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!

[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).

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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: