How to – Authenticate Domain in Dynamics 365 Marketing

Domain authentication is required for marketing email messages and for hosting the marketing form externally. Authentication of the email domain confirms that you have been approved by the organization to send messages on their behalf, this also increases the deliverability of the email. And in the case of an externally embedded form, domain authentication establishes that you own the domain, which is also required for the pre-filling of the form to work.

Best practices for email marketing

When Marketing is installed, we can see a default pre-authenticated domain (ending in – dyn365mktg.com) already added. We can use it for testing and demo purpose.

Here using Test send we are sending an email that uses the from address using the pre-authenticated default domain.

We can see the email received from marketing.

Now let us add a new domain record and authenticate/configure it for both External Form Hosting and Email Sending.

Navigate to Settings >> Email marketing >> Domains and create a new record.

Enter the domain name and check both the enable form hosting and email options.

If we uncheck Enable email sending, we will be only presented with the option of Verify ownership.

Click on Add will take us to the next screen having the TXT type DNS record/ownership key to be added to the DNS provider’s portal.

Clicking on Next will take us to the CNAME DNS records details, to be added to the DNS Zone

In the last step, we are again presented with all the DNS records to be placed in the DNS zone, along with the option to Verify or Save and Close the record for later verification.

Let us add these DNS records in our DNS Zone (here we are using Azure DNS Zone, the process would be similar in case of another DNS provider/ Site) and click on Verify.