Let’s assume your organization’s domain name is mycompany.com.

The survey URL for your surveys can be customized using a custom domain. For the URL to your surveys, we typically recommend using a subdomain name such as feedback.mycompany.com, survey.mycompany.com, etc. You are essentially choosing a subdomain, which is a prefix to your main domain. You can only choose a subdomain that is not in use yet.

The full URL to a survey would then change from something like this…https://s.chkmkt.com/?e=123&h=01ABCDE123&l=en

…to something like this:

https://feedback.mycompany.com/?e=123&h=01ABCDE123&l=en

In addition to the survey URL, any survey reports (and shared reports) will also use this custom domain.

The email address for outgoing CheckMarket emails (invitations, reminders, notifications, etc.) can also be customized.

We recommend using a dedicated email address on your main (top level) domain, such as [email protected], [email protected], etc. This email address should exist within your company’s email server, either as a dedicated mailbox or as an alias.

After you request a custom domain via the domain request form, the CheckMarket domains team will verify your request and reach out to you to approve the costs.

Once your custom domain purchase has been finalized, the CheckMarket domains team will configure your domain. You will then receive an email from that includes the DNS records for the domain.

The DNS records should be shared with your internal IT team to configure on your company’s server (the owner of the company domain).

Once you configure the DNS records on your company’s server, reach out to the CheckMarket domains team so they can activate your new custom domain.

In larger organizations, the IT team/department would typically handle the configuration of DNS records. In smaller organizations, this might be an IT employee or webmaster. Alternatively, some organizations may have an external website agency or web hosting provider that handles this.

The exact steps vary from provider to provider. Here’s some links to help articles of some popular providers:

• GoDaddy
• Bluehost
• Ionos
• Google
• Microsoft
• WordPress
• Amazon Web Services

To find help articles from your provider, you can conduct a quick internet search for “(your provider) DNS”.

You will receive a list of DNS records to configure from the CheckMarket domains team. This list will also check the DNS records that are currently active and inform you which ones are valid or invalid.

Some organizations have a policy that disallows other businesses to send emails from the main (top level) domain (e.g., survey@mycompany.com or really [anything]@mycompany.com).

We can provide an alternative setup that enables you to send emails from your survey URL subdomain (e.g. info@feedback.mycompany.com). Contact our domains team ([email protected]) if this is required.

If possible, we always recommend sending from the main domain, since it offers a few benefits, as follows:

• Easier to recognize and trust
  When sending out survey invitations from your main domain (e.g. [email protected]), people will recognize it and trust it faster than info@survey.mycompany.com, especially because you have likely already sent an email to your targeted audience if they have previously purchased a product or service from you.
• Replies
  If anyone sends a reply or out-of-office email to [email protected], the reply will arrive in this mailbox on your end. When using a subdomain, the reply wouldn’t go anywhere and cannot be captured.
• Better deliverability
  Your messages will have an even better chance at arriving directly in the inbox of the recipient, because email servers likely already know and trust your existing domain.

All of our emails are sent out using both DKIM and SPF records. You can use a DMARC record on your top-level domain.

No, your existing SPF record can remain the same. CheckMarket uses a subdomain for the envelope address (RFC5321) of the outgoing emails. Since email clients verify the SPF record on the envelope address rather than the FROM (RFC5322) address, your main SPF record doesn’t need to change.

In your list of DNS records, you’ll notice a mailer subdomain (e.g., mailer-us.mycompany.com). This record contains a CNAME pointing to a domain on CheckMarket’s end. This underlying domain contains the actual SPF record.

Our IP ranges change regularly and we don’t recommend whitelisting based on IP address. To obtain all necessary information to whitelist CheckMarket, we suggest you send a preview invitation to your IT department. They can get all necessary information from the mail headers. If they do request specific IP ranges, send them the instructions listed in the whitelisting help article.

A CNAME record cannot exist with any other records for the same name because a name cannot both be an alias (CNAME) and something else at the same time. Check if there are any other DNS records present. Proceed with caution, since the presence of other DNS records might indicate that this subdomain is already used for something else.

The CNAME record cannot coexist with any other records. This even includes NS records. If you created a separate DNS zone for this CheckMarket subdomain (e.g., survey.mycompany.com), you might run into this issue. If so, we recommend not creating a separate zone but adding these records to the main DNS zone (e.g., mycompany.com).

CheckMarket uses a CDN with varying IP addresses. Since these IP addresses can always change, configuring A records is not an option.

Not really. These DNS records are necessary for CheckMarket to send emails and accept Web traffic on your behalf.

If it’s only about the URL and not the emails, you could consider embedding your survey into your own website with an iframe: https://www.checkmarket.com/kb/embed-survey-iframe/

You could also consider configuring redirects on your server so that you can redirect all Web site traffic to point to a specific URL. For example, you could forward a URL (such as mycompany.com/mysurvey to chkmk.com/mysurvey or chkmk.com/?e=12345) so that any survey respondents would be able to enter a simple URL into the browser, before being redirected to the actual survey link.