If you’re wanting better email marketing delivery rates then authenticating your sending domain is one of the best things you can do. Authentication will get more emails through spam filters which will get you better open rates, click rates and more sales.
In this tutorial Gary, a Mailchimp certified partner, shows how to authenticate your domain if you use Cloudflare for your DNS. Authentication only needs to be done once and the benefits are huge.
If you use GoDaddy for your domains then see Gary’s instructions on how to authenticate your Mailchimp domain in GoDaddy.
hi Gary – thanks for the great resource – I cannot enter this in CF, I get a message: DNS Validation Error (Code: 1004) This kind of record cannot be proxied – any ideas? Thanks in advance
Hey Craig, try to disable the proxy and see if that works: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/how-to-disable-dns-proxying/107055
Thanks but no joy – any other ideas?
Craig, perhaps try to remove the domain from Mailchimp, then make sure that the CNAME records are added to Cloudflare and the proxy is disabled, then add the domain to Mailchimp and try to authenticate (I’ve seen issues in the past with Mailchimp where is the authentication is started in MC and then changes are made to the CNAME Mailchimp doesn’t look to see if changes have been made to the CNAME records).
Hi thanks Gary – u mean the email domain or site domain? Cheers
All references to your domain at admin.mailchimp.com/account/domains/
Thanks Gary that seems to have worked – I am just waiting for MC to connect my domain, which seems to take an age.
Apologies, last question – nearly there. To connect domain MC is asking to ‘Copy the following value into the CNAME record named www for zaeger.com.au. If this record does not exist in your DNS settings, create it.’ I have that entry but not the value they specify – just scared of breaking it:) The same q for the A record – I have one existing, but they want me to replace the IP with the one they recommend? Thanks in advance!
By following Mailchimp’s directions, when someone goes to zaeger.com.au or http://www.zaeger.com.au in their internet browser they will go your website or landing page/s on Mailchimp. I notice that you already have a website for zaeger.com.au. It may suit you better to use a subdomain (e.g. abc.zaeger.com.au ) for your Mailchimp website or landing page/s (thus allowing you to keep your existing website).