Tom Ryan walks through setting up a custom domain in Pardot by adding SPF and DKIM records at your DNS provider. DNS changes take 24 to 48 hours to propagate, then use Pardot's Check DNS entries tool to verify everything so your emails hit inboxes instead of spam.
Chapters
What we need to do now is set up the technical parts within Pardot so that we can send email campaigns effectively. By this I mean we want to make sure that we have the best chance of our emails going into the actual email folder and not going into spam. So what we need to do is head to admin Domain Management and we're going to set something up with the SPF record and Domain Key Policy record. So the SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework. And what both of these records will do is essentially act as permission on your domain. Where Pardot is a third party and we're going to be sending emails masked from your organization, we need to have that link between your domain and Pardot to basically say yes, we give permission for Pardot to send via our domain, therefore get into the email inbox. So to do this we need to add a new domain. So if your email address is tomarcleauconsulting.com you just type in markleauconsulting.com as the domain and then we'll click Create Domain. This is where you probably may need some help from your IT team, who will be able to set this up on your domain. So what we need is the permissions set up on the domain. So how we do this is if we click onto expected DNS entries, this will give us the bits of code that we need to set up. So what we would do is we would head into our domain. So for example, I use GoDaddy. So to show how this would work in practice, would add another record onto the domain if there isn't one already. So we can see there is already a SPF record present. So what I'm going to do, because it's already here, is I'm going to add this particular record, which is include aspmxpadl.com and I'm just going to add this into this section here. Now this can take up to 24 to 48 hours to propagate, which essentially means to, for the Internet to see it basically. So we'll add that in save. So now we wait until we can validate it. So once we've set up those SPF and we've done the same for the the domain key as text records, we will then want to check DNS entries and what that will do is essentially check these and it will tick verified. That's quick. So we this will verify each of these once Pardot recognize it as set up correctly. So we want to go ahead and do this for Domain Key policy and domain key. I'll add some documentation in the link below and then we want to make sure that yep, this is verified and as soon as it is, we can send via this email domain with no problems.
