Custom Domain Email for Churches

When your church sends a campaign through Ekkli, it goes out from your own domain — This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., not a shared Ekkli address. Every church that sends bulk email on Ekkli sends it from its own domain: you add SPF, DKIM and DMARC records to your domain's DNS settings, we verify them with a live check, and sending switches on from there. Your sender reputation belongs to your church alone — no other church on the platform can affect it. Custom-domain sending is included from the Growing plan — see email campaigns for what's on each plan.

What's real today, and how the two "custom domain" features relate

It's worth separating two different things that both involve the phrase "custom domain," because they're easy to mix up and both are live, on different plans:

• Custom domain for your church website — available on paid plans. Your public Ekkli website can run on your own domain (your-church.org) instead of an Ekkli subdomain, and the "Powered by Ekkli" footer comes off.
• Custom domain for sending campaign email — available from the Growing plan. When your church sends a newsletter or announcement through Ekkli's email campaigns, it's sent from your own domain once DNS verification is complete, not from a shared Ekkli address.

They're configured independently, so a church can be on its own domain for its website without yet having set up sending verification, or vice versa. Your website's address bar and your outgoing campaign email's "from" domain are two separate systems in Ekkli.

How verification works

Setting up custom-domain sending means adding three DNS records at your domain registrar:

• SPF lists which servers may send mail for your domain.
• DKIM attaches a cryptographic signature proving a message wasn't altered in transit.
• DMARC tells receiving mail servers what to do if those checks fail, and gives you visibility into who's sending mail as your domain.

We check all three with a live verification before switching sending on, so there's no guessing whether it worked. If nobody at your church is comfortable editing DNS records, we can set it up for you for a one-off fee — get in touch and we'll walk you through it.

Why custom-domain sending matters, in general

Across the email industry, sending from an organization's own domain instead of a shared platform domain is understood to improve recipient trust, because the "from" address matches the sender a recipient actually recognizes — This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. reads as more legitimate than a generic shared address ever will. It also lets an organization build and maintain its own sender reputation, rather than sharing reputation with every other organization on the same shared domain. SPF, DKIM and DMARC are the standard technical mechanism industry-wide: mail providers check them to confirm a message was actually authorized to be sent from the domain it claims.

This matters more for churches and nonprofits than for some other senders, specifically because they're frequent targets of spoofing and phishing — scammers impersonating a pastor or church office to ask a member for gift cards or an urgent wire transfer is a well-documented pattern, and it has made many congregants understandably more cautious of email claiming to be from their church. A recognizable, authenticated own-domain sender address is one of the few signals an ordinary recipient can see and trust at a glance, and industry data on email generally shows authenticated, own-domain sending tends to correlate with better open rates than mail from an unfamiliar shared address.

What else is included

Custom-domain email sits alongside the rest of Ekkli: consent-aware email campaigns, your church's website on your own custom domain, worship display, member database, rota, and event registration — all available from the six-month free trial for churches up to 50 people, with custom-domain sending itself starting at Growing.

See email campaigns for what Ekkli's email sending includes at each plan, and pricing for the full breakdown.