For the best possible user experience, marketing success, and email security, we recommend all Feathr users connect their organization's domain to their Feathr account. Instructions for how to do so can be found in these articles:
How to Add an Email Sending Domain
How to Add a Content Serving Domain
This article will focus on information and tips for understanding domain registrars to ensure that connecting your domain to your Feathr account goes as smoothly as possible.
What is a Domain Registrar?
A domain registrar is a service that manages the registration of domain names on the web, as well as the assignment of IP addresses and email hosting. In essence, domain registrars lease you the rights to a custom web and email address, and ensure that the address you lease actually gets published on the internet. For example, if your website is www.your-business's-name.com and your email ends in @your-business's-name.com, someone at your company registered that name and pays registration fees to keep it. Think of your domain registrar as the "landlord" for the address of your website and email.
Why Should I Add my Domain to Feathr?
Adding your domain to Feathr involves copying a few strings of characters that Feathr provides, and pasting them into a field in your domain registrar where domain records can be added. This initiates permission for Feathr to publish on your domain.
By connecting your domain to your Feathr account, you are ensuring that landing pages you build in Feathr appear on your organization's domain, and that emails you send through Feathr come from your organization's verified and secure email domain.
Without adding your domain to Feathr, your email campaigns are limited to 1000 sends, and your landing pages will appear on the domain l.feathr.co, rather than your own.
Adding your domain—despite being a relatively simple process—can present a challenge for Feathr users who have never heard of, much less worked with, a domain registrar. It also presents a challenge for us at Feathr, because we cannot control what your domain registrar does. We can, however, offer guidance and information. For example...
Who is My Domain Registrar?
It may sound old fashioned, but the actual best way to determine your domain registrar is to ask whomever at your organization is responsible for your website and email. If you don't have an IT department or a designated webmaster, you may have an outside agency or contractor.
Domains must be re-registered on an annual or semi-annual basis, so it is likely that a current employee or contractor has that information and can provide a login for you, or add the domain records themselves that you download from Feathr.
If the human interaction route fails, another reliable way to to discover your registrar is to enter your organization's website into the domain lookup at whois.com. Enter your organization's web address and you can view domain registrar information.
Here you can see the results from Feathr's own website. Note here that the registrar and the name servers have different names. In this case, NameCheap acts as a broker and the actual domain records are managed by Cloudflare, a full-service web security company.
If your registrar and name servers are different, ask your IT, webmaster, or web contractor where domain records can be added.
What to Ask Your IT Department, Webmaster, or Web Contractor
If you have followed the instructions in our email domains article or the content serving domains article, and downloaded the records Feathr provides in .csv format, but got stuck, this section should help.
Short of logging in to your domain registrar and adding the records yourself, you may have the option of handing off the .csv file from Feathr to a webmaster role. If you lack the vocabulary or knowledge to talk shop with your organization's web guru, the boilerplate text below can provide a starting point:
Hi Webmaster, we work with a marketing platform called Feathr that is requesting to add domain records in order to use it to build landing pages and send marketing emails. I am attaching a .csv file with domain records that Feathr provided. Can you please add them to the records on our domain registrar? Thank you.
Love,
Your Name
Adding The Records Yourself
Once you have reached the step in Feathr where you can download the .csv domain records (instructions here and here), and you are responsible for adding them yourself, you will need to log in to your domain registrar, locate the correct place to enter the records, enter them, and save.
Because those steps differ slightly for every domain registrar, and because there are so many domain registrars, it is impossible for us to provide detailed instructions for each. We can, however, offer pointers.
- Adding domain records is a fundamental function of any domain registrar. It is in their best interest to make that process as user-friendly as possible. Every domain registrar should have help documentation to guide you through how to add records on their particular platform.
- If the help documentation fails you, domain registrars almost always offer email or phone support from a real human. If you're unsure what to ask for, say something along the lines of "I have a few content serving and email records I need to add to my domain but I've never done it before. Can you help guide me through the process? I already have the record values."
- If you are contacting your registrar's support via email, simply attach the .csv file you downloaded from Feathr. This will give the registrar's support rep all the information they need to help you.
- If you think you have successfully added the records yourself, but you still see your domain status in Feathr as pending after 48 hours, you will need to contact your registrar's support.
Lastly, because we're thoughtful and we want you to succeed, we have compiled help documentation from a handful of the most commonly-used domain registrars. If you don't see your registrar on this list, a simple web search for the registrar's name and how to add domain records should get you the information you need.