Verifying your domain is an essential step to start sending email through Back In Stock. We ask all of our users to verify ownership to enable open and click tracking, mitigate spam, and ensure that nobody can send from your domain besides you and your organization.
This step-by-step guide will walk you through how to add and verify a domain in Back In Stock app. For this example, Cloudflare will be used as the website hosting provider. However, it should be noted that these steps are the same for other hosting providers as well.
If your domain is already hosted somewhere (like Cloudflare), you’ll need to login to your provider to change DNS records. If your domain isn’t hosted anywhere yet, you can setup a free account at Cloudflare and follow along this guide.
Step 1: Add your domain to Back In Stock app
If you’ve already added your domain, skip to step 2
Before you can verify a domain, it needs to be added to Back In Stock.
Login to your Back In Stock app, click Customize >> Email Settings >> Domain Settings on the left hand side.
Enter your domain name into the field. We recommend using a subdomain for better email deliverability. In this example, we used bis.yourdomain.com. If you want to use just your domain name, that’s fine too.
After you click Save, you’ll see instruction be taken to add DNS records to your domain.
Step 2: Add DNS Records to Hosting Provider
Login to your hosting provider and navigate to the DNS section. This area is called ‘DNS’ at Cloudflare, but we’ve seen it called ‘Networking’ in Digital Ocean and ‘Zone Editor’ in cPanel.
Next, you’ll be asked what type of DNS records you want to add. We’ll go through each one individually.
TXT Records
The first records Back In Stock asks you to add are TXT records. We will add two separate TXT records, one for SPF and one for DKIM. These are required to send and receive email with Back In Stock.
If you’re using a subdomain, add a new TXT record with bis.yourdomain.com as the hostname (with certain providers, you may just have to enter the subdomain, which would just be mail in this case) and the appropriate value Back In Stock provides. You can leave TTL as the default option.
If you’re not using a subdomain, most providers will accept @ as the hostname when creating DNS records for the root domain. Here’s an example:
Clicking Add Record will add your first DNS entry for your domain!
Add another TXT record for mx._domainkey.mail.yourdomain.com. Cloudflare only shows the subdomain, so your result will look like this:
CNAME Record
Lastly, you will need to add a CNAME record. The CNAME Record is what enables Open and Click tracking. This is highly recommended to reap the full benefit of Back In Stock and gain insights into your email performance.
Add the CNAME the same way as the others. The hostname here is email.bis.yourdomain.com
Step 3: Wait (up to 24 hours)
It can take up to 24 hours for DNS changes to propagate across the internet. In our experience, it usually happens faster than that, but don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t happen immediately.
Having trouble? Contact our support team and we will be happy to help you.