Building Your Marketo Toolbox: How to Boost Your Email Deliverability?
By: Valerie Mayer
Tags: Email Marketing, Marketing Automation Tool, Marketing Automation, Marketing, Marketo

For anyone starting in Marketo, it can be an overwhelming journey. When lockdown began in March of 2020, I shifted roles from Events Manager to Marketing Automation Specialist with little knowledge of Marketo, which had many challenges. Having now over nine months of experience, I wanted to share some of the things I wish I knew at the start to help anyone new to marketing automation with Marketo. In this first blog, I will explore some of the key elements I looked at on our team to help boost our deliverability and some of the mistakes I learnt along the way that I can share to help others.

Scenario: Does this sound familiar to you?

You approved your email to go out next Tuesday before logging off for the weekend. You looked through your mailing list to make sure everything was perfect and clicked the approve program button. Fast forward to Wednesday morning, you log in to Marketo to look at the performance of your email and see your email deliverability percentage at 85%. This result can be discouraging for anyone in email marketing. Before getting too discouraged, here are five steps you can take to increase your deliverability percentage to a minimum of 98%.

Check Your Sender Policy Framework (SPF)/DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) Set up

Our Marketo Consultant Daniel Yan described this best: “would you go out to the bar for a drink without a piece of ID and question why the bartender turned you away because you didn’t have one?” This analogy is what your SPF/DKIM does for your email deliverability. In simple terms, it’s an agreement between your Marketo instance and the receiving email server that determines if the email is legitimate. If this is not set up properly, a majority of your emails are going to land in the spam folder or they will hard bounce which is an unsatisfactory result for any Email Marketer. If you want to know more about this, here is a link to some Marketo documentation that talks about SPF/DKIM.

Note, this step is only for those who have Admin access to Marketo. However, if you’re noticing deliverability issues, I would ask your Admin to double-check these are verified.

How can I identify if there is an issue with SPF/DKIM? We realized early on that this step wasn’t completed properly because all test emails sent to a Gmail account were landing in the spam folder.

Clean Your Database: The Heavy Lifting Work is Worth the Time

Data integrity is one of the pivotal parts to increasing your deliverability, but it can be incredibly time-consuming. Using automation can make this easier on you and your team. You can create multiple operational programs that take care of the heavy lifting so that you don’t have to in the future. You will have to make an audit of your current database to identify some of the problems within the contacts you have and clean it out manually, but I promise it’s worth the time (Smart Lists in this case will be your best friend).

Here are some examples of easy programs you can create to automate your data cleanse:

A program that deletes emails that bounce (email invalid) that aren’t part of the company’s CRM

A Program to filter out your Soft Bounces and mark them as email invalid. After three soft bounces within 30 days, this usually means the person has left the company.

Another quick tip is to work with your sales operations team to make sure you agree on what can or cannot be deleted from your CRM system.

Fun fact: when you delete unsubscribed emails from your database, Marketo will remember who unsubscribed even after being deleted. It’s a good idea to delete people from your Marketo database that have unsubscribed because Marketo charges you based on your database size. Again, double-check with your sales operations to understand what the best practices are for contacts who are in your CRM to avoid possible duplicates in the future.

Exclude Blocked Emails from Your Email Send

If you do not remove your blocked emails from your Smart List when building the program, this will affect your deliverability. Marketo will not send these people the email but will include it in your total of emails sent. Below is an example of what you should see in your control panel before approving your email programs, 0 blocked contacts.

Control Panel with 0 Blocked Contacts

A simple solution to avoid using blocked emails is to create a Smart List in your database that helps you filter out the blocked contacts from your email sends. Here is an example of what to include in your Smart List. If you have master program templates that you clone every time you create a new email sent, you can include this Smart List as a filter.

What to include in your Emailable Database Smart List

The image above includes the minimum criteria to include. If you have all your operational programs set-up to clean your data, these 5 filters should be enough. However, you can include anything that makes sense for your company to exclude from email sends (i.e. a list of competitors to block, a list of companies that blacklisted your IP, or more).

Implement a Verification Tool Like ZeroBounce or NeverBounce

One thing that has helped my team a lot to improve deliverability was implementing a verification tool like ZeroBounce or NeverBounce. We chose ZeroBounce simply because of time zones. We have a team in Europe, and if they required any support, NeverBounce’s support hours didn’t align with their timezone. Look at the pros and cons of each company to make your decision on which one would be the best fit for your team’s needs.

How to use this? If you are an admin, there is a simple API integration that you set up via your webhooks in the Marketo admin section. These two companies have documentation on how to connect the API. Make sure afterwards to set up an operational program that calls on the webhook to update the person’s status in your database. Here is a simple example of the program below:

What to include in your Smart List tab for your Operational Program

What to include in your Flow tab for your Operational Program

In the program above, you can use additional filters to exclude email domains from people in your company, competitors, etc. The main reason to do this is to make sure you aren’t using an email validation credit if you don’t have to.

Tip: Webhooks can only be called in trigger campaigns (not batch campaigns). Therefore, if you wish to run your entire database through an email verification tool, the best way to do so is to create a list within your database and an operational program where the trigger is “added to the list”. Once you activate this campaign and add everyone in your database to that list, it will call on the webhook and verify all the emails.

Reach Out to Your Customer Success Team at Marketo

If after all of this your team is still struggling with deliverability, I would recommend reaching out to your customer success representative to set up an initial meeting with their deliverability team. Marketo has some tools (i.e. 250ok) that you can add to your instance to make it easier for you and your team to see where the problems are for your particular instance. Before purchasing any other add-on from Marketo, make sure you understand where the problem is before seeking their professional services; these are quite costly and you want to make sure you aren’t wasting resources.

I hope these simple steps will help your team improve deliverability, but keep in mind deliverability can be a complex and ongoing challenge. For example, if your IP has been blacklisted these recommendations may not apply as you will need to build up your sender reputation. However, I believe that for beginners, this is the first tool to add to your toolbox. Just think about it like this: if you create the best email content, but the content is not reaching the intended inboxes, your content is useless.

Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn for any questions or to let me know if you have any recommendations on topics I could explore to help you in your journey.

Keep learning and growing.

Your Marketo Helper (Valérie)