How do you make your email deliverability unstoppable?

[Anonymous]

Are you a deliverability magician?  Do you have the Midas touch to ensuring your emails reach their target audience?  Are you unstoppable?  Share your secret to success here!

[Anonymous]

There is a webinar that might help you: 7 Plays to Make Your Email Deliverability Unstoppable

This section in DOCS is also userful: Deliverability - Marketo Docs - Product Docs

[Andrew_Turley]

Yes! this is a major issue for us too. response from Marketo has been a bit frustrating to be honest. We got the "your deliverability is 97%+ etc" feedback, which is less than helpful.

We see consistent blocking due to either IP block or blacklist subscription by recipient orgs, and we know from feedback from actual customers of ours that they receive none of our Marketo generated communications at all.

We maintain good data, and we can send to them from our domain, but anything through Marketo is blocked.

[Anonymous]

Sorry to hear about your troubles...but glad to know we aren't alone.

[Anonymous]

We are having a similar issue. Deliverability is in the 9x% range consistently, but our open/click rates are incredibly low. We work primarily in the life sciences space, so I wonder (like other folks have mentioned) if our emails are getting delivered - but not necessarily to the end recipient's inbox.

We've tested different email formats (text v. HTML, no image vs. hero image, CTA buttons v. text links, etc.) and aren't noticing a huge difference either way you shake it. I've also started narrowing our Smart Lists even more by restricting any bounced addresses, blocks, low activity, and so on. Still no luck. We perform fairly regular review of our database (at least quarterly) to get rid of old leads and dud emails. At this point I figure it must be a domain issue.

Any tips from folks out there?

[Anonymous]

+1 here. This is a major problem for the B2B space and there's simply no good solution out there.. yet.

It may be a signal though that we as marketers need to rethink what it means to track performance and measure engagement. I think it's only going to get more difficult in the coming years. 😕

[Anonymous]

Keeping up with best practices, good lead hygiene and retiring leads that are unmarketable are the ways that we keep our rates up high!

[Melanie_Chapman]

Even though it's a pain in the heinie, we keep up with OOO auto-replies to mark dead emails invalid. We also check the database once a common week for common spam traps and use a breakup email reactivation campaign.

[Amanda_Thomas6]

Cleaning out bad emails! Sirius Decisions has a great list of bad emails you can filter out of your email send list. This will improve your open/click rate and will reduce your likelihood of getting marked as spam.

Also, implementing a break up email is a great way to stop emailing the dead leads. Michael Madden & Stacey Thornberry cover it in this session: https://events.marketo.com/summit/2017/sessions/they-love-me-they-love-me-not-create-an-email-databa...

[Chris_Saporito]

We're in a very similar situation as Dan. Currently we are getting delivery rates of around 97% for prospect emails, which is more than a double digit improvement over the past 12-15 months. But we get a TON of false positives for opens and clicks, I would love to see something on Marketo's end to combat those.

[Amanda_Thomas6]

To combat fake clicks, we implement a filter of clicked in email and visited web page when reporting clicks. This gets rid of all the anti-spam software clicks. More suggestions are here.

[Anonymous]

While this is helpful, it's still not a great fix for the false click issue.

We found that so many people run adblockers that if we just trigger off visits web page, we are missing lots of folks who actually did engage but will never load Munchkin tracking. And the number running adblockers will probably continue to increase.

The visits web page filter ends up counteracting the real value of click tracking for us anyway. In a world without email scanners, click tracking seems the most accurate way to measure engagement.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Hi Amanda - we tried this in our instance last year (as part of the thread you referenced) and found that often times, the "visits web page" filter will disqualify the leads from running through the campaign due to the delay of the VWP activity to appear - sometimes as much as 5-10 minutes after the actual activity occurred.  Can you post a screenshot of the smart list in your smart campaign?  Ours looked like this - but we had to remove it due to legitimate activity not qualifying:

[Dan_Stevens_]

I suppose one way to combat this is to remove the VWP filter and turn that into a choice as part of the "Change Program Status" flow (along with a 15 minute wait step):

Keep in mind, though, this "choice" will qualify the person if the visited the page at any previous time - not just as part of this email send.

[Amanda_Thomas6]

Yes, that's exactly what we do.

[Dan_Stevens_]

And like Chris, we're getting 9x% deliverability rates as well.  But they're not being delivered to the recipient, but rather to some central quarantine folder/area.  So the end-user doesn't even have an opportunity to check their junk folder.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Yes, please tell us!  Even when adopting email best practices (explicit opt-in, no purchased lists, highly targeted/personalized/relevant emails, proper setup of authentication (SPF/DKIM/DMARC/Branded Envelope), it still can be very challenging to make it into the user's inbox - especially in B2B.  We're finding more and more of our recipients' email servers are either blocking our emails (since they can see that it ultimately is sent from a marketing platform like Marketo) or much of the activity are false positives, making it appear that the emails are delivered/opened/clicked - when in fact, it's a spam filter that's doing this.  For large global organizations like ours, it's not realistic to ask every client's IT team to whitelist a range of IP addresses. 

[Andrew_Turley]

Dan, I totally agree with this point - For large global organizations like ours, it's not realistic to ask every client's IT team to whitelist a range of IP addresses.

This is something that we simply cannot do. We can't expect other large orgs with critical IT infrastructure to trust a RANGE OF IPs that we don't even control ourselves, to allow us to send them email...

[SanfordWhiteman]

Ask them to whitelist based on DKIM signature, which is not shared, nor tied to IP.

If they're already blacklisting Marketo's IP subnets they won't switch to whitelisting by IP, certainly.

But still -- you're using a marketing automation platform. If an org wants to stop non-essential email, it's a great start to block Marketo, however frustrating it is for us.

[Andrew_Turley]

Hi Sanford, while it's still a stretch to try and get a change made at the client mail server point, I'm willing to try anything! WOur DKIM is configured and verified, but how/what exactly would we share with a customer's IT/admin to have them whitelist us? Any advice on the process? thanks.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Ask them to whitelist DKIM-signed email From: your domain with the selector "m1" (m1._domainkey.example.com).