Is anyone using Marketo to send critical client communications like a system outage?

[Anonymous]

We are new to Marketo and are just piloting our Marketing programs.  A question was raised about using Marketo to send client communications for system outages.  Since we haven't tested bulk sends yet, I don't have any experience yet on speed, email limits and issues with emails being queued.   Any feedback would be appreciated.

[Darrell_Alfons2]

I've used it with a SAAS platform to communicate product updates, maintenance, and things like that, luckily our system hasn't gone down so...

But overall yes, you can use operational emails to do that, which bypass unsubscribe.

You may come across some deliverability issues if you haven't been keeping your lists clean, which then means a few clients will have to whitelist you to ensure they are receiving messages.

[Darrell_Alfons2]

Oh and Karen you might want to move this to Products discussion.

[SanfordWhiteman]

I would not advise this at all. The answer is in your question: you should not use a multitenant marketing platform for criitical email.

[Anonymous]

Sanford - do you know what larger enterprises are using for a platform to deliver these kinds of communications?

[SanfordWhiteman]

On the generic SMTP side: MailGun, Mandrill, and -- my preference --  self-hosted SMTP servers. Something like SMTP2GO is also a pretty good look because here's where you want a metered (read: expensive) service, since that discourages spammers.

For critical status updates in particular (not just via email but other forms of subscription like SMS): StatusPage.  Advantage of a service like SP is that while it's multitenant SaaS, it's specifically for operational communication. No one's going to pollute the SP IP range by sending marketing emails. And asking for StatusPage to be whitelisted is way more reasonable than expecting people to whitelist an MA platform!