Emails

The Emails section under Settings lets you take control of the emails sent from your organisation. Here, you can configure the email preferences or customise the email templates.

Sender Email Preferences

You can configure the email addresses that are used in the From field of emails sent from Zoho Billing. However, these emails can sometimes land in your recipient’s spam folder, causing them to go unnoticed. This happens when the email address in the From field of an email belongs to a domain that does not have SPF and DKIM records.

What are SPF and DKIM records?

By adding an SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record to your domain, your recipient’s mail server will be able to verify that Zoho Billing is sending emails using your email address with your domain’s permission. Without the SPF record, the emails that Zoho Billing sends on behalf of your domain will mostly end up in your recipient’s spam folder. 

DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) is also used for preventing spam and allows the recipient email server to verify whether an email was sent and authorized by the owner of that domain.

DKIM and SPF records are effective in preventing spam when used together. For this reason, Zoho Billing will consider a domain as authenticated only if it has both SPF and DKIM records.

Read on to learn more about sender email preferences:

• Domain Classification
  • Unauthenticated Domains
  • Authenticated Domains
  • Public Domains
• Authenticate Domains
• Other Actions
  • Mark Primary Customers
  • Add New Sender Email Addresses
  • Resend Verification Emails
  • Edit/Delete Email Addresses

Domain Classification

Zoho Billing has classified domains into 3 categories to help you identify the email addresses, which if used in the From field of emails, could cause them to go to the spam folder.

To find out which category your email addresses belong to, navigate to *Settings* > *Emails* > Sender Email Preferences.

The 3 categories that you will find in this page are:

1. Unauthenticated Domains

Email addresses that belong to a domain without SPF and DKIM records will be listed here. If any of these email addresses are selected in the From field of an email sent from Zoho Billing, the email address in the From field will be replaced automatically with message-service@sender.zohobilling.com, which is Zoho Billing’s own email address. This is done to prevent the email that you send from landing in the Spam folder. 

It’s important to note that the message-service@sender.zohobilling.com address will only be used in the From address for emails and not the Reply-To address. i.e, your customers will still be able to see your name in their inbox and when they reply, their email will be delivered to your own email inbox. 

To use the email addresses under this category in the From field, you must authenticate their domains.

2. Authenticated Domains

Email addresses that belong to a domain with both SPF and DKIM records will be listed here. These email addresses can be used in the From field of emails sent from Zoho Billing without worrying about them ending up as spam.

3. Public Domains

If you use an email address that belongs to a public domain, such as Gmail or Yahoo Mail in the From address of emails sent from Zoho Billing, it will be replaced with message-service@sender.zohobilling.com. This is because SPF and DKIM records cannot be added for public domains and can only be added for domains that you own. 

If you still wish to use emails listed in this category in the From address, you can do so by:

• Click change setting.
• Select Sender’s email address.
• Click Save.

Now, email addresses from public domains will not be replaced with message-service@sender.zohobilling.com.

Authenticate Domains

Emails listed under the Unauthenticated Domains section can be authenticated by adding SPF and DKIM records for their domains. 

To do this: 

• Navigate to Settings > Emails > Sender Email Preferences.
• Click Authenticate Now → next to the domain that you want to authenticate. 
• Copy the SPF record from the pop-up that follows and add it to your domain name provider’s (e.g. GoDaddy) DNS settings. 
• Copy the Host Name and Value for the DKIM record and add it to the DNS settings of your domain name provider. 

• Click Validate.

  Insight: It will take a while for your newly added records to reflect on the DNS server. If your validation fails, wait for a while and try again. Also, you can continue to use Zoho Billing while the records are being validated. 

A few points to note about adding SPF and DKIM records:

If an SPF record already exists for your domain, i.e, you’ve added an SPF record for a different service in the past, you must remove v=spf1 from the SPF record before adding it to your domain.  If you use GoDaddy as your domain name provider, the Host Name for the DKIM record will have to be slightly modified. You will have to remove your domain name alone from the record, before adding it. For example, if the Host Name is 1522406527365._domainkey.patricia.com, you will have to remove your domain name from it and add 1522406527365._domainkey alone. 

Now, your domain has been authenticated and it will be listed under the Authenticated Domains category. The emails from this domain can be used in the From address, without having it replaced or worrying about it landing in spam.

Other Actions

You can perform a few other actions from the Sender Email Preferences page.

Mark Primary Customers

A primary contact is an email address that will be used as the point of contact between your Zoho Billing organisation and Zoho. Updates regarding your Zoho Billing organisation, such as usage related emails will be sent to this email address.

Also, this email address will be used as the default in the From address of emails sent from Zoho Billing, unless you change it manually while sending an email.  

To mark a contact as primary, hover over an email address and click Mark as Primary Contact.

Add New Sender Email Addresses

You will be able to add new sender email addresses and select them when you send emails from Zoho Billing. To do this: 

• Navigate to Settings > Emails > Sender Email Preferences.
• Click + New Sender on the top right. 
• Add Name and Email.
• Click Save.

Now, a verification email will be sent to the email address that you added. Once the email address has been verified, you will be able to use it in the From field of emails sent from Zoho Billing.

Resend Verification Emails

As mentioned in the previous section, when you add a new sender email address, a verification email will be sent to that email address. However, if the email was not received, you can resend the verification email. Here’s how:

• Navigate to Settings > Emails > Sender Email Preferences.
• Click Resend Email next to an email address that has not been verified yet.

A verification email will be sent again.

Edit/Delete Email Addresses

You can choose to delete users’ email addresses from Zoho Billing by clicking the Trash Can icon, which can be found on the right side of an email address. Click the Pencil icon if you want to edit the Name of the user.

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Email Insights

Emails are the conventional method of communicating with customers. However, it could be a hassle to check whether your customers have viewed the emails that you have sent them. The Email Insights feature in Zoho Billing lets you keep track of the notification emails sent to customers. With this, you can know when a customer has opened a notification email.

Let us understand this better with a scenario:

Read on to learn more about email insights:

• Enable Email Insights
• Track Email Status of Transactions
• How Zoho Billing Tracks Email Activity

Enable Email Insights

Once you enable Email Insights, you can track the notification emails sent for the following modules:

• Invoices
• Retainer Invoices
• Estimates

To enable Email Insights:

• Navigate to Settings > Reminders & Notifications > Emails.
• Select Email Insights under Preferences.
• Enable Track the emails sent to your customers.

Track Email Status of Transactions

After you have enabled email insights, you can view the status of the notification email in the following places:

Transaction List View: In the transaction list page, you can view the date and time the customer opened the email. To view this, navigate to the desired module, say Invoices. The status of each sent email is indicated with the help of the following icons:

• : Indicates that the transaction was sent via email.
• : Indicates that the transaction’s notification email was opened.
• : Indicates that the transaction was viewed from the Customer Portal.

Transaction Details Page: You can view the date and time the notification email was opened, in the Comments & History tab of the corresponding transaction.

How does Zoho Billing track email activity?

Zoho Billing uses the web beacon trafficking (the industry standard followed by email service providers for tracking emails) to track the emails sent to your customers. 

A small graphic (one-by-one pixel) is embedded at the bottom of the HTML emails sent from Zoho Billing. When a recipient opens the email and chooses to Display images in it, this tiny image is downloaded from our server. This download enables Zoho Billing to track when your email was opened. This simple method, however, comes with its limitation that the email will be marked as open only if the recipient has chosen to display images.

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Email Templates

Email templates in Zoho Billing lets you create unique, customer-centric notification emails that can be sent to your customers. You can create email templates that is in line with your business and customise the email content accordingly. 

Read on to learn more about email templates:

• Create an Email Template
• Customise Email Template
• Associate Email Template to a Customer

Create an Email Template

To create a new email template:

• Navigate to *Settings* > Emails.
• Under the *Templates* section, choose the module for which you want to customise the email template.

• Click + New in the top-right corner to create a new template.

  Pro Tip: You can also Clone a pre-loaded email template, make changes to it, and then save it as a new template.

• Enter a Template Name for the email template you are creating.
• Select From, CC and BCC email addresses.
• Enter the Subject of the email.
• Customise the email content according to your needs.
• Mark Set this to default if you want to use this template as the default.
• Click Save.
• You can also add up to five files (each of 5MB) to each email template by clicking Attach File(s).
• To edit a template, click Show Mail Content or the template name.

Customize Email Template

You can personalise the email content of the template to be in-line with your business. Here’s how you can create tailor-made emails to send to your customers:

• Navigate to Settings > Reminders & Notifications > Emails.
• Under Templates, choose the module for which you want to customise the email template.
• Select an existing email template or create a new one.
• In the text box provided, enter the message that you want to send to your customers.
• Use the rich text editor (provided on top of the text box) to format your texts. You can change the font, colour, size, etc. of the texts as desired.
• To make your email content dynamic, click Insert Placeholders to select values from the list of available placeholders. 
• Click Save to apply these changes.

Associate Email Template to a Customer

Add a personal touch to the notification emails sent to different customers. In Zoho Billing, you can send client-specific notification emails to customers by assigning email templates for them. Once you have created email templates, here’s how you can associate them to a customer:

• Navigate to Customers.
• Select a customer.
• Click More in the top right corner of the Customer Details page.
• Select Associate Templates.
• Under Email Templates, select and assign a template across the corresponding notification.
• If you want to create a new template, click Click here, which will redirect you to Email Template creation page.

• After associating templates for all the notification emails, click Save.

  Insight: Once you associate a template to each notification for a customer, they will be set as the default templates for all future email notifications sent to that customer. You can choose to change them any time.