New Account Setup Tutorial
Ready to get started on the InboxAlly platform? Check out this simple guide for all the steps you need to take to get your account set up properly and quickly.
Written by Eric J
Updated at September 19th, 2023
You may have already seen our Quick Start Guide or Setup Wizard Documentation to help get you started. If you have not, we recommend you start there. In this article we take you through a more detailed step-by-step process and introduce you to additional terminology and best practices.
Download of Seed emails
On the Seed Emails page, you will find a list of seed emails to download. Seed emails are our own emails that you send to so that we can assess your email sending platform's deliverability and perform engagement actions on to increase deliverability. Unless you are changing plans (including upgrading from a trial, you will need to download these only once. However, you will always have the option to return to this page and download your emails again in the future.
You will notice that there are two options, download your whole list or select a range of emails to download. The first option is self explanatory. The second option is provided for those using email sending platforms where it is difficult to make segments from a list. When you select a range of emails and click download, the file will be aptly named with the range of emails in the file for easy uploading to your email platform.
⚠ Should you cancel our service or your trial is over, please be sure to no longer send to our seeds as your emails won't be engaged with and this could affect your overall deliverability.
Create your Sender Profiles
A Sender Profile enables you to define a set of rules for all sending you do from a particular from email or IP address. It will also enable you to see your emails grouped as separate broadcasts when viewing reports. The number of simultaneous profiles you can setup and use is limited by the plan you are on. When you create a new sender profile, you will be asked to select a verified sender email that is not attached to another sender profile (regardless if the profile is active or not).
When creating a sender profile, you will see a default auto generated name with a time stamp. If you would like, please feel free to change it to a more recognizable name such as that of a client or mailing list. This name will be seen only by you.
Sender Profile Limit
Your sender profile plan limit is for active profiles only (not ones you have marked inactive). Thus if you wish to send using a new from-address and you do not have any more profiles left in your plan, you can deactivate one first and then you can create a new profile. You can repeat this process in reverse to reactivate a profile. It is important to remember to never make a profile inactive if a broadcast was sent to a from-address in that profile in the last 12 hours or so as seed emails will only be tracked and engage with if the from-address matches a from-address in an active sender profile. You also have the option to purchase additional sender profiles.
Configure Engagement Rules
Engagement rule presets can be found on the sender profile page. These rules let you choose what engagement actions you want taken for the seed emails in your broadcasts. You can choose one of the presets below which best suits your needs. Then, you can further tweak the settings. Or you can just start off changing the settings.
| Rule Preset | Description |
|---|---|
| Default | For general sending |
| Traditional warmup | Use this when you have a cold domain or IP. Also be sure to ramp up slowly and spread your sending throughout the day if possible. Contact us if you need help with a ramp up schedule. |
| Domain & IP reputation repair | Use this when you are having trouble getting out of the spam folder. Also, if possible, it's best first to stop sending to your own list and instead send to just our seeds for a week or two. Before using our service, you should first check and get your domain/IP delisted from any blacklist. |
| Reputation boost | Use this when you have been sending to one or more lists on a regular basis and feel you have experienced a drop in opens. Send to our (highly engaged) emails about 4 hours before sending to the rest of your list with the same exact subject, content and from-address. Mailbox providers will learn from our highly engaged seeds as part of your "real" broadcast. |
| Reputation protect | Use this when things are going well but you want to make sure you keep up your good reputation, especially if there is something special coming up such as holiday sale, new product launch, or other important announcement. Send to our (highly engaged) emails about 4 hours before sending to the rest of your list with the same exact subject, content and from-address. This will make it seem as our highly engaged seeds are part of your "real" broadcast. |
| Custom | When you tweak any of the settings, you will see a radio box titled "custom" appear in a selected state. |
When you are finished with your settings, click on the button "Apply instructions" or to see your seed emails with instructions replied, click button "Apply instructions & view emails".
How we randomly apply engagements
Every night at 12:00 AM your profile local time, we randomly reapply your rules to your emails. We do this to make interaction behavior look more natural as it would look odd if each seed email performed the same exact actions to your emails every day. If you are sending to the same seeds from same email address more than once per day you should reapply the instructions yourself. To do this just go to each sender profile that this is pertinent to and at the bottom of page you will see a button to click entitled "Reapply instructions".
Reporting and Analytics
Once you begin sending to the seed emails in your campaigns, you will start seeing your email placement data. As you continue to send day over day, the reporting view will show the changes in placement over time. Check out our article on Analyzing Engagement to learn more about analyzing your broadcasts and seeing the results from our engagement with your emails.