Why am I Receiving High Bounce Rates for my Email Campaigns

When an email campaign is sent, there is a potential that emails may "bounce" back from your recipients. These "bounces" can be classed as a Hard Bounce or Soft Bounce. (For more information see What’s a Hard Bounce/Soft Bounce/Opt Out?)

If you are experiencing high bounce rates from your email campaigns, it maybe due to your recipients' email does not recoginise your email address for the following reason;

When sending an email from the SportsTG system, you are asked to enter your Sender's Email Address however when the email is actually sent it is, sent from the SportsTG system, which can cause confusion for the recipients email provider.

We recommend you set up your own Sender Policy Framework (SPF) authentication. This way, SportsTG will be permitted to display your domain’s information in your email header, which can can help improve your delivery rates and make your campaigns look more professional.

To do this, you’ll need to make a few changes in your DNS records (this is your website/email provider), so you may want to ask your website manager or domain registrar for help.

1. To authenticate your domain (yoursite.com), you’ll need to complete tasks in your domain provider’s Zone Editor or cPanel. This process requires you to copy and paste information from this article to your domain provider’s site.

We recommend that you work with two browser windows or tabs to easily move between your sites.

2. In your Domain's cPanel or Zone Editor setup a SPF record with the value:

v=spf1 mx a:img-smtp.hostworks.com.au a:smtphwa.hostworks.com.au a:smtphw01.hostworks.com.au a:smtphw02.hostworks.com.au ptr:img-smtp.hostworks.com.au ip4:202.59.54.218 ip4:202.58.32.4 ip4:202.58.32.5 ip4:202.58.32.6

If their DNS server doesn't offer SPF, create a TXT record for "yoursite.com" with this value:

v=spf1 mx a:img-smtp.hostworks.com.au a:smtphwa.hostworks.com.au a:smtphw01.hostworks.com.au a:smtphw02.hostworks.com.au ptr:img-smtp.hostworks.com.au ip4:202.59.54.218 ip4:202.58.32.4 ip4:202.58.32.5 ip4:202.58.32.6

Note: The URLs above are examples only. Replace “yoursite.com” with the domain you want to authenticate.