B2B Email Deliverability at Marketo

Deliverability — A Shared Responsibility between Provider & Sender

Deliverability is an important topic for anyone that wants to communicate over email. Many marketers find the topic scary and confusing since it is so important and can be affected by so many factors. For B2B marketing professionals, email deliverability can be even more confusing because of the unique challenges presented by sending to corporate domains. Fortunately, Marketo has a team of email deliverability specialists who are experts in B2B email deliverability, and we’re focused on helping to ensure your permission-based emails reach your prospect’s inboxes.

Deliverability — A Shared Responsibility between Provider & Sender

With all the issues involved with deliverability, the best way to success is for email provider and sender to work together. Deliverability is a shared responsibility between email provider and sender – between Marketo and you, our customer.

Marketo – Provider of Advanced Email Systems

As your email provider, Marketo is responsible for providing you with modern email technology compliant with today's current requirements. We are also responsible for optimizing the technology back-end of our delivery platform for reduced friction with corporate filtering systems. Additionally, Marketo is responsible for relationships with receivers including issue resolution, Feedback Loops and whitelisting. Furthermore, Marketo provides the segmentation and targeting capabilities to enable our customers to accomplish the main deliverability requirement – sending the right message to the right person at the right time.

The Sender’s Responsibility

Of course, senders (that’s you) directly affect their own email deliverability. Senders with long-term deliverability keep clean lists, spend the time to understand their audience and create carefully targeted messages that are relevant to subscribers.

As the sender, Marketo’s customers are responsible for what they send and who they send it to. Corporate email systems watch to see how its users respond and interact with your email. You are then given a score based on how your subscribers interacted with your email campaigns. If your subscribers did a lot of opening, clicking, forwarding, saving or printing of your messages, then you will have a good sender reputation. If your subscribers did not interact with your message or, worse yet, marked your messages as junk you’ll have a poor sender reputation.

Put simply, if you send relevant messages to an opt-in list, you will build a reputation for good email deliverability; if you send irrelevant messages or do not establish permission, you will hurt your reputation and deliverability. This means there is simply no eliminating the sender from the deliverability picture.

Marketo Is The B2B Email Deliverability Expert

Today’s businesses use a variety of email systems that have different optimization requirements. This means that a B2B sender has to implement a wide range of different technical requirements to be able to deliver to the many systems used in the business community. These technical requirements are often more stringent than the requirements of B2C senders.

Marketo’s technology stack and technology team work behind the scenes to meet the specific requirements of B2B email marketing so that our customers can focus on their segmentation and messaging.

Email Monitoring

Marketo’s deliverability back-end includes monitoring programs designed for B2B senders. Corporate email systems use a wide-range of bounce codes and connection settings requirements that are different from one corporate system to the next. This means there more bounce codes and connection optimizations that a B2B sender has to make compared to the typical B2C sender. Marketo’s email platform is designed for the B2B world and we’re constantly updating our systems with what we see happening at corporate receiving systems.

IP Options for Customers

Marketo has a range of IP options available to our customers. Customers that send enough volume to maintain a positive reputation on a dedicated IP are given dedicated IPs. These customers have full control over their sender reputation and their deliverability. Customers with lower volumes cannot always move to a dedicated IP since many sender reputation systems have minimum volume requirements for assigning reputations and IPs without reputation are heavily throttled. For these lower volume customers, Marketo offers a shared IP range that our constantly monitored and actively managed by our deliverability team. For low volume customers that have exhibited top-notch best practices, Marketo has a Trusted shared IP range that are registered with major ISPs.

B2B Feedback Loops and Whitelistings

Marketo is registered with all the major ISP’s to receive alerts whenever your recipients report campaigns as junk or spam. Additionally, Marketo has Feedback Loops (FBLs) registered with major corporate email outsource providers like Rackspace and Tucows. We’ll instantly unsubscribe any complaint reports in order to keep our senders from being blocked in the future. ,/p>

While most ISPs have transitioned to Feedback Loops, some ISPs combine FBLs with whitelisting programs. Marketo is whitelisted at ISP whitelisting programs. While whitelisted senders still have to maintain good sender reputations, often whitelisted senders will be given priority in processing before non-whitelisted senders.

Team of B2B Email Deliverability Specialists

Marketo has a dedicated team of deliverability professionals that live and breathe B2B. These deliverability experts maintain Marketo’s network range and interface with ISPs and anti-spam systems. Additionally, Marketo’s deliverability team is available to customers that would like advice and guidance on how to improve their email campaigns.

Receiver and ISP Relations

Sometimes good messages are caught in spam filters. This is known as a false-positive. When false positives occur, resolution can require reaching out and escalating issues to the anti-spam vendors or receiving ISPs. Marketo’s deliverability team maintains extensive contacts with receivers and can take action if Marketo customers are experiencing false positives.

Marketo Represents the B2B Sender Community in Industry Organizations

Email and privacy associations such as the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) and the Online Trust Alliance (OTA) are leading forums where the email community codifies its requirements for senders. Marketo is an active participant in these organizations. It is our mission to represent the B2B community at the organizations so that our customer’s voice is heard.

Authentication Protocol Deployment

Businesses of all size are constant victims of forgeries, spoofing and phishing attempts. This can impact a legitimate senders when their reputations are hit by forgeries. To protect themselves from these types of attacks, businesses deploy authentication protocols. Authentication protocols help email receivers separate legitimate messages from spam and malware. When a sender deploys the authentication protocols a receiver uses it is easier for that receiver to make its delivery decision and less false positive filtering occurs. Business email systems have implemented different authentication protocols. Marketo implements and optimizes all major email authentication protocols that B2B senders need including DKIM (DomainKey Identified Mail, SPF (Sender Protection Framework) and SenderID.

Advanced Bounce Handling

Over the past two decades, ISP and email receiving systems have continued to diverge further and further from email RFC standards by starting to use a high number of custom bounce codes. Modern email systems need to know what all these different new bounce codes mean so they can properly process soft and hard bounces while giving B2B senders the visibility they need to manage their email campaigns. Marketo’s email backend is continuously updated with the latest bounce codes and proper processing commands.

DNS and Email Routing Efficiency

Virtually all businesses today are under constant attack from spam and malware messaging. Legitimate messages make up only a small percentage of the total volume of email hitting corporate networks. This means that corporate email receivers have to be efficient in their DNS lookups to conserve resources and not waste them on spam or malware. Marketo’s email envelopes are highly optimized to reduce processing friction with business email systems.

Real-time Connection Throughput Optimization

The underlying specifics of a corporation’s email system load can require specific connection concurrency and messages per connection settings. This means that different businesses’ email systems like to be talked to in particular ways at different times. Marketo’s delivery systems are constantly watching its email queues and setting real-time connection throughput optimizations. Additionally, the Marketo deliverability team is alerted when queues build up or deliverability issues occur.