You say you’re not a spammer? You send legitimate marketing communications? Prove it.
There are three major authentication protocols: DKIM, DomainKey, and SPF. These effectively introduce you to the recipient’s mail server, and greatly improve your chances of inbox success. If you’re using a service provider for your email, these may already be setup for you—but don’t assume. Find out if one of them is in use, and ask whether the other two are. There are only benefits to utilizing all three protocols. Without a partner between you and the ISP, you’ll need to enable these technologies on your own. Regardless, you’ll want to know the status of your DNS records, and which ones are setup, because this is where the authentication protocols live. You’ll also want to test these setups.
The domain and any IP addresses your emails originate from can be flagged and filtered against, so know what those are. Consider whitelisting and certainly keep an eye out for blacklisting. Note that your focus will differ here, depending on whether your communications will be more B2B or B2C. Use these methods to monitor your reputation, especially if you’ve automated part or all of your communications.
Marketing Automation may sound impersonal, but it isn’t. Then again, if your goal is to introduce a layer of technology between you and your prospects and customers, kick your feet up, and watch the cash roll in, you’re in the wrong business. When your conversions become overtly robotic, your company might as well be an ATM. Same time of day, same day of week, same message, same purpose; ATM to cuckoo clock. Your customers won’t think twice about disregarding or marking spam on attempts like this, so all that authentication work you did won’t count for much.
Net-Results uses technology to increase efficiency, so you can know when to interact with your customers and why, because it’s not a war to see who can send the most email. Nor is it a war to see who can reach the inbox, as not even that guarantees a click, open, or continued subscription. Next time, we’ll talk about beyond the technology, where it’s important to be relevant and consistent, and what this means to automation.

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Lucy