You lost me at DNS

At Titan, we are working with the world’s leading web hosts and registrars to make the data-driven improvements needed to double revenue from email. Acquiring valuable email customers starts with providing a better product than the archaic email our industry has typically offered, but it goes deeper than that.

In this blog, we would like to shed light on why up to 30% of customers who pay for email are unable to activate it.

To use new email at a domain, the MX and SPF records in the domain’s DNS settings need to be properly configured. Even for your technically-minded customers, this is a tall order. In fact, across all of Titan’s domains, we see 15% to 30% that have incorrect MX records. And for some of our partners, between 25% to 35% of their email-related support tickets are tied to DNS activation.

If nearly a third of your customers can’t get out of the gate, we are left with lower revenue and dissatisfied customers. Let’s take a look at what’s stalling your customers and how we can get them going.

Broken records

Gmail has conditioned users to expect email to just work when they create a new account. So when the critical steps for activating email are left up to the user –– most of whom think of sunscreen when it comes to SPF –– accounts get created with broken records that never get fixed.

For many customers, we found there are a variety of scenarios that can instantly complicate things when they try to activate email at their domain:

1. MX records point to a different provider.
2. DNS points to a different provider.
3. The domain is unregistered.
4. The nameservers are invalid.

Make it easy to make it right

We set out to fix this issue once and for all. To start with, Titan provides you with realtime data on your customers’ DNS troubles.

Next, Titan is Domain Connect compliant. With Domain Connect, Titan enables your customers to instantly configure their DNS correctly without getting into the weeds. We found that up to 13% of your domains could fix their DNS woes in a single click.

Lastly, in cases where Domain Connect is not applicable, Titan will guide the user through specific instructions tailored to the DNS provider they are using.

The Titan difference

Titan not only gives you branding, packaging and pricing control, we also go the extra mile to identify ways to constantly improve customer activation. At Titan, we are obsessed with activation metrics. When was the last time you had a conversation with another email service provider about activation?