Marketing: How to set up custom domains

Custom domains play a pivotal role in enhancing brand recognition and improving email deliverability. They serve two key purposes: first, by hosting landing pages, Nutshell forms, Scheduler links, and marketing email editions, they create a white-label space for your brand. Second, for tracking emails, custom domains ensure positive deliverability and prevent other email senders from affecting your reputation.

Normally, links in your messages sent with Nutshell's Email marketing tool look like `depotstreetmail.com/email/link/1234` or 'maynardstreetdelivery.com/email/link/1234'—this allows Nutshell to track your recipients’ engagement.

With a custom tracking domain, these links will look like growth.yourdomain.com/email/link/1234. This brings along the reputation of your domain to the emails that you send. Nutshell will provide you with a record that points your domain to our services, secured via an SSL certificate. Once you set up your custom domain, you won’t need to do any work to keep it secure and operational.

Watch our video about adding your custom domains:

Take an interactive tour in Nutshell:

To get started with configuring custom domains, head to Marketing and click on Domains.

Click on the “Add new domain” text button and enter the name of your domain in the dialogue that opens.

You can then configure which domains to use for click tracking and for your Nutshell forms, Scheduler links, and email Broadcast, Newsletter, and Drip editions:

Nutshell will then provide you with seven records that you need to add to your DNS provider. This tells the world that Nutshell is authorized to send and secure email on your behalf, and to host your landing pages. This will not affect your existing email or website.

Most people use services like Godaddy, Namecheap, Bluehost as their DNS provider. You may also encounter AWS Route 53, or Cloudflare. You’ll add the records that Nutshell provides to this account.
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Once your records have been added, you can go back to Nutshell, which will automatically check to ensure that they’re active. You’ll see a green checkbox for each record that has been verified.

If you're using Nutshell's Landing pages feature, you can also add a subdomain to use for your landing pages. This allows you to create a dedicated URL for your landing pages and click tracking. For example, if your main domain is yourdomain.com, you could create a subdomain like landing.yourdomain.com for your landing pages.
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To add a subdomain:

Once your subdomain is set up, Nutshell will provide the necessary DNS records to ensure everything works seamlessly.

We’ll need your help to log in to your DNS provider, but once you have access, we can help you to create the records. Just reach out to our support team, and we'll help guide you through the process.