Deliverability & Messaging

Guidelines for sending surveys via email and SMS while maintaining strong deliverability and compliance.

AwareCX is designed to help you collect feedback while protecting sender reputation, improving inbox placement, and supporting compliant messaging practices across both email and SMS.

Email Deliverability

AwareCX sends survey emails from a dedicated subdomain:

feedback.awarecx.com

AwareCx sends email through Resend: https://www.resend.com

Domain Authentication

SPF and DKIM records are configured on the sending domain to verify that emails originate from an authorized source.

A DMARC policy of p=quarantine is also enforced. This instructs receiving mail servers to quarantine messages that fail authentication checks.

Sending Practices That Protect Your Reputation

Throttled Dispatch
Emails are sent with an intentional delay between each message, currently 500 ms, to avoid burst-related rejections from providers such as Outlook and Gmail.

No Open or Click Tracking
Open-pixel and click-redirect tracking are intentionally disabled. These tracking mechanisms are a common trigger for spam filters and can reduce inbox placement rates.

Email Verification
Before dispatch, each recipient address is verified through Bouncer: https://www.usebouncer.com

Addresses flagged as undeliverable are automatically skipped and marked as failed. This helps protect your sender reputation from hard bounces.

If the verification service is unavailable, emails are sent normally without blocking.

Delivery Event Tracking

AwareCX automatically captures three delivery events from the email provider:

Delivered
The message was accepted by the recipient's mail server.

Bounced
The message could not be delivered. This may happen because of an invalid address, full inbox, or similar issue.

Complained
The recipient marked the email as spam.

These events update the recipient record in real time, so you always know the delivery status of every send.

Tips for Maximizing Deliverability

• Keep your contact lists clean. Remove invalid addresses regularly or rely on automatic verification.

• Avoid sending to purchased or scraped lists.

• Use the Send Test Email feature on any survey to verify inbox placement before a full send.

• Monitor bounce and complaint rates in your send results. A complaint rate above 0.1% signals a list quality issue.

SMS Sending Best Practices

SMS surveys are available on Growth, Professional, and Enterprise plans.

Messages are delivered through Sendly using a reply-based model, which means the recipient replies directly to the message with their score.

https://www.sendly.live

Quiet Hours Enforcement

AwareCX enforces quiet hours automatically.

SMS messages are not sent before 8:00 AM or after 8:00 PM in the recipient's local time zone.

Time zones are determined from the phone number's area code for the United States and Canada. If the area code cannot be mapped, Central Time is used as the default.

Phone Number Format

All phone numbers are normalized to E.164 format.

Example:

+15551234567

Contacts imported in other formats, including parentheses, dashes, or spaces, are automatically converted.

Reply Flow

The SMS response flow works as follows:

1. The recipient receives an SMS containing the survey question and score scale.

   • 0–10 for NPS

   • 1–5 for CSAT

2. The recipient replies with their score.

3. A follow-up message invites them to share additional feedback, either by replying directly or by clicking a link to the web form.

Custom Question Text

If you have configured custom question text on a survey, that text is used in the SMS body instead of the default wording.

Opt-In and Compliance

Email

AwareCX is designed for relationship-based feedback.

You should only survey contacts with whom your organization has an existing business relationship.

The cooldown system, with a default setting of 30 days, helps prevent over-surveying. A contact who was recently surveyed is automatically suppressed from the next send unless you explicitly override that suppression.

Every survey email includes a Powered by AwareCX footer.

If required by your industry, you can add unsubscribe language to your email subject or body through the subject line customization fields.

SMS

AwareCX maintains an SMS opt-out list.

When a recipient replies with a standard opt-out keyword, such as STOP, they are added to the opt-out table and will not receive future SMS surveys.

Delivery events, including sent, delivered, and failed, are tracked for every SMS just as they are for email.

Sender Identity

All survey emails are sent from:

{Your Organization Name} Feedback feedback@feedback.awarecx.com

The From name matches your organization name as configured in Settings, so recipients see a familiar sender in their inbox.

Your logo and brand colors are automatically embedded in the email template.

Reminders

AwareCX supports automatic reminder emails for recipients who have not yet responded.

How Reminders Work

Reminder subject lines are automatically prefixed with:

Reminder:

This prefix is followed by your configured subject line.

Reminders are sent only to recipients with a status of sent, meaning they received the original email but have not responded or bounced.

The same throttling, verification, and deliverability protections that apply to original survey emails also apply to reminder emails.

Key Takeaways

• Your sender reputation is protected by default through throttling, DMARC, and disabled tracking.

• Email addresses are verified before every send to reduce bounces.

• SMS respects quiet hours and opt-out preferences automatically.

• Use the Send Test Email feature to confirm inbox placement before launching a campaign.

• Keep contact lists based on real business relationships for the best results.