A tale of two business owners

Two competing business owners, Luther and Eileen, are looking to grow their companies with a new marketing platform on the web.  They both have the same vision in their head about how the platform should look and what results they should expect over the next few years.

Luther finds a web developer online who charges $20/hour. After explaining his vision for the platform, the developer gets to work right away with great enthusiasm. Just a few weeks later, the platform is launched and Luther is only out $2,500.

Eileen asks her friend for a referral and is recommended to speak with a web consultant. After listening to her concept, the consultant comes back with a list of ideas for alternative approaches to the platform and how it can be more readily adopted by customers. The platform project has turned into a marketing + sales tool that will take $10,000 to build. Eileen approves the project. Continue reading “The difference between a web consultant and web developer” …

When a potential customer fills out your contact form, how important is it that you get notified? How much money could you potentially lose if you don’t receive one important email notification from your site? An upcoming change from Gmail could affect your site very soon.

Following in the footsteps of AOL & Yahoo, Gmail will soon change a policy that will stop contact form submissions and other emails from “looking like” they are coming from a Gmail email address. In short, if your contact form uses the submitter’s email address in the “TO” field for the notification, it will fail and won’t ever hit your inbox.

AOL already made this change for AOL email addresses in 2014, as did Yahoo. As such, you may want to check your contact form plugin’s entries list and see if you missed some important notifications…

What’s the fix?

The policy change – or, in technical terms, the “DMARC policy being updated to ‘reject'” – means your automated emails must be coming from a different domain besides @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, or @aol.com.

To prevent the emails from failing, set the “TO” address in your contact form to [email protected] or simply set it to your own email address.

Bonus tip: to make life easier when you’re responding to the email notification, set the “Reply To” to the submitter’s email. When you hit the reply button in your email app, it’ll be set up to reply to the submitter rather than the noreply email address.