Is it standard practice to configure Marketo to the main domain of your website?

[Shannon_Kelly1]

When setting up our Marketo account a few months ago, we tied it to our main website and corporate domain.

We had some worries about our marketing program sending emails from our regular corporate domain, rather than a secondary domain. (For example, a secondary domain like "@mycompany-mail.com" rather than the regular corporate "@mycompany.com".)

Is it possible to readily set up Marketo to a secondary domain? I need to investigate all avenues to determine whether we might need to make changes.

If the Marketo account isn't sending from the main corporate domain, would that affect the ability to track website activity? For instance, could website activity from "@mycompany.com" be associated with emails that came from "@mycompany-mail.com" in the same Marketo account?

[Edward_Unthank_ · Accepted solution]

From a technical perspective, there's no challenge in sending emails from @not-companyA.com if your domain is actually @companyA.com, so long as you own @not-companyA.com and can set up SPF and DKIM on them.

I've run into this issue before, and I think what you're trying to do makes sense—a better solution I've seen, though, is to set up your Marketo mass-emails to be coming from a subdomain of your main URL. The main problem with sending from @not-companyA.com is that it looks like spam/phishing. For example, if I were to receive an email from an address claiming to be Bank of America, but it was sent by an address with @marketo-bankofamerica.com, I would immediately report it as phishing. Same with any other company.

If you're sending from a subdomain of your main domain, you get the deliverability protection, as it's treated as a separate domain, while maintaining the branding power. You can set up SPF and DKIM on subdomains as well. Just make sure your "reply to" goes to an email address that someone actually watches, such as your main domain.

Regarding domain tracking ability when sent from another email domain, there is no negative impact because these are two siloed functionalities within Marketo. There are three moving siloes that are relevant here:

• Email domain you're "sending from" in Marketo—you could make this anything you want so long as it's set up with SPF and DKIM in Marketo (conversationally, you can also send it from any other domain, if you're okay doing that without SPF and DKIM in place).
• Email link branding and shortening—this tracks clicks and opens based on people hitting these links. Each lead/contact gets a different unique URL that tags them with a cookie upon clicking. You can see what these are when you send an email to yourself and hover over the link. Because this is a redirecting link sitting in the middle, tracking clicks work by people hitting these redirecting links. Regardless of whether these point to google.com or to your companyA.com, they'll track link clicks.
• Munchkin tracking on your site—this is the JS snippet on your site which watches for web page visits. This happens independently, so in the same way that you got a visit from a web referral of linkedin.com, you can see you got a referral from your email link branding.

Edward Unthank | Founder, Etumos

[Grégoire_Miche2]

To complement Edward's comprehensive coverage of the topic, using a "@not-companyA.com" domain to sent the emails will slightly reduce your deliverability though, because the assets in your email will be from your company domain (since you will need Marketo landing pages to be in the same domain as your web site), and it is also likely that the sender and reply to email addresses will also be from your corporate domain.

These domain differences are more likely to identify you as a spammer.

So +1 for the subdomain approach. We have set it this way a few times and it worked well.

-Greg

[Shannon_Kelly1]

Thank you so much for your reply.

To make sure I understand:

@mail-mycompany.com is a separate domain, while @mail.mycompany.com is a subdomain

Is that correct?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Shannon,

Yes, this is correct.

-Greg

[Shannon_Kelly1]

Thank you, Greg -- very helpful!

[Anonymous]

I assume that there *would* be significant issues if we used a different domain than our main domain for landing pages?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Christine,

For a start, different domains do not share cookies. As a result, you would not be able to simply track a lead navigating from on domain to another. There are some workaround, though, but they would involve some custom developments.

-Greg

[Geoff_Krajeski1]

Another consideration you should take into account is that there is a coming third authentication method, DMARC​, as was mentioned in the sessions about email deliverability at the MKTGnation Summit 2016.