1. Introduction Today I’m gonna show you exactly how to set up Elastic Email in Cloudways. If you wanna ensure that your clients are receiving all of the emails and the leads from their website, thus not leaving money on the table, then you really want to stay tuned. Hey, my name is Lee Matthew Jackson. I’m the host of the Trailblazer FM podcast, and I’m proud to be a Cloudways Maverick. And I’m gonna share with you a story of what life was like before Elastic Email, and how we nearly went to court. 2. How difficult were things before Elastic Email? Cue the sad and emotional music. We built this incredible website for a client. We were ridiculously proud of it. We were also very focused on conversions. We needed to ensure that the visitor would arrive on the site and when they needed it, they would be able to connect with our client for the relevant information. That’s exactly what we did. We created this incredible site. We could see that conversions were increasing cause we, as the developers, were looking at the data. “Wow! Look at all these form fills.” And yet, a few months later we started to receive complaints. “Where are all our emails?” You see, whilst we could see the forms were getting filled in on our dashboard, the client wasn’t actually receiving the emails. They had gone months receiving nothing, thinking all the work that we did had been pants. Pants in the UK means underwear. Just FYI. They thought our work was underwear. We were very confused. We knew the form was being filled in, so we couldn’t understand what the problem was. And then the client discovered something really stressful for us. They found the entries in the backend of their website and recognized that they hadn’t received any of them. All of those emails had gone into a black hole. Their email provider had seen these PHP generated emails from our forms, and essentially blacklisted the lot. You could argue that that’s not our fault. Maybe that’s the email provider’s fault, but actually it was our fault because we knew that the best practice would be to route those emails through some form of email provider to ensure that those emails get to the intended recipient. We’d done all of our internal testing, worked fine. We switched out for the client’s email and figured, “Hey, everything’s great.” No. The client hadn’t received any of those emails. They were extremely upset. There was thousands upon thousands of pounds of potential opportunities in there, and they hadn’t seen any of it. Now, the good news is we were very honest with the client. We had a lot of conversations. We made it right and whilst they were very angry at the beginning and we weren’t really sure where things were gonna go, they were awesome. They were forgiving, and I am really grateful that they accepted our apology, they accepted all the extra work that we did to make that right, and we were all able to move on. But we’ve learned. We learnt from that experience that we definitely need to make 3. How to set up Elastic Email on Cloudways sure that those potential leads are hitting our clients’ inbox. It’s one of the biggest priorities we have. Now, we’ve been able to solve that through Elastic Email, which you’re gonna discover in a few minutes exactly how to set up for your WordPress website on Cloudways. This means you can be confident that emails are getting delivered to your clients, that your emails are safe, not hitting spam, and reducing your stress levels. That’s a big promise. Let’s see if we can do it. Let’s dive right in. Let’s start by setting up a new server as an example. I’m gonna select WordPress 6.0. Let’s give this a name. I’m gonna add this to my Trailblazer project. I’m gonna opt for Digital Ocean. Gonna have a 2G server size, location, London, as you can tell by the accent. I’m quite happy with that. 26 monthly. Let’s launch now. As you can see, this is gonna take a few minutes to build. Once it’s built, we’re gonna configure our server for Elastic Email. Now that my server’s been created, we’re gonna go up here and click on add-ons. Then we’re going to go to Elastic Email and click on the Edit icon. This is where you select the volume you expect to be processing each month. For us, we only have a few transactional emails on this server and a few contact forms. Once you’ve selected the level, you would then press this button here, which for you, if you’ve not activated Elastic Email before, will say Subscribe. Once that’s been set up, you’ll want to bind Elastic Email to your server. Let’s do that by going to Servers, clicking on our new server, going down to SMTP, and then selecting Elastic Email and pressing Enable. Remember, you’ll need to do this for every server that you manage, where you want Elastic Email to be the default process Now we need to verify our domain. Please check the link in the show notes for the full article that we’re using for this demonstration, but that will allow you to copy and paste the items we’re using. Step one, jump into the control panel of your domain and go to DNS management. In our example, we’re using one of our spare domains, and we are here on Namecheap. First, we need to create the SPF record. You can see here, we have the instructions of exactly what to paste into our DNS tool. Let’s copy this, switch over to our DNS tool. I’m gonna add a new text record. I’m going to put @ for the host, and then paste in the information from the website. I’m now going to press Save . Changes. Now we need to configure the domain key. In this case, it’s gonna be another text record, but instead of the @ symbol, we’re gonna use this. Let’s copy that, jump over, create a new record. Text record, paste that in, switch over and grab this. And then paste that into the value. And then again, I’m gonna press Save Changes. Now we wanna set up the tracking subdomain. We do that by selecting this here, tracking, and we’re gonna create a new type of record called a CNAME record. I’m gonna paste Tracking into there, then I’m going to paste api.elasticemail.com into there and press Save Changes. For DMARC, in this case for us, we’re gonna keep this simple and we’re gonna use Option 1, because we don’t need to receive any reports. To do that, we’re gonna be creating a text record and we’re gonna grab this, switch over, and create a new text record. Paste that into the host, and then grab this and paste that into there, Save Changes. Now it’s time to verify the domain. So let’s switch into add-ons again. And then inside of the Elastic Email, then we’re going to click on this icon to view and verify domains. I’m gonna paste in the domain I’ve been configuring, and press Verify Domain. As you can see, we’ve got green marks across the board. Back on the server we created, we now want to verify that email is getting delivered. So I’m switching down here into SMTP, and I’m going to click on here to Send a Test Email. For this example, I’ve entered [email protected], and I’m going to send a test email, which should arrive in my corporate inbox. We’re now here in [email protected], and we can see the email was successfully delivered. It didn’t hit spam, it didn’t hit a black hole. We can also access reports by going back into add-ons, then to Elastic Email, and clicking on this icon here. This information is very useful if you need to work out what has or has not been delivered, what has been clicked, and so on. Now that is it. It is as simple as that. What I would say is, please be sure that you have selected Elastic Email as the SMTP provider for your server. You don’t then need to configure anything else in WordPress or have any third party plugins, because Cloudways will do the rest and ensure that any emails processed within WordPress are routed through Elastic Email. What I would suggest, however, is that despite us testing on this server, also test in the WordPress application that you can receive the emails and that the client can receive the emails. Also, make sure your client adds rules in their inbox so that whenever an email comes from that form, it’s definitely going to arrive in the inbox, it’s never going to be spammed. These are rules that your clients can set up as an extra precaution. Again, be sure to check out the link in the description and you can follow that guide and my video step by step. 4. Conclusion So there you have it, and I hope that was informative. We go through this process for every single website and we test and test to the Nth degree, especially if you remember that story right at the very beginning. Once burned, twice shy. Let us know your stories in the comments. Let us know if you are able to activate Elastic Email for your websites. Whilst you’re down there, there is a link to our Agency Resource Pack. Be sure to check that out. If you like content like this, then hit that subscribe button, give us a like, hit that bell notification icon and if we don’t see you in the comments, let’s see you in another episode. There’s loads. Go check them out.