Email deliverability refers to the ability of an email message to reach the intended recipient’s inbox, or the rate of successful deliverability in which the recipient does not report the email as spam or unsubscribe. This post will walk through five steps you can follow to understand and improve your email deliverability.
Please comment below if you have any questions regarding managing your email deliverability with Marketo!
Step 1: Understand the Basics
Review the following resources to learn the fundamentals of Email Deliverability.
- Learn about optimizing email deliverability (Video, 8 min): Short video demo on how to create interesting content, avoid being sent to spam, and better engage your customers.
- Deliverability (Webinar, 58 min): Marketo’s deliverability expert explains components of sender reputation and how to manage your reputation.
- Marketo Email Deliverability FAQ (Blog, 13 min read): We've partnered with our experts to answer your most burning deliverability questions.
Step 2: Verify email authentication protocols (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)
What is it? Why is it important?
- SPF and DKIM verification should be done for each sending domain. You’re basically telling recipients that you've authorized Marketo to send emails on your behalf. Without this setup, your email has a higher chance of being marked as spam.
- DMARC is another authentication protocol used to help organizations protect their domain from unauthorized use. it protects your brand and reputation by preventing spammers from using your domain to send email without your permission (i.e. email spoofing). Major providers such as Google and Yahoo have announced that they are making DMARC a requirement for delivery.
How to verify your email authentication settings:
- You can verify SPF/DKIM in Marketo by going to Admin > Email > SPF/DKIM
- To verify DMARC, go to https://dmarcian.com/ and enter your sending domain
- Ensure all sending domains (including subdomain and root domains you send from with Marketo) are verified. Follow the Configuration Protocols for Marketo Engage if any of your domains are not setup properly.
| Pro tip: Consider using subdomains for individual Business units to separate/isolate reputation |
Step 3: Diagnostics – How do I know if I have a deliverability problem?
Step 3.1 - Review & Monitor Email Performance Report
Your email engagement is a big factor that affects your email deliverability and inbox placement. The easiest way to monitor your engagement is to create an email performance report for all emails sent from your Marketo instance in the past 90-day timeframe. Pay attention to Delivered, Open, and Click-to-Open metrics:
- Delivered: Aim for 98-99% delivered rate
- Opened: Recommend > 20% open rate. Keep in mind open rates are often inflated due to email bot activities in today’s world. If you have a large base of Apple Mail users, this can be skewed further due to Apple’s Mail Protection Policy (What is it?). If you still see lower than 20% deliverability despite the trend of generally inflated open metrics, this may indicate a warning sign.
- Clicked-to-opened: Recommend >15%. This is an important metric to see your overall email engagement in general. With the trend of bot activities inflating email metrics, you will want to couple this report with the actual web page visits to determine true engagement. A bot click will not generate a web page visit activity.
- Unsubscribed: Aim for <0.2% unsubscribed rate.
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Pro Tip: Enable Marketo’s bot activity filtering Email bot activity refers to automated interactions with email systems that are carried out by software programs or bots rather than by human users. These may include programs that automatically clicks on links within emails to determine if they are safe or not before delivering to the user’s inbox. To more accurately monitor your email performance metrics, you have options in Marketo Admin to log or Filter Email Bot Activity. We highly recommend the filtering option to remove bot activities from being logged in your instance and polluting your email performance report. Note: If you choose Filter Bot Activity, you may see a drop in email opens and clicks as false activities are weeded out. |
Step 3.2 - Identify outliers
Highlight any large sends (>1000 recipients) with outlier metrics such as below 90% delivery, high unsubscribe rate, or high bounce rates, etc. for further investigation.
Step 3.3 - Monitor your Sender Reputation
Think of Sender Reputation as the credit score for your email send. However, each provider has their own reputation rating system therefore there isn’t a single reputation score. Google’s Postmaster Tools is a popular option that can provide some insight on both domain and IP reputation. If you use dedicated IP, Microsoft Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) is another free service that can provide insight into the sender reputation of your sending IP. Marketo’s Deliverability Tool offers a feature to monitor your sender reputation.
Step 3.4 - The verdict
If your email performance report shows low deliverability or engagement rate and the reputation report indicates Low/Bad or Yellow/Red grading, you will want to take actions to improve your deliverability.
Step 4: Take Actions to manage and improve your deliverability
List quality and engagement are the two largest factors affecting your email deliverability. Good news: As a marketer, you can take full control of both.
Step 4.1 – Review your List Acquisition Strategy
- Obtaining explicit consent is required by laws and regulations such as GDPR, CAN-SPAM, and CASL, which mandate that recipients must agree to receive marketing emails. Non-compliance can lead to legal penalties and fines.
- For effective email list acquisition, it is best practice to use opt-in forms on your website and landing pages to encourage voluntary subscriptions and offer incentives like exclusive content or discount to attract sign-ups.
- Clearly communicate what subscribers can expect and how their data will be used to build trust and provide easy opt-out options to ensure compliance with privacy regulations.
- Avoid purchasing email lists, as they often contain outdated or non-consenting addresses and can harm your sender reputation. (Plus, it is against Adobe’s Acceptable Use Policy.)
- Collect relevant information during sign-up to segment your list based on interests, preferences, or demographics, to facilitate more targeted and effective communication.
- Leverage social media, webinars, or events to broaden your reach.
- Regularly clean your list to remove inactive or invalid addresses, maintaining a high-quality and engaged list.
Step 4.2 – Implement a Deliverability management program
It is best practice to set up a program that’s dedicated to managing your list data in order to optimize email deliverability.
Don’t currently have such a program in place? Fear not, Marketo offers a deliverability management program you can import into your instance! Learn more:
- How to Manage Your Marketo Database for Deliverability: Detailed step-by-step instruction on importing and using the program
- Deliverability: Video demo on how to import and use the program starts at 20:20 timestamp
- OP-Deliverability Management – Documentation of the program
Step 4.3 – Follow email marketing best practices to improve email engagement
- Use mobile-responsive email template with clear subject lines and non-image CTAs, adopting clean a/b testing strategy, and prioritize sends with highly engaged lists to help you improve inbox placement: How to avoid the 8 biggest mistakes in email marketing
- Include Alt text for all images. Many spam filters use image analysis as part of their detection algorithms. If an email contains images without descriptive alt text, it may be flagged as suspicious spam, since spammers often use images without alt text to bypass text filters. Therefore, providing relevant alt tags helps indicate the images are legitimate and also helps maintain brand/domain reputation and improve deliverability. See more info here.
- Implementing a regular and consistent A/B testing strategy can lead to gained momentum within your email engagement through improved open, click through, and click-to-open ratios: Add an A/B Test
- Leverage your Marketo data to personalize your email and improve engagement: Personalization At Scale
- Use Dynamic Content to send more targeted, relevant content to your database: Dynamic Content and the Power of Personalization
- Configuring communication limits or a prioritization strategy for emails helps prevent over-communication and consequentially, disengagement: Operationalizing your Communication Limits
Step 5: Leverage Marketo Deliverability Tool & Service Add-on
Here are additional considerations if you want to have more control over your deliverability:
Option 1) Deliverability Tool: Deliverability Tool offers additional features to help you better manage your email deliverability within Marketo. The Inbox Tracker feature offers visibility and insight to your Marketo email send by providing data on your inbox placement rate, and design tracker feature shows you how your email design is rendered across different email platforms and recommendations to improve your email content. Watch tutorial video here
Option 2) Deliverability Consulting Service: while the Deliverability Tool provides data, the deliverability consulting service provides guidance on tools training and what to do with what the data shows, so it’s like a personal trainer of deliverability. Example engagements include:
- Deliverability health audit
- Deliverability monitoring subscription
- Troubleshooting specific deliverability issues (i.e. sudden/steady drop in inbox placement)
Option 3) Dedicated IP: Having Dedicated IP allow you to have full control over your brand and IP reputation. However, it is important to consider your sending volume and frequency to determine if it is appropriate for you. For example, if you send less than 100,000 emails a month on average, or less than two mailings in a month, you probably wouldn’t benefit from a Dedicated IP, as you will need at least 100K and a regular sending cadence to maintain sufficient reputation.
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