Sending surveys from our domain
This is something we have evaluated heavily and discussed pros and cons with clients. We would make the private domain name option available if there weren’t so many downsides. Here are some of the issues we found with private domain names during testing:
1. Most importantly if our servers attempt to send surveys from your domain name there is a much higher likelihood that they will get flagged as spam. Even if we setup SPF records and other validation mechanisms, we’re never going to get as high deliverability as if we send from the official Bizratings.com domain since that is the one our email delivery servers are fully validated to send from. Surveys at the end of the day are pointless if they don’t get delivered.
2. If we try using your domain name and relay messages through your email server, that still also poses problems. We would have hundreds of relays we would need to manage and rely on for our members, and that is not feasible. Your mail server or IP addresses may get blacklisted and then that throws off not only your response rate, but our averages as well and clogs our outbound mail queues.
3. We currently pay a transactional email company called Sendgrid to send all survey emails. This greatly enhances deliverability, however as part of that the “From” domain name has to be Bizratings.com. To keep their spam reputation scores as high as possible with ISPs and mail hosts they have to limit their allowed domains.
4. We tested sending surveys from the client Connectwise server as part of the closed loop process as some other CSAT tools do, however found that to be far less effective in getting responses. When embedding surveys into closed loop emails a lot of clients immediately discarded them as the same as other CW closed loop clutter, and simply deleted. This adversely effects response rate.
5. More clients prefer the concept of a CSAT survey coming from a neutral 3rd party rather than from the business itself. This leads to more honest feedback. When surveys come directly from the vendor being reviewed, many clients are less comfortable fully sharing their complaints.
6. Bizratings.com gives member companies the ability to publish the testimonials they receive from surveys as public reviews indexed by Google and other search engines. This reputation marketing functionality is a big part of why a lot of companies use our tool and requires surveys to go out from us as an objective 3rd party instead of directly from the company. If you sent out surveys yourself and then published them yourself, that reduces their credibility.