We've been having lots of conversations with members about email deliverability and thought it might be helpful to break down the various systems we use and the deliverability issues we run into.
1:1 Email from Staff - we use Outlook for our office email. Direct email from staff Outlook accounts to members rarely generates bounces or other delivery failures.
Email from NPAmarketplace - this can include system notifications, like candidate or job alerts, email between partners (sharing candidates or jobs), or email between members and candidates. We rarely see delivery failures from NPAmarketplace, unless it's to an invalid address.
Email from NPA Central - this is our primary tool for 'bulk' email that goes out to many members at the same time and includes things like newsletters, information about meetings, invitations to calls, follow-up notes and recordings, etc. This is also a generally reliable system that does not generate many failure messages coming back to us - meaning that email is delivered to the recipient's server. HOWEVER, it does not mean that the email is delivered from the server to the final inbox, and this is not usually something that we can control from our side. NPA Central uses an email aliasing feature (this is fairly common in bulk email environments), so while you may get an email from NPAworldwide, the actual "from" address is slightly different and may be "unrecognized" by your email server, leading to that email being trapped in a spam filter or routed elsewhere. Here are a few simple things you can do to verify that you are receiving email and if not, what you can do to help fix that:
- Login to NPA Central and look at the Communication tab on your dashboard. This shows you every email that gets sent through NPA Central and the first column on the left is the delivery outcome, usually Opened, Sent, Bounced, Dropped, or Unknown. "Sent" could mean that you are viewing in a reading pane or it could mean that you haven't seen it in your outbox. Bounced is usually a temporary failure (we monitor these to the best of our ability). Dropped means that delivery attempts have failed so many times that the system is no longer attempting delivery. Opened and Unknown are pretty self-explanatory. If you see a lot of Sent items, but haven't seen these in your inbox, try this:
- Add @membernova.email as a safe sender - this should tell your server that ALL email from the NPAworldwide NPA Central account is valid and should be sent to your inbox. This step solves more than 90% of the delivery issues we see.
- Ask your IT provider to "whitelist" the domain npaworldwide.com at the server level - this should stop our email from being routed to spam/junk if the first step doesn't work.
- If you use Outlook, add our email to your Focused inbox - in your Other inbox, locate an email from within NPAworldwide. Right-click the message and select Move>Always move to focused inbox. You may need to do this for each individual address you find in the Other inbox, but it's a good way to keep NPAworldwide email where you can see them. Alternatively, you could create a folder for NPAworldwide and then create a rule to automatically move all NPA-related email to your dedicated folder.