Best practices on managing inbound emails

[farslan]

Hello Marketo Community,

My company is currently migrating from an old Marketo instance to a new one. One of the issues that we came across while setting up SPF/DKIM and DMARC is that we have certain "reply to" addresses that are not being regularly monitored by staff members due to the large volume of emails that come through them. We also have other sets of "reply to" addresses that can potentially receive the same kinds of questions, despite them having different purposes. Though our organization has been receiving email responses over the last few years, figuring out how to manage the large volume of email inquiries is uncharted territory for us. Therefore, we have listed several questions below that we hope can help guide us towards an effective solution.

1. What are the general best practices for monitoring incoming email responses to your marketing campaigns. Are there specific feature we can utilize within Marketo or SFDC to help with this effort. 
2. Do spam filters establish trust based on specific email addresses or specific email domains? We are trying to understand if there would be an impact on our deliverability if we change specific sender addresses that we have been using for several years.  
3. Are we at risk of GDPR non-compliance if we start using a no-reply email address? 

[Michael_Florin]

First of all, I'd strongly recommend to take a look at Drift: https://www.drift.com/platform/email/inbox-management/

As far as I know this is the only tool that's actually able to receive, evaluate, sort, categorize ... incoming emails at scale. And it integrates beautifully with Marketo.

That would also be the best practice advise. Apart from that you could assign specific people or mailboxes who monitor incoming responses. Outlook filtering can help remove the noise, but it's still a lot of manual work.

Yes, deliverability might be impacted if you change the from-email-address. Don't do this lightly.

Well, and using no-reply@... for marketing emails defeats the purpose of engaging with people aka potential customers, doesn't it?

[Tadia_Charles]

This is a very timely discussion for me as I was just about to ask if anyone had alternatives to Drift Email. We are exceeding our monthly replies and increasing the limit is proving to be very expensive. I understand that Drift Email may be the best, but do you know of any other similar tools?

Thanks,

Tadia

[emilyghenson]

Hi Farslan,

I agree with Michael's recommendation to get Drift Email embedded in your tech stack as a long-term solution for managing email replies. In the short term, I recommend shortening the list of reply to email addresses used in your instance. Lock those down and do an audit of where rogue reply to addresses are in use. You mentioned you are in the middle of a migration from an old instance to a new one. Do you have program templates in place for your campaigns? If you do, I highly recommend tokenizing the reply to email address in your program templates so that there is consistency across all emails sent outside of your new instance. Then, when it comes time to reference the new Drift email replies and use those addresses instead, it will be a simple fix of updating your program templates, and existing programs in place. 

As for your last question about GDPR compliance, I always recommend asking your legal team first before making any updates to using no-reply email addresses, but I think once you get Drift email, this point will be solved as well.

I hope this helps!

Emily Henson
Campaign Operations at Etumos

[SanfordWhiteman]

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My company is currently migrating from an old Marketo instance to a new one. One of the issues that we came across while setting up SPF/DKIM and DMARC is that we have certain "reply to" addresses

SPF is simply irrelevant for Reply-To addresses. Don’t understand what issue could be here?

DKIM is also irrelevant for Reply-To addresses, but if your From address happens to be the same as the Reply-To then it is implicitly relevant.

I hope you can explain what you mean about SPF/DKIM/DMARC and the Reply-To header because it’s sounding like a different topic.