Hi Marketo Community,
@shannonmacq and I presented at the February 2025 Marketo User Group on one of our favorite topics: email operations. From improving deliverability to surfacing meaningful metrics, Shannon created this blog to give a high-level summary of the strategies and best practices we covered during our session.
Building and Protecting Your Sender Reputation
Your sender reputation directly affects whether your emails land in the inbox. These are some of the foundational steps every team should be following:
- Authenticate your sending domain: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are essential. BIMI can also enhance brand recognition.
- Warm up new IPs or domains: Start slowly, sending to your most engaged users first, and gradually increase volume.
- Maintain list hygiene: Remove invalid or inactive contacts regularly. Email validation tools are helpful for staying ahead.
- Stay consistent: Maintain a steady sending volume and cadence to avoid deliverability spikes.
- Avoid “no-reply” senders: Use monitored email addresses to encourage responses and reduce spam complaints.
Maintaining a Marketable Database
High-performing email programs start with a clean, well-managed database. Here’s what we recommend:
- Implement global form validation: Filter out typos and unqualified addresses at the point of entry to ensure accuracy. This saves hours of cleanup later.
- Set communication limits: Use your data to guide frequency. Evaluate unsubscribe rates by day of the week and adjust accordingly.
- Offer a subscription center: Let users manage preferences—opting down, pausing for a month, or selecting specific types of emails.
- Use segmentation intentionally: Create meaningful segments, such as “engaged prospects,” “active customers,” or those by geography, to better target your messages.
Email Best Practices and Smart Personalization
Deliverability is only one part of the equation. Engagement is what drives performance. Here’s how we approach it:
- Optimize image size and accessibility: Include alt text and avoid unnecessarily large files.
Establish a QA process: Check for typos, broken links, and personalization logic before sending.
- Avoid spammy subject lines: Keep subject lines clear and relevant. Limit excessive emojis or misleading hooks.
Personalization that works:
- Segment your audience and use dynamic content to tailor messaging.
- Add personalization tokens for greeting lines and reply-to fields.
- Use snippets to serve relevant content based on segment.
- Create custom scheduling links that direct each lead to their assigned sales rep’s calendar.
- Build Velocity script tokens to dynamically populate links based on ownership—saving time and increasing accuracy.
Meaningful Email Reporting and Action Planning
Email reporting helps you understand performance, identify trends, and drive future strategy. Here’s how to make it actionable:
- Use the right reports:
- Email Performance and Link Performance Reports
- Engagement Stream Reports for nurture programs
- Email Insights for trend analysis and device-level reporting
- Benchmark performance: Use relevant industry metrics as a starting point, and create internal benchmarks to guide improvements.
- Build a SMART action plan:
- Identify performance gaps
- Define measurable, time-bound goals
- Test, optimize, and document what works
Let’s Continue the Conversation
We’d love to hear from other members of the community:
- What strategies have helped you improve your sender reputation?
- How do you approach dynamic content and segmentation?
- What reporting tactics do you find most useful for surfacing results to stakeholders?
Want to see the full walkthrough?
Catch the recording of our live presentation where we dive deeper into everything covered in this post—including real examples, live Q&A, and practical tips you can start using today.
Watch the recorded session here
If you’re interested in discussing further or have questions, feel free to connect with us in the thread. We’re always happy to share ideas and learn from others in the Marketo community.
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