Send emails from Marketo with our own email servers

[Anonymous]

It seems that a large majority of our emails are getting blocked by the recipient's email server.

To resolve this, we would like to use our own Gmail servers instead of sending emails through Marketo.

Has anyone done this before?

[James_Leedom1]

Hey Lucy. As I understand it, Marketo has a dedicated IP address feature that puts you on your own domain. It costs money and you also have to have a pretty high volume database to qualify for it. You can chat with your Account Manager about that process.

We were having the same issue with being blacklisted by some actual clients of ours because of the shared IP address through Marketo. That's why we made the switch.

[Katja_Keesom]

That is indeed true and also takes quite a bit of effort to warm that dedicated IP address up. If you don't have the volume or budget to look into dedicated IP, there is an intermediate solution you could discuss with Marketo Support, called Trusted IP. This is where you still share your IP address, but with a very limited and closely monitored group of Marketo customers and in my experience it does improve deliverability quite well.

[SanfordWhiteman]

You can have Marketo relay mail through your own mail servers. It's considered an add-on and, as I understand it, quite costly.

You would not want to (nor would you likely be allowed to) use Gmail as that relay. It's expected that you route through servers you completely control (and whose presence on blacklists you *also* control).

Outside of the official support, I've engineered a solution to send only selected mail via a relay, for example to known customer domains. Such a project is not for the faint of heart.

[wbarillasGT2]

Hi Sanford, 

I know that post is old, but I need connect Marketo with Proof point, I understand that I need the Add-on Relay for that, but is there another form, I don’t know maybe send something by webhooks?

[SanfordWhiteman]

No, you can’t send Marketo emails (i.e. actual email assets using email templates) using a webhook.

You can send {{lead.tokens}}, {{company.tokens}}, and {{my.tokens}} via webhook. A custom service can turn that data into an email and send it via any server you want.

But there’s no reason to be paying for Marketo if you have to go that route. It doesn’t make sense to completely avoid email assets if you’re using Marketo, even though the platform has other functions.