From my understanding, we're adding DKIM/SPF records to the DNS server for Marketo's domains
No, we wouldn’t phrase it that way! They’re not “Marketo’s domains”. Marketo’s domains are marketo.com, mktoweb.com, mkto-nnnn.com, mktoresp.com, munchkin.net, and so on.
It’s very confusing to refer to the corporate domains/subdomains that you’ve allocated for marketing purposes as Marketo’s domains. They’re your marketing domains: the click tracking/branding domain, the LP/asset domain, the From: domain, and (you don’t have this with your subscription) the envelope sender domain.
This will authorize Marketo to send emails on behalf of the company. Since emails are addressed from the company's domain but sent from IP addresses assigned to Marketo's domains, this is the reason why we need to include this entry in the company's DNS server. (Please let me know if I have misunderstood the concept.)
Not really. The IP addresses make no difference because you don’t have a branded envelope sender.
(Also, IP addresses aren’t “assigned to” a primary domain for SMTP. An unlimited number of domains can allow an IP address to use their domain in MAIL FROM. That’s not a characteristic of the IP address, but a characteristic of each domain’s SPF record. Looking up the IP address cannot tell you the domains. Anyway, SPF is completely irrelevant to your setup which is why you do not need to alter the SPF record for any of your marketing domains.)
If you have more questions about this it might be good to get your IT team on the phone with someone knowledgeable in this area.
Does this mean that any issues with Marketo's email sending practices could directly affect the organization's reputation and potentially result in emails being marked as spam? Would a poor sending reputation for Marketo have a negative impact on the company's domain reputation and deliverability?
Of course, shared risk comes with a shared service.
But unless you’re sending spam, you don’t need to worry much about your domain reputation being damaged outside of Marketo. Your Marketo deliverability can be affected by Marketo’s reputation at a given point in time, but — again, if you aren’t spamming people — it’s not going to be contagious and hurt deliverability from your company’s mail server.
Are Marketo email campaigns comply with all email regulations such as CAN-SPAM, GDPR ?
You are responsible for complying with CAN-SPAM and GDPR. Marketo itself honors and persists Unsubscribe requests. But if, for example, you prohibit people from Unsubscribing (a violation in any country) Marketo cannot know this. Once the complaints come in, Marketo may suspend you from the platform, but it can’t know in advance that you’re sending to people you shouldn’t.
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