Making sure that participants receive your event emails

As part of setting up your event, you'll need to send out emails to your audience. These emails are especially important as they may contain personalized links that allow your audience to RSVP to an event, confirm their event registration, download and activate the app, or access the web app.

SpotMe's technology relies on the best email providers in order to maximize email deliverability to event audiences. By following the below recommendations, we can ensure that all emails sent from your event safely reach your attendees.

To note, these recommendations take into consideration the deliverability rules that Google and Yahoo started to enforce in February 2024.

1 - Things to consider before reading these recommendations

Are your event emails sent using the SpotMe domain or your own custom domain?

Emails that are sent from Backstage are by default sent from the spotme.com domain.

This domain is fully configured by SpotMe to ensure maximum email deliverability, per the recommendations and best practices described in this article.

You may however be sending your event emails via Backstage using your own custom domain, in which case there are certain actions that will need to be carried out on your domain’s configuration, and that we will explain later on in this article.

Are your event emails promotional or transactional?

Please note that from a deliverability perspective, there are two types of emails that are sent from Backstage for your events. These emails have different purposes and requirements.

Some of the emails sent from Backstage are considered transactional, as they are essential to allowing the attendees access to the event and are often used to provide unique content for the individual attendee.

These emails include:

• Emails sent to access the app (including magic links).
• Meeting confirmation emails.
• Digest emails.
• Event registration confirmation emails or any email designed to confirm an attendee’s email address.
• Reminder emails for registered attendees, saying “the event will start soon”.

Other emails that are sent from Backstage are considered promotional. These tend to be non-essential emails in the form of a bulk campaign created and sent via Backstage, and include:

• Invitations to register for an event via RSVP.
• Reminders to register to an event for attendees that have not registered or declined the invitation.
• Invitations to view an on demand video recording of a past event.
• Invitations to complete a survey.

Keep this distinction in mind when reading through the below requirements, in particular when we explain about using unsubscribe links in emails.

How many emails are sent by your event, and why is this important?

As you read through the below recommendations, you’ll notice that some requirements that are listed here are specifically applicable to domains that send over 5’000 promotional emails per day.

Please note if you are sending emails using the spotme.com domain, no action is needed on your part as the SpotMe domain already follows these recommendations.

If you are sending emails using your own custom domain, then please refer to the recommendations at the domain level listed below.

To find out how many emails your event sends out, you can go to the Design > Emails section of the workspace in Backstage. Here you can access the Mailings and Logs tabs in order to see all information regarding your mailing campaigns and see your email logs. This includes how many emails were sent for each mailing, and their status (whether they were delivered or not). More information

2 - Recommendations at the domain level for sending emails

Configure your domain appropriately for sending emails

As a summary, the below actions need to be performed at the domain level in order to ensure that emails are safely delivered:

• Set-up the SPF (Sender Policy Framework).
• Set-up the DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail).
• Set-up the DMARC (Domain Message Authentication Reporting).
  If you send over 5’000 emails daily: Set up email authentication for your sending domain. Your DMARC enforcement policy can be set to “none”.
• Update the DNS (Domain Name System) for your domain, and set up valid forward and reverse DNS records, also referred to as PTR records for your domain.
  If you send over 5'000 emails daily: For direct mail, the domain in the sender's “From: header” must be aligned with either the SPF domain or the DKIM domain. This is required to pass DMARC alignment.

All of these actions are implemented on the SpotMe domain (spotme.com), by the SpotMe team.
Therefore, if you are sending your event emails from Backstage using the spotme.com domain, no further action is needed.

If however you are sending your event emails from Backstage and from a custom domain, please refer to the article on How to change the domain for emails sent from Backstage article.

Keep track of your domain’s spam score

Your domain’s spam rate, or spam score, is a key component in email deliverability.

It represents the percentage of emails sent from your domain that are considered as spam by the recipient’s email client, or actually marked as “spam” by the recipient.

Mailbox providers use this spam rate to assess your domain's reputation and decide whether your emails should make it to the recipient's inbox or not.

Keeping this score as low as possible by following the best practices listed in this article is therefore crucial.

At SpotMe, in addition to following the recommendations in this article, we constantly monitor the spotme.com domain's spam rate threshold to ensure that it stays as low as possible (below 0.1%). We use tools such as Postmaster Tools in order to track this. Therefore, if you are sending your event emails from Backstage using the spotme.com domain, no action is needed from you here.

If you are sending your event emails from Backstage and from a custom domain, make sure that you follow the recommendations in this article and closely measure your domain’s spam rate threshold to ensure that it stays as low as possible, below 0.1%.

3 - Recommendations at the network level for receiving emails

Whitelisting email domains

Some organizations allow incoming emails to be received only from approved services.

In particular if your audience is internal to your organization, and your organization is using email scanning or filtering software, you may want to add SpotMe’s mailing server to the approved list:

Our mailing server: 76.223.128.203, 76.223.128.204, 198.2.132.142
DKIM verification header: see details

Also, because SpotMe platform sends event log-in emails that contain time-sensitive links, to ensure a safe and fast delivery of these emails we recommend removing any artificial delays to email delivery.

To do so, contact your IT department and request that they change the configuration of the network or email firewalls to allow emails from SpotMe to be received. Below are some steps that can help with this:

Below are some steps that can help with this:

• Contact an IT professional or IT department within your organization, or ask your workspace/app users to do so.
• Ask the IT department to whitelist emails coming from spotme.com as well as the following IP addresses: 76.223.128.203, 76.223.128.204, 198.2.132.142.
• Once the SpotMe domain and IP addresses have been approved, try sending an email again.

If the IT department is unable to make the changes:

• For app download emails, use internal mass-emailing tools to launch your app.
• For app activation emails, review the available activation workflows, or contact SpotMe support to assist you in setting one up that does not rely on a timely email delivery.

4 - Recommendations at the email template level

The Emailing module in Backstage and the default SpotMe event email templates all comply with the below recommendations, which help ensure that emails are safely delivered to their intended recipients.

Make sure your emails follow the correct format standard

To improve deliverability, it is recommended that emails are always formatted in compliance with the Internet Message Format standard (RFC 5322).

All default event emails that are sent from your event in Backstage are compliant with the RFC 5322 standard. This is true whether you are sending emails from the spotme.com domain or a custom domain.

If however you have imported emails that were created via a third-party email email editor, we recommend that you check that they are formatted in compliance with the Internet Message Format standard (RFC 5322).

Always include “Unsubscribe” links in your promotional emails

Here we are referring to an “Unsubscribe” link that is added manually to the body of the email templates, such as this one preset in the default SpotMe invitation email:

This is a recommendation only for "promotional" emails: i.e. emails that are not considered essential to the attendee’s login or access crucial event content. The email displayed in the image above is promotional, as it is an email designed to invite the attendee to complete an optional feedback form.

"Transactional" emails, on the other hand, tend to be designed to provide access to the event app or to crucial event app content. Therefore we do not recommend that you add "unsubscribe" links to them, as doing so may result in attendees unsubscribing from very important event communications. More information on the difference between promotional and transactional event emails.

Note: This added "unsubscribe" link is not to be confused with the "one-click unsubscribe mechanism", explained below.

Clicking on the Unsubscribe button in a SpotMe email will take the recipient to the dedicated SpotMe page where their email address is pre-populated and they can unsubscribe from all the future event emails:

If a recipient hits the “Unsubscribe” button in an email received from a workspace, then that user will not receive any more emails from that specific workspace. This is applicable whether it is the spotme.com email domain that is sending the emails from Backstage, or any other domain. More information on managing unsubscribes

Make sure the “one-click unsubscribe” mechanism is supported for emails sent from your domain

One-click unsubscribing is a required mechanism that is built into the source code of the SpotMe emailing capabilities.

Below is an example of a one-click unsubscribe button and how it can look in the Mail application (the default email client on Mac):

Here is another example of how the one-click unsubscribe button can look in Gmail:

In the list in emails:

In the opened email:

 

Clicking on the one-click unsubscribe button will allow recipients to unsubscribe from emails without leaving their email client, via a pop-up displayed in the email client.

This pop-up’s appearance and the text included is entirely dependent on the email client:

Example in Mail (on Mac):


Example in Gmail:

Notes about how the one-click unsubscribe mechanism behaves:

• In emails sent from Backstage, the one-click unsubscribe button is only ever displayed to the recipient if there is already native SpotMe “Unsubscribe” button or link in the email template’s body. If no native “Unsubscribe” button is included in the body of the email, then the SpotMe email will not display the one-click unsubscribe button to the recipient. We therefore always recommend that you always include an “Unsubscribe” button or link in your workspace’s promotional email templates.
  
  
• In some circumstances, email clients will simply not display the one-click unsubscribe button, even though it is always included in SpotMe emails.
  For example, Gmail doesn't show the one-click unsubscribe button in the emails until it has verified that the sending domain is reliable. This is to prevent spammers from using the unsubscribe mechanism as a means to get recipients to confirm their email addresses.
  For Gmail to effectively verify your domain, it is recommended that you manually include “Unsubscribe” buttons in the body of your promotional emails.
  Once a number of recipients have used those links and their unsubscribe requests have been promptly processed, the one-click unsubscribe button will start to be displayed to recipients by the email client.
  
  
• If the one-click unsubscribe button is not displayed, you can still check the source code of any email you receive from Backstage, and search for “List-Unsubscribe-Post: List-Unsubscribe=One-Click”, in order to see that the one-click unsubscribe mechanism is included in the email:

• When it is displayed, the appearance of the one-click unsubscribe button in the email (as well as the pop-up window that is displayed after clicking on “Unsubscribe”) is entirely dependent on the email client that is being used, and will vary from one email client to another.
  For example, depending on the email client used, the one-click unsubscribe link can be displayed in the header of the email (see example above) or in the footer.
  
  
• Please note that when an attendee unsubscribes from an event email, the unsubscribe process will use the sender name as the item to unsubscribe from. This means that, even if you have changed the sender name to "My organization", the unsubscribe will still only be applied for emails that are sent from the event. Emails sent from the same sender as part of other events will continue to be received.

Honoring email unsubscribes promptly

It is important that email recipients who have effectively unsubscribed from receiving event emails, immediately no longer receive them.

If a recipient hits the “Unsubscribe” button in an email received from Backstage, then that user will immediately no longer receive any additional emails from that specific workspace.

This is applicable whether it is the spotme.com email domain that is sending the emails from Backstage, or any other custom domain. No action is needed from you in this regard.

5 - Other best practices in emails to avoid spam filters

Spam filters can sometimes prevent emails from reaching your participants, based on their content.

Follow the below best practices in your emails to help avoid your emails from getting blocked by spam filters:

• Do not use "noreply@something.com" or "companyname@spotme.com" as the "From:" address. Instead, use a more realistic address, such as "name@company.com". Please note that to do this you may need to follow the steps described here in order to change the sender domain.
  Important: In older templates and workspaces, the default "From:" address may still be set to "noreply@spotme.com." This address should never be used. Replace it with "event-management@spotme.com" to ensure successful email delivery.
• Use a meaningful subject line that matches the sender logic and content.
• Do not use long subject lines (less than 140 characters).
• Avoid using words or expressions that may trigger the spam detector, such as:
  Limited time offer / Act now / Guaranteed / Risk-free / Cash / Discount / Save / Sale / Cheap / Incredible / Urgent / Incredible offer / No obligation / No purchase necessary / Special promotion / Click here / Congratulations / Double your / Prize / Open now.

What happens when a recipient hits "unsubscribe" in an email?

If a recipient hits an unsubscribe button in an email received from a workspace, then that user will not receive any more emails from that specific workspace. This is applicable whether it is the spotme.com email domain that is sending the emails from Backstage, or any other domain.

Beyond this

If after taking the above actions some of your participants are still not receiving your event's emails, it's quite likely that this is being caused by something beyond SpotMe's control.

An alternative to sending emails via your event in Backstage could be to send email to participants via a personal email address or from within the relevant organization.