As a ‘fairly’ new digital business, a large part of what we do relies on reaching out to potential prospects via email. Having spent the last two weeks dealing with Microsoft and Google, it’s fair to say their systems are NOT geared towards helping new businesses in this arena.
Like domain authority, new businesses need to deal with email authority and freshness of your business IPs. Both these properties can affect email sendability. Any potential bounced, blocked, unreachable emails will count negatively towards your email authority and affect your ability to reach mailboxes in future.
We needed a system to monitor and report on email outreach efficiency, which is where SendGrid comes in. By hooking up SendGrid to BuzzStream we are able to route traffic for outreach away from Microsoft and Google servers and have the ability to monitor the efficiency of our outreach and continually improve.
Here are the steps you need to follow to hook up BuzzStream to a G-Suite account and send through SendGrid.
There’s a fair bit of technical jargon so feel free to get a developer friend to decipher!
Integrating SendGrid with BuzzStream
Step 1 – You’ll need to sign up to a SendGrid account and go for an Email API plan – depending on how many mails you send.
Step 2 – Once you’ve signed up you will need to authorise your domain on the account – look for ‘Sender Authentication’ under ‘Settings’.
Step 3 – Go through the setup options and you’ll be served with some CNAME info that needs adding to your domain records – you’ll need to get help from someone who has access to the domain records to do this.
Step 4 – In BuzzStream you’ll have already set up your G-Suite mail that you’re using for outreach.
Step 5 – In SendGrid you need to set up an SMTP relay.
Step 6 – On the next page create a key – any label you want to provide should be fine. Click ‘Create Key’ and you’ll be presented with details that you’ll need to save. In particular.
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- Server
- Username
- Password
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Step 7 – In BuzzStream connect a new account.
Step 8 – Click ‘Next’ and then ‘Click here to associate existing IMAP credentials with this email account’ and then choose your existing G Suite connection.
Step 9 – Click, next and fill in SendGrid’s details you saved in Step 6.
For Sendgrid, the username will be ‘apikey’ (without the quotation marks) and password will be the API key you created with Sendgrid.
Click save and that’s it. Your mail is now passing through SendGrid’s servers rather than Google and you’ll have access to the monitoring functions of SendGrid to then optimise your PR outreach.
Any questions on optimising outreach and PR campaigns feel free to contact any of us.
