Marketing Cloud: Maximize Your Email Deliverability with Sender Authentication Package
Most companies sending emails genuinely underestimate how much deliverability can impact their organization. A beautiful, well-constructed, and highly effective email can be in the junk folder of someone who subscribed and wished to convert to your company. That’s a terrible situation to be in.
Even worse, you may not realize that your emails are being routed to junk unless you use an inbox monitoring tool. I recommend getting a deliverability monitoring platform that monitors your inbox placement. These platforms accomplish this by providing a seed list, monitoring those inboxes, and reporting whether your email made it to each major ISP.
Any number of issues can impact your email reputation, but most of it comes down to five issues:
- Configuration: Are your domain and email server configured so ISPs can authenticate that the emails are coming from your company?
- Subscriber Health: are your email addresses updated, valid, and opted into your email? If not, the chances of being reported as SPAM are significantly higher
- Reputation: Is the sending IP known for sending SPAM via junk reports? Has it been blacklisted before?
- Volume: Are you sending a large volume of emails? Bulk email sends trigger stricter monitoring of senders.
- Content: Do you have red flags with the terminology used in your subject line or content? Are you sending bulk emails with bad URLs or domains that have been flagged for malware, or are you lacking an unsubscribe link in your emails?
Marketing Cloud’s Sender Authentication Package
If you send more than 250,000 emails per month and are a Salesforce Marketing Cloud client, you should invest in their Sender Authentication package, which is a robust configuration to ensure you maximize the deliverability of those messages to the inbox. The Sender Authentication Package offers the following:
- Private Domain: This product enables you to configure a domain to send emails. This domain acts as the From address for your email sends. Salesforce Marketing Cloud authenticates the email you send using SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc.
- Dedicated IP Address: This product assigns a unique IP address to your account so that your reputation is yours. All email messages from your account via Marketing Cloud use this IP address. This IP address represents most of your sending reputation.
- Reply Mail Management: This product controls the replies you receive from your subscribers. You can assign filters for out-of-office messages and manual unsubscribe requests.
Additionally, the package comes with Account Branding, where Marketing Cloud brands your account with your chosen authenticated domain. This product modifies link and image wrapping and removes all references to Marketing Cloud in favor of your authenticated domain.
Sender Authentication Package Video
Private Domain
Your private domain enables ISPs to authenticate and effectively communicate issues with your subscribers through feedback loops. Within the Sender Authentication Package, you’ll have to set up your DNS to enable quite a few subdomains for sending and response and authentication keys. With subdomain delegation, also called zone delegation, you only transfer part of your existing domain to Marketing Cloud as part of your authenticated domain configuration. Marketing Cloud only uses the specified subdomain for appropriate activities.
| Subdomain (localpart) | Fully Qualified Domain Name | DNS Record Type | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| @ | sample.domain.com | MX | Allows email sends using Marketing Cloud servers |
| bounce | bounce.sample.domain.com | MX | Tracks email sends and bounces |
| reply | reply.sample.example.com | MX | Allows Reply Mail Management to handle filters and forwards replies to specific addresses |
| leave | leave.sample.domain.com | MX | Allows subscribers to unsubscribe |
| image | image.sample.domain.com | CNAME | Points to Marketing Cloud image servers |
| view | view.sample.domain.com | CNAME | Points to Marketing Cloud View As a Web Page servers |
| click | click.sample.domain.com | CNAME | Points to Marketing Cloud Click URL for tracking click-throughs |
| pages | pages.sample.domain.com | CNAME | Points to Marketing Cloud microsite and landing page servers. |
| cloud | cloud.sample.domain.com | CNAME | Points to Marketing Cloud’s cloud page servers. |
| mta | mta.sample.domain.com | A | Points to your dedicated IP Address |
| domain._domainkey | domain._domainkey. sample.domain.com | TXT | Authenticates DKIM and DK Selector |
| @ | sample.domain.com | TXT | SPF1 – SPF status authorizes bounce host in mfrom identity |
| bounce | bounce.sample.domain.com | TXT | SPF1 for bounce host |
| reply | reply.sample.domain.com | TXT | SPF1 for reply host |
Wildcard Certificate
You’ll want to get a wildcard SSL certificate for your domain for Marketing Cloud to utilize as well. Accounts configured with SAP that do not use an SSL certificate show a secure Marketing Cloud domain on the properties of images in Content Builder. When you add the image to an email, the URL in the editor shows your custom domain setup with SAP. The copy link on the image properties page copies the custom domain for use in emails, landing pages, and browsers.
IP Address Warming
The sending IP addresses must be warmed up once the Sender Authentication Package is fully configured. This is known as IP Warming. This is because the ISPs have no reputation associated with your IP address. If you start sending everything through the new configuration, there’s a high risk of getting blocked. Most connections from new IP addresses are attempts to deliver unsolicited spam or other unwanted mail, so ISPs are suspicious of a new IP address sending mail.
The largest ISPs and webmail providers recommend that you build up a sending reputation on any new IP address by slowly and methodically sending in small volumes, then gradually increasing your volume of desirable mail to their users. This sending reputation is referred to as the warming or ramping up of your new IP address.
The goal is to build up approximately 30 days of desirable sending history and data so that ISPs know the mail from your new IP address. The ramp-up period can take longer than 30 days for some senders and a shorter time for others. Factors such as your overall list size, list quality, and subscriber engagement can influence the time it takes for your IP address to be fully ramped up.
Marketing Cloud recommends that you focus on sending to your most active and engaged subscribers during this critical period since it can be the initial basis for the ISPs to determine your sender IP addresses sending reputation. Ramp-up involves sending a limited number of messages per IP per day, so adjusting your current sending practices may be necessary as part of the process.
