Gainsight email service is an email service built from the ground up by Gainsight in partnership with Sendgrid. With Gainsight's email service, you now have a best-of-breed email solution to deliver your communications. This article will walk you through when to use the service and how to set it up.    

When to Use

  • Gain efficiency in your organization by automating some communications via email
  • Standardize your key lifecycle emails such as welcoming new customers, upcoming renewals, and organizing for Business Reviews
  • Trigger success communications based on key behaviors in your data; e.g. support, usage metrics
  • Automate emails you always need to send at key lifecycle points
  • Send survey emails

Setup in Gainsight

Turn On and Authorize Matrix Data Analyzer

Turn On and Authorize Matrix Data Analyzer
  • Navigate to Administration > Operations > Integrations
  • Click on Authorize MDA and choose ON
  • Click Authorize

Note: If you are having trouble accessing this page, contact support@gainsight.com.

8e7f6424-784a-46d9-ac3d-87c2ae505479.png

You will see a pop up requesting permission. Click Allow. On the next pop up, click close.

Enable Gainsight Email Service

Navigate to Administration > Communication > Email Configuration. Turn Gainsight Email Service ON and then click Enable.

Now that Gainsight Email Service is enabled, you can begin to send emails and survey emails.

Notes:

  • Gainsight Email Service is enabled by default when MDA is enabled.

  • If you want to distribute surveys using the Gainsight Email Service, you must enable this setting.

  • If you want to distribute surveys using Journey Orchestrator, enablement of this setting is not required.

Reasons to Allow your Domain

  1. Remove the "Sent via Gainsightapp.com" tag.
  2. Increase the deliverability of the emails to Inbox instead of the Spam folder.
  3. If you have DMARC setting on, you will have to allow a list to send emails using Gainsight Email Infrastructure.
  4. If you have "-all" option at the end of your SPF setting, allow listing is mandatory for using Gainsight email infrastructure.

What is Allowing?

Allowing is functionality that shows ISPs for which SendGrid (Gainsight's ESP) has your permission to send emails on your behalf. This permission is given by the act of pointing very specific DNS entries from your domain registrar to SendGrid. Once these DNS entries are entered and propagated, recipient email servers and services will read the headers on the emails you send and check the DNS records to verify if the email is initiated from a trusted source. This drastically increases your ability to deliver email and allows you to begin building a sender reputation for your domain and for your IP addresses.

Types of Allowing

Domain Allowing: This type allows recipient email servers and services to verify the identity of the email sender back to the domain that the sender controls. This gives a layer of email authentication that helps in email deliverability. With only the domain allowing, you are still subject to the reputation of your IP address.

Email Links Allowing: When you put a link or an image into an email and have the click or the open tracking turned on, then the click tracking links and the images will point to your domain. This tells the recipient email server that you are not trying to hide anything behind the links, and that you control the content of your emails. A few bad actors will use 3rd party link shortening services to populate the domains they list in their email content, and they do not include their own domain in those links. This practice is a red flag to spam filters.

Steps for Allowing

Contact Gainsight Support to obtain the DNS settings. You will receive a set of DNS Entries similar to the following sample:

a78963d7-588f-4b08-b7b3-2a50ce4b6f9e.png

Enter these settings in your DNS with the help of your IT team and communicate back to Gainsight Support for verification.

Reputation Score Calculation

Reputation score calculation is automated based on the # of spam reports and # of bounces vs. the total # of emails sent. Gainsight email service is configured to maintain this at an optimum level by:

1) Bounces are added to the master deny list maintained by Gainsight and we ensure future emails to that address are not attempted.

2) Spam reports are added to the unsubscribed list automatically.

The usual behavior observed with most Gainsight customers is that they start with a low score since their contact list is often initially dirty, but within a few outreaches, it improves. The problem is minimal for Gainsight because the recipients are customers and not prospects. The average reputation of Gainsight customers is 98/100.

When there is a problem of low reputation, we get in touch with you via our CSM.

FAQs

Does using SendGrid's automated security use up a DNS lookup on our SPF?

No, the SPF is managed by SendGrid.

How will using a subdomain affect sending emails from Gainsight?

Emails will be signed by the subdomain. Sending from your base domain will result in the envelope-from using the subdomain, while the header-from and reply-to will be the base domain, if configured as such.

Can we use custom DKIM selectors for the CNAMES?

Yes. S1 and S2 is default for SendGrid but we use gs and gs2. You may request a custom DKIM selector of up to three characters.

Can we allow a subdomain?

Yes.

Can we Allow a sandbox?

Yes, however, we recommend using a subdomain if this is necessary. Please note that if the SFDC sandbox gets refreshed, this configuration will be broken and needs to be reconfigured.