Hi Alethea,
We are struggling with our email deliverability this year. We've tried different approaches and I'll summarize them and results. Really looking forward for some feedback on how to move forward as well since we need to solve for this. We are a B2B company, so we primarily send to other organizations and have to deal with their spam filters, but we also send to the gmail's and yahoo's of the world as well.
In 2020, we used Qualtrics' IP's and one of our own domains in the From address, and had a decent deliverability/response rate.
Earlier this year, we introduced another domain. We are not allowed to send emails from 3rd parties using our main email domain. We started experiencing issues with emails getting quarantined internally - we narrowed it down at first to a black-listed Qualtrics IP address which has since been fixed (we think).
We tried using the SMTP relay, but testing showed we were still having major deliverability issues with emails either not getting to inboxes as well, getting quarantined, or going into spam.
We have since tried various combinations:

1. Sending through SMTP using our domain


2. Sending through Qualtrics IP's using our domain


3. Sending through Qualtrics IP's using their domain.

I can say with confidence, that deliverability is dismal across all these methods compared to last year. The best results was using approach #2.
Based on my understanding, there are three things affecting deliverability - IP reputation, domain reputation, and email content.
We are quite stumped as to how to move forward and address this. We think spam filters have gotten increasingly hostile to emails with survey links.
Open to suggestions and things to try to solve for this.
And if anyone can recommend a B2B email deliverability expert that we can bring in to help us, please send my way.

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Thanks so much for this detailed response. Can you further explain option two? Our IT team has now set up an SMTP Relay using our domain, but will not do the same for option 2 (they insist that we must create a subdomain). To me, deliverability using a subdomain is just the same as using Qualtrics' domain options. What are the advantages of implementing option two using our own domain, assuming IT will allow me to do this?
As a follow up question, how did you set up SMTP Relay with Qualtrics support? I have submitted two tickets with the two emails that need to be used in the From field and the other fields they require of us. But why do they ask for a default From address? Each survey will have different From addresses (our testing has shown that different audiences respond to different From emails in our institution). I have submitted two usernames and their passwords, but I--and our IT team--may be misunderstanding what is needed on the Qualtrics side to allow for the creation of two different From addresses in the Qualtrics mailer using SMTP.
Any guidance you can offer about your SMTP setup and process is much appreciated!
-Alethea

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In option 2, what I mean by "our domain" is the additional domain that was set up specifically for survey send. Not the main one used for all other email. We're not allowed to use the main domain, so it's that secondary one that we are using.
And yes, you're right, you then need to manage the reputation of this new domain since it's considered separate from you main email one.
I agree that it's not ideal being limited to the 1 email address when using SMTP relay. However, I think changing the From Name is more important than changing from email for the different surveys. So for example, for installation feedback, we can say the from name is + Installation Team, vs. for relationship surveys we include + "Feedback". Your from email address can be something standard - e.g. feedback@domain.com. As far as additional guidelines, I am not in the position to do that - their support team really needs to do that.
Bottom line though, we didn't see an improvement in deliverability from SMTP relay. So I was looking for other guidance from other experts in driving deliverability and being able to overcome the spam filters.

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