How the Mediarails Email connection works and the options available

Mediarails email/communication approach:

Mediarails has developed an innovative approach to helping you communicate with your partners and potential Partners. From the beginning one of our guiding lights was to enable you to create a deeper more personal connection to your partners. To do this we determined that we needed to enable brands and agencies to communicate with partners using their personal email address or at least an email address from the brand or agency's domain. We then enable automation to help you automatically trigger or follow up with your partners based on logic directly through your normal inbox.

Mediarails approach compared to other systems:

Some users may be used to systems that have their own ESP built in to power a separate email inbox of sorts directly in a tool or network. If we look at the example of an affiliate network; many of them have email services that allow for email communication directly in the platform that is not truly connected to your personal inbox. Sometimes this communication is even anonymized to protect the true email that the messages are being sent to or from. This type of approach did not meet our goal of creating more personal connections that we believe help you grow your program more effectively. Mediarails is a CRM tool and is supplementary to a Partner program. Mediarails is not a "network" and you are not limited to discovering partners from a specific network or database, but helps you search across the internet to find potential partner matches based on keyword and other search criteria. 

How is the Mediarails approach executed?

To enable Mediarails to connect to your personal inbox we leverage a 3rd party tool called Nylas. Nylas connects to your inbox in a similar method as a mobile app might connect to your inbox to allow actions to be performed on your behalf. That being the case, this method does require that your company email policies allow this type of connection. In certain cases there may be security restrictions or settings that would limit a users ability to make this connection. We typically see very large companies or companies that handle sensitive data have greater restrictions that may require an alternative approach. 

What are all of the options for creating an email connection?

• The first option is to try to connect your email to the system to see if you able to do so. 95% of the time this works. 
• The second option if you run into issues connecting, is to contact your Email admin to see if they are able to edit the settings to allow the connection to take place. This can sometimes be difficult if your Email admin does not understand what you are trying to do or if they are not easy to get in touch with. In most cases though there may be some blanket settings in place that they are able to change. In some cases though your company has policies that will block you for your personal email connection that cant be changed. 
• The third option to explore if you run into a direct block on your personal email is to ask if your company Email admin would be able to setup a second inbox on your domain that does not have the same restrictions as your personal email. Maybe something like "[e-mail]"
• The forth option if none of the above options are possible is to look at purchasing a separate domain that can be directly used to setup another email account, where you are able to reduce restrictions and avoid implicating your main domain in the setup. This can be done by your company or if you prefer, Mediarails can do this for you. In the case where Mediarails does this for you; we would purchase and manage the domain as well as administrate the email inbox we setup on that domain. The domain will depend on what domains are available but we look for options like (yourbrandname)partnerships.com. An example might be "acmepartnerships.com" We are flexible on this and can work together to find something that fits your needs. 

Additional help articles related to this topic: 

Info regarding the security and privacy of the different types of connections can be accessed by clicking here.  

Info on how to connect your email address to the Mediarails system can be found by clicking here. 

Info on how the Nylas connection works and how your data is protected can be found by clicking here.

Side note:

Additional capabilities if you are interested in sending very large amounts of emails (greater than 2,000 emails a day) are also available through ESP connections Mediarails has if this is something you would like to explore. This still requires access to a domain to power the email so there are still restrictions if there are security policies blocking connections and an alternative domain would still need to be acquired. 

For more information on SPAM in the United States, please see CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business on the FTC's website.