If you're receiving complaints from customers that they are not receiving their order confirmation emails, this post will point out ways you can set up your email strategy to prevent order confirmation emails from going to spam as well as a few things your organization could consider doing as well.

What Direct Ordering does

1. Direct Ordering uses Amazon's SES outbound email service to send order confirmation emails. Amazon SES assists us in authenticating all emails sent through the system using SPF checks, DKIM checks, and reverse DNS paths. These 3 checks help spam filters know the emails we send are coming from where we say they are coming from.

2. We make it easy for servers to recognize the order confirmation emails by using a consistent IP address to send emails, we only send emails to one specific person, and we always use the same "From" address.

3. We only send order confirmation emails to those who order online and therefore have "opted in" to receive the confirmation email.

4. We keep the image-to-text ratio low in our confirmation emails (a high ratio makes spam filters suspicious), we follow HTML standards for the email, and the content of the email is consistent with the subject.

What your Restaurant can do

1. Make sure your organization is not sending any bulk or promotional emails from the same email in which you send order confirmation emails created by the Direct Ordering system. For example, if you are currently using "orders@coffeeshop.com" to send order confirmation emails, consider creating a separate email for promotional emails "promotions@coffeeshop.com".

2. Consider asking customers to add "orders@coffeeshop.com" to their contact list.  You could add this wording to the checkout page.

3. Consider asking customers whose confirmation emails are sent to spam to click the "Not Spam" button in their email account to help them receive order confirmation emails in the future.

4. Consider setting the subject of your order confirmation email to include your restaurant name.  For example, "Your Coffee Shop Order is Confirmed". A common spam-preventing recommendation is to make sure your “From” field and subject line are branded for better recognition. See below for instructions on how to update your email subject. 

5. Consider monitoring bounce/complaint/successful delivery statistics for all of your email addresses. You should automatically unsubscribe users whose addresses bounce multiple pieces of mail, as they would affect your statistics, and contribute to your mail being sent to spam.

How to update your confirmation email subject

1. In your Direct Ordering Admin Panel

2. Go to Settings > in the Communications section, go to Confirmation Emails

3. Select the Email Type that you'd like to update. 
   We chose INITIAL in the below example, which is the email confirmation a customer receives when their ASAP order is placed, or once their future order is approved. 

4. Update the email subject to include your brand. 

5. Submit to save your changes.