Marketo Email Deliverability

June 23, 2016 • Fab Capodicasa

After having composed a great email for your prospects, there is one thing you should never overlook – Marketo email deliverability. You have to make sure your messages reach their destination.

If you’ve ever gotten an email that says it’s from your bank, PayPal or a company you do business with, but it’s really from someone else, then you’ve seen first-hand how easy it is to forge emails.

Because Marketo sends emails on behalf of your company, without the right setup these emails will be flagged as ‘forged’ and send straight to the junk folder.

There are two ways to ‘check’ emails. These authentication methods are SPF and DKIM.

How does DKIM/SPF work?

Imagine you get a letter from your bank asking you to donate money to a charity. You suspect it’s a forgery, so you call your bank on the phone and check if they really did send you the letter. If the bank tells you they didn’t send anything, it will go straight into the trash.

That phone call is how SPF and DKIM work. The email host (e.g. Gmail or Yahoo) will ‘call’ your company’s website (e.g. hooshmarketing.com.au) and ask:

‘Is Marketo allowed to send emails on your behalf?’

If you don’t have DKIM & SPF setup correctly, then your website will always answer ‘NO!’, and that email will be sent to the junk folder.

These records should have been setup by whoever installed your Marketo. However, it is often the case that these records have either been corrupted, accidentally deleted or were never setup correctly in the first place.

Is my DKIM/SPF setup correctly for Marketo?

Normally, you would need your network administrator to check your DNS records, unless you are particularly IT savvy. If you choose this path, a detailed technical document can be found on the Marketo site. Alternatively, you can open a case with Marketo support.

However, the easiest way by far is to a use an online-checker tool, which performs the necessary checks and requires no technical knowledge. We recommend Marketo Health-checker.

Hopefully, you now have a better understanding of how important DKIM and SPF are to your email deliverability. Do you know of any other online-checker tools for Marketo? If so, drop us a line we can include them in this article.

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