51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ

Transcript

Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. I’m going to give everyone a couple more minutes to join and we’ll get started in just a moment.

We still see a bunch of people joining us. I’m going to give it another couple of seconds and then we’ll get started.

All righty. Hello everyone. Welcome to Marketo and MOCAs. Today’s topic is deliverability. This is actually part two of our little deliverability series here. Yes there are still people joining us, but we’re going to go ahead and get started because we’ve got a lot to get to today. So let’s jump right in. So this is an ongoing webinar series. It’s designed and designated for interactive activities. So we encourage you to ask questions in the questions box in the GoToWebinar control panel throughout the presentation. You can type them in there. And we have a couple of people monitoring the Q&A pod today. And we’ve also set aside some extra time for Q&A today. So we’re going to do our best to answer as many of those questions as we can. So start asking those in the Q&A pod and we’ll get to as many as possible. I want to quickly mention a few housekeeping items before we get started. We will be recording this webinar to be viewed on demand and shared with other members of your team that might not be able to attend today. We’re going to leave some time at the end to answer questions. As I mentioned, feel free to ask them throughout the presentation. But if your question is not answered, please do follow up with your Success Account Manager for additional information. And at the end of the webinar, please complete a short survey that’s going to pop up on your screen. That information helps us to ensure that we’re meeting your expectations at these events. So going to dive into today’s agenda. First we’re going to introduce ourselves and then Sean will take us through today’s presentation and demo of all things deliverability. After presentation and demo, we’ll quickly chat about some upcoming events and then we’ll conclude with that extended session of Q&A. So start asking those questions. We had a lot coming in in part one of this, so I can’t wait to see what you guys have for us today. And I would like to quickly mention that in the control panel of GoToWebinar, you’ll see a handouts dropdown. In there, you’ll find a downloadable handout that we’ve created for you. There are some quick resources, including links to Marketo user groups, experience lead, different trainings and more. It’s a really awesome resource. So definitely download that, check it out. There’s a lot of super helpful information in there. So with that, I would like to introduce myself. My name is Lana Cohen and I am the Digital Events Manager for our Customer Success Strategy team here at 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ. I’ve been with 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ for a little over four years and spent about the last two and a half years organizing and hosting these events for our digital experience customers. So prior to my time on this team, I spent two years working with 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ’s Advertising Cloud customers, helping them to build and execute their advertising strategies. Before coming to 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ, I spent about 10 years at different advertising agencies around New York, but I am excited to be here now hosting events like this for you guys, our customers. So if you have any questions or comments about today’s event or any of our customer exclusive events, please do reach out to me. And now I’d like to pass things over to our special guest for today, Sean. So Sean, please go ahead, introduce yourself and kick us off. Thanks, Lana. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining. It’s a pleasure to be back speaking with you folks. As as Lana said, I am Sean Wirt, I’m the Manager of Marketo Deliverability Services here at 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ. I have a little over 20 years experience in the email deliverability space, kind of fell into it like everyone else in the email deliverability space. I was working at a ISP, a large ISP at the time. And I’ve since moved on to work for a couple of other email service provider and emails tools provider. So I’ve been around the space for a little bit. I’ve been at Marketo 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ for almost seven years now. So it’s been great being able to work with our Marketo customers and looking forward to presenting to you guys today and working with some of you in the future, if I have a chance. So let’s get into it. So just wanted to do a quick little recap of the first session that we had. So just in case you missed it, we went through the components of reputation. They’re major, there are five different components, but we really focused on data quality and engagement data quality being super, super important just to have a good quality database, keep things cleaned up. And the level of engagement that you have, the higher the level of engagement, the better your reputation is going to be. And ultimately, the better your overall deliverability is going to be. We then went through a demonstration of a couple of data quality programs that we have. Cynthia did a great demonstration of pulling in a program that we have that you can pull down from the Marketo program library, which is great for helping to keep that database clean, keep your engagement level high. And then finally, we went through the pros and cons of shared IP addresses versus dedicated IP addresses. One thing I neglected to mention last time with regards to data quality and engagement, our team of consultants, we do offer a data quality review. It’s a consulting engagement. You would work with your account management team to work with us to get that. If you want to purchase that sort of engagement, we go through all of your data, do a deep dive there to kind of give you some pointers on what we’re seeing there and ways that we recommend that you make some improvements there. So it was a great session. We had a number of great questions. So as Alana said, keep the questions coming in today and we’ll try to get to as many of those as possible. There’s also a, you can listen to that recording and we’ll have a link to that so you can go follow up and listen to that if you’d like. All right. So with regards to today, what I thought we would focus on is our tools. I think that we want to, we have a poll Alana, that we want to just kind of get a gauge for. So if you want to go ahead and start that, that’d be great. Yeah, definitely. So the poll should pop up on everyone’s screen. So we want to know of everyone on the line, do you have the deliverability tool in Marketo Engage? You do, either you don’t have it yet, but you want the tool, you want to know more about it, or you’re not even sure what we are talking about today. So hopefully we’ll clear that up as soon as this presentation ends. So we’ll give it another second to let everybody answer this. And then we will continue on. One more minute, if you haven’t answered, let us know. Alrighty, looks like we’ve got most of the responses in. I will pause the poll now. And let’s see. So it looks like about a third of the people on the line have the deliverability tool and the rest either don’t have it or are not really sure what it is. So back to you, Sean, to share more info. Great. And it’s not surprising that people aren’t sure. Believe it or not, I have quite a few clients who have it and they just weren’t aware. And so I think the next slide is going to help you find that answer. But what we wanted to do with the tools today, typically, if we sell the tool to a client, we do suggest that the account team sell some consulting hours with that product so we can assist you with getting it set up and show you how to use the tool, how to interpret the data. But there are some things that are out of the box ways that we use the tools. And so I wanted to bring that to your attention. For those that have the tools, you can certainly start to implement this. For those that don’t currently have it, could be a reason for you to consider purchasing this. I tell most of my clients, if they don’t have the tool set, I recommend that they at least consider it. It’s just there’s so much data in there and a good bit of it is a blind spot in your deliverability, especially with the use of the seed list. As an email service provider, we can only give you so much data. We can tell you whether or not an email was delivered, but beyond that, we can’t tell you what happened with it. So with the seed list, we try to fill that void by using this list of addresses. The full seed list is about 800 or 900 addresses. These are just addresses that are used or they’re owned by Validity, the company that provides the tool that I’ll be demonstrating for you today, a tool called Everest. They own all the mailboxes, so they have access to those mailboxes and they can go in and they can report on whether or not the mail was received. And if it was received, did it go to the inbox or did it go to the spam folder? So it’s that inbox versus spam folder piece that’s really a blind spot for you. And so the tool is great for that. So let’s start taking a look here. So when we asked if you have the tools or not, the one way to know if you have it or not is on your main dashboard there in Marketo, you’ll have this deliverability tools icon. And if you have that icon, it means the tools are provisioned in your instance. You simply just click that tool and then it’ll launch you out to the tools. So what we’re going to do today is this. What I wanted to show you is, and let me get out of here real quick. And pull up an instance here. So I’m going to pull up an instance and what we’re going to do is ultimately just to kind of tell you what we’re doing here, we’re going to get a we’re going to pull a list out of Marketo and then we’re going to upload it into a feature in the tool called the seed list optimizer. And then what it’s going to do is it’s going to give us a little more insight that’s going to be super helpful for those of you that have mainly a B2B audience, even if it’s not mostly B2B, even if there’s a portion of your audience that’s B2B, there’s a great feature in the tool that can help you to get more insight into what’s going on with your overall deliverability. So the goal here, the first step would be to pull a list in Marketo or pull a list from Marketo. This list can be whatever list you want. It could be your entire database. It could be a list of the largest list that you mail to. Maybe it’s a monthly newsletter or maybe it’s just a list that you’re super interested in. You pull that list in Marketo. So for example, I’m going to test instance right now. You can see here that I pulled the list, I pulled the leads. And then what I want to do is I want to just download that list. I will export it as a CSV and through the miracles of the internet, I already have a list. Oops, not that, oops, sorry, not the document, sorry. There we go. So we have a list here that’s been downloaded and then we don’t need all this data from this list. So what we want to do is we want to delete any field that’s not, except for this email address field. And then what we’re going to do, we can actually clean that up a little further. You can upload all of these addresses to the tool if you’d like, or you can pare this down and just remove everything before the at sign, which is what I typically like to do. So what I do here is I go here to the data, highlight that column. I do text to columns. I then do the delimiter. I change the delimiter to the at sign. That means that’s where it’s going to split each of the email addresses and then I finish it off. And then what I can do is I can delete the front part of the email address and then just save the domain. So what we want to do here is even though we don’t have the full address, we still want each instance of that domain residing in the database, right? So each one of these represents an individual user. So we don’t want to we don’t want to dedupe this list because again, we want each instance of that domain in the database to show up in this list. And then what we want to do is we want to save this as a text file. So I will just usually change this to a UTF unit code text and save it there. And then we’ll go down. And then once I’ve clicked that deliverability tile on the tools, it’s going to take me here to the main tools dashboard. Just for those of you who don’t have the tools or you haven’t seen it, there’s different options here. You can buy different options if you choose to purchase the tool. The basic set of the tool comes with the pre-send, the design and content. So that’s going to be akin to your litmus or your email and acid. This is a tool that you can use to load your content as you’re designing new content, as you’re designing new campaigns, new templates, and see how that content is going to render in various email clients, web browsers, mobile clients, all that. And then the other piece is inbox placement, which is in the in-flight pre-send. We call the design pre-send because, again, you’re typically using that tool before the live campaign goes out. And then the seed list is considered in-flight because, again, typically what you do here is you take this list of addresses and you send it, you attach it to your live campaign. So as you’re building that smart list for that campaign, you would go through the normal process of putting in the filters that’s going to target the audience that you want to target with that campaign. And then what you would do then is just add an additional filter, is member of whatever you name your seed list. And then when you launch that campaign, the seed list, the content goes out to the audience that you targeted, that live audience, and then it also goes out to the addresses and the seed list. And then the seed list tool goes in and starts to report on if and when the messages were received, what volumes, all that good stuff. So the inbox placement is where the feature resides that we want to take a look at here today. So when you click on inbox, you have some options up here. Inbox test, that’s where your campaigns are going to show up after you’ve started sending to that seed list. Mailbox provider health, it gives you an overview of everyone that uses the Everest tool. It kind of gives you an idea of what their inbox placement rates are looking like at the various providers that use the tool set. And then finally managed seed list, which is, this is the place where we want to go here. This screen allows you to customize your seed list to allow you to make it more relevant to your overall database. On this screen, what you can do is you can remove various regions or various types of providers. So on the B2C side, you’re typically going to see providers here like your global ISPs like Gmail and AOL and Hotmail. And then within each region, you’re going to see more like the regional providers like Yahoo, for example, has different domains for each country where it has mail available to its customers. But also phone companies, cable providers, anyone that offers that mail service to the broader audience. And then there’s also on the B2B side, two different types of providers. There’s the hosting companies, and that’s going to be companies like Office 365 and Google’s apps. And then on the filter side, there’s going to be companies like, this is a third party hardware or software provider that goes in front of a company’s email server that filters mail out the big players there, Proofpoint, Mimecast, Spamcop, those types of companies. So again, at this level, you can turn it off by region, but we can also further pare down the list by using this seed list optimizer feature. So what we do here is we do this little down arrow. And I know that I’m probably talking pretty fast. And if you just enjoy it now, watch how we do this. And then if you feel like you want to do this, then you can go back and watch the recording at a later date. But what we want to do is you can see that we’ve got, there’s four different lists that have been optimized in here. So one thing to think about is even if you upload a list here, it doesn’t mean that you necessarily have to optimize your seed list based on what the output is here. And that’s what we’re going to do here today. We’re going to use the tool, but we’re not going to make any changes to the seed list based upon that. So just keep that in mind. I use this tool a lot. Probably I use it more often to do things other than optimize the seed list than I do to actually optimize a seed list. So just keep that in mind. So what we want to do is we want to click on Upload List and then we want to give it a name. So call it whatever you want. I’ll call it Demo List. I’ll choose my file and then that will be the text file that I just created. And I will upload it. Now, these are test addresses, so they’re not going to be valid. So I’m going to move on to one of these lists that we’ve already used. But there’s no limit here to the size of the list that you can upload. Just know that the larger the list, the longer it’s going to take. But we have this list here that we can use so I can show you what the data, what the output will look like. So if I click over here to the three dots at the far right, we can view the results.

Now, the great thing about this, especially in the B2B space, is it gives us visibility into the providers that your audience is using. It’s pretty easy to define who your Hotmail, your Gmail, your Apple, your AOL audience is just by looking at the email addresses. So if you needed to define, determine who your Gmail audience is, you could just create a smart list looking for any email address that contains Gmail.com. Pull that list and that’s your Gmail audience. But on the B2B side, it’s impossible to do that based on just the domain. So that’s where this tool can really come in handy on the B2B side. It can tell you that, for example, my email address work at 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ.com, that 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ uses Office 365. Just by looking at my email address, you couldn’t see that. But this tool is here to tell you that. And it’s also giving you a breakdown of the percentage of each of these domains in your database. So we can see here that Hotmail is 20% of the list. Gmail is 15%. Yahoo is 18%. It kind of gives you an idea of which ones are the most important, which ones you should focus on as you’re looking at your results. Without this knowledge, seeing that you have a spam folder issue at Office 365, for example, really wouldn’t mean much with regards to the impact that that’s having on your overall deliverability. So it’s really helpful in that regard. You can also take this one step further. You can click this right arrow here. And what it’ll do, it gives you a breakdown of all the domains that you send to that use Office 365. And you can also export that list as well, which can be really, really helpful.

What you can also do is once you’ve done this, you can do what’s called apply weighting. And what that does is it takes the list. I’ll just show you what that looks like. It takes the list and it will show which domains are more important. So for example, as the export of your list, let’s say you have a list that’s not weighted. And just for ease of explanation, let’s say you have only 10 providers in your seed list. You send a campaign out.

All of those providers go to the inbox, but one goes to spam folder. Let’s say that provider is Gmail and Gmail represents 40% of your list. If you were to weight your seed list based on without it weighted and you had the nine go to the inbox and one, nine providers go to the inbox, one go to the spam folder, that provider being Gmail, you would see that you have 90% inbox placement and 10% spam folder placement. However, with the seeds weighted, it would show that you actually have only a 60% inbox placement and a 40% spam folder placement because of Gmail representing 40% of your overall database. And then the final thing that you could do here is you can actually remove the individual providers within these regions if they have a zero weight. So you turn this button off and it’s going to remove any provider that has a 0% representation in your database, thereby further consolidating your list to just the most relevant of all the providers. So what we’re going to do here, we want to go here and we want to, we’re going to view the results again, but we want to download this, we want to download the entire list here.

And then we can, we’re going to pop it open and take a look at it now. So what you’ll see here is I tend to play around with this a little bit so you can watch what I’m doing or not. I just try, I like to try to clean it up. So I will usually just copy it over here, keep my original list over there in case I make a mistake. I usually will just pull out this couple of lines here. And then what I will do is I will sort by, I’ll sort by the domain.

And then what that does is it pulls all the providers up top here. And so what I can do is I can take that list of providers.

I will usually just copy that and I’ll stick that over on another page. And then I can sort this by the count.

Largest to smallest. And you can see now who the largest providers are in your database, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, Office 365 and AOL. Those are the top five providers there. Now if I go back over here and I just remove those providers from the database or from this list. And then what I can do is I can filter by provider. So let’s look at, let’s say Office 365. Now what that’s going to do is this is now just going to give me the list of the Office 365 domains. So now I have the Office 365 domains. Let’s do these descending.

Now, so this is all the list of Office 365 domains that we have. Now what I want to use this for is I want to be able to pull reporting in Marketo that is specific to Office 365. Now the reason I might want to do that is let’s say you send a campaign.

You send a campaign, actually let’s say you send campaigns over a period of time. I like to look at the trending data with the seedless results as opposed to just a single campaign. So let’s say over the span of a couple emails, you’re seeing spam folder placement with the seeds.

And you want to see what sort of impact that could be having on your real live data. So what you want to do then is take these domains and then create a filter in Marketo to show what the, you know, to be able to pull a list of the Office 365 domains. So I typically don’t pull the entire list. I typically will pull up to, you know, down to the domains that have single digits.

It represented a number of addresses within those domains. I’ll copy those and then you can put as many as you want. Just know that the more domains that you pull, of course, the longer that it’s going to take the reporting to run in your Marketo instance. But what I would do is I would go back over to my instance. I would go to the analytics section. I would look for an email performance report. And then what I want to do is I want to create a smart list.

And I’m going to filter by email address.

And then I’m going to say email address contains and then I’m just going to drop that list of domains in there and save it.

And then what I can do is I’ll save it. I usually just put it into my reports. I’ll name it, let’s just say, I’ll just call it Office 365.

All right, so now I have my Office 365. Then what I can do, so now when I run this report, there’s no data in here, so I’m not going to get any results, but the data that I’m going to see here is going to be specific to those hundred and whatever domains it was that I chose for Office 365 specifically. So I can then see what my open rates are, what my click rates are. And then what I can also do is I’ll usually create a report that’s all domains. So that’s not pulling anyone out specifically. So I will clone it, update it, just remove the filter there, and then run it. And so what I’m looking for here is I want to look and see what the data says for all the domains that I mailed to. I want to look at my delivered rates, my open rates, my click rates, see what that is looking like, what the average is there. And then if I’m trying to determine whether or not I have an issue with spam folder placement at Office 365, I’ll look at the results here and I’ll see, does the data prove that out? Am I seeing significantly lower open, significantly open, lower click rates as compared to the overall list of all the domains? So for example, let’s say you see that you’ve got 30% open rates on the all domains, and then you go to the Office 365 and you’re only seeing about a 10% open rate, that’s probably a good indication that you do have a spam folder placement issue at Office 365. And at that point, you’d want to start concentrating on figuring out what you can do to improve that. Typically, it’s going to be something related to your reputation, of course. And as we mentioned last time, your data quality, your engagement levels are going to be really, really important there. So kind of trying to button up your data quality, trying to get those engagement levels high, trying to filter out people that haven’t engaged in a long period of time. It could be really, really helpful there to get that reputation improved. And the final thing that this will help you do too is, let’s say you’re trying to do some troubleshooting, or let’s say you get reports from a client or maybe your customer service team or whatever that says, hey, so-and-so at Acme.com is saying they’re not getting our emails anymore.

You could come back, you could go back into this list, and then you could just search on the domains for who the provider is for Acme.com, and then see, are you seeing issues with that particular provider in your seed list results to help explain what could be going on there with that customer. Let’s say they are getting spam folder placement. You then actually have a good contact at that company to try and help you improve your deliverability there. Typically, when you’re having spam folder issues or blocking issues at an individual company, really the best way to try and get that resolved is if you have a point of contact there, and you can work with them and have them work with their IT department or their mail operations team to say, hey, these guys are trying to send me mail. It’s important for the business. What can we do to get their domain or their IP safe listed so that I’m guaranteed to continue getting their mail delivered? That’s usually the better way of doing that. The mail admins, they don’t really want to hear from me that my client’s mail can get delivered. They don’t really care. They’re trying to protect their network. However, if they hear from their internal team that they’re not getting mail that they want, they may be more willing to do something about it. And again, that could be safe listing the IP or the domain or something along those lines to help ensure that the mail does get delivered.

All right, so that’s it as far as the demo goes. I hope that was helpful. Again, I could talk forever about this, the seedless optimization piece. There’s just so many things that you can use it for. And again, you don’t have to wait to seedless. But once you do have the list where you want it to, it’s going to be down here for wherever you want to grab it. You can just select all of your addresses, copy them. You then just go back into Marketo, create a static list and save it in your instance. And then again, as you’re creating your campaigns and for any campaign where you want to get this data, you just add this list as a filter for creating that campaign and send it off. You can also set up an alert within the tool so that they send you an email when there are changes made to the seedless. So because it’s a static list, you’ll be alerted to let you know that you need to update your seedless. So you just come on here, come in here, download it, go back into Marketo and update it with the most recent seedless and keep everything up to date there.

All right, so that’s it as far as the demo goes. So let me go back here to our deck.

And Alana, I think you had a couple of things you wanted to talk about here. I do. Thank you, Sean. All right. So again, thank you, Sean, for that in-depth, informative demonstration. As he mentioned, this session is being recorded and you’ll be getting it on demand tomorrow. So you can watch all of that back at your own pace at a later date. Not to worry. So I want to quickly go over a few upcoming events. On April 26, we’ll be hosting our new series Level Up with 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ, the panel of solutions consultants that will be joining us. We’ll run through in-product demonstrations, telling the story of how AEM Sites, AEM Assets, Workfront and Marketo Engage work better together. We’re really excited for this event. Our teams met with a ton of customers at 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ Summit two weeks ago, if you were one of them. Thank you very much for being there. And one of the biggest things that we heard was that our customers wanted more information on how our products work better together. So we are excited to meet those requests with this event.

And then as 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ customers, you get access to all of our customer exclusive events. So we’re excited to invite you to our next Commerce and Coffee on May 11th, where we’ll be discussing how to build customer loyalty and retention. We’ll be sending out invitations to our Marketo customers in case anybody’s interested in learning more about that. And we’re also launching a new series for our AEM customers on May 25th, where we’ll be covering the AEM Assets migration process. So if that is of interest to you or someone on your team, keep an eye out for more information on that. And at the bottom of the screen is a reminder that you can find all of the recordings of past Marketo Emocha events on Experience League, including part one of this series, which I put in the chat pod for anybody who would like the link to that. So with that, I’m going to hand things back over to Sean to cover a few hot topics that were consistently asked in the registration questions, and then we will get right into Q&A.

Sean? Great. Thanks, Alana. All right. So we did have three main, we saw this questions from last time, pre-registration questions this time that I wanted to talk about. First off is Gmail deliverability into Gmail. Huge topic, always a topic. I’ll set this for you at a high level. Gmail is really keen on having high levels of engagement with your emails. They also put a high level of importance on domain reputation.

So keep that in mind. If you’re having issues with deliverability at Gmail, there’s typically going to be some issue with your reputation there, and there’s a high probability that that issue with your reputation is a lack of engagement. So going back to the demo that Cynthia did last time, if you go through and pull that program into your Marketo instance from the Marketo program library, focusing on that engagement piece and kind of ruling out people that have engaged, haven’t engaged in a period of time, only send up people that have engaged recently, that’s going to help you to really improve your overall deliverability there. You may want to cut back and make an extreme cutback for a period of time, especially if Gmail registers as one of your top five domains.

Just focus on that engagement and that you’ll typically see. You’ll typically see things start to improve, and as they do, then you can kind of begin to loosen the filters over time so that you can send more and more mail, but just try to keep an eye on how things are looking. And if you start to see issues again, then kind of cut things off there at that point, and don’t keep trying to further introduce lesser engaged segments into your overall audience. The second topic was the Apple mail privacy.

Huge, big, big, big, big topic. A lot of questions about this. Just day to day, we get a lot of questions about this. For those of you who don’t know, a couple of years ago, Apple introduced this privacy program with their devices that they, essentially, they don’t allow for pixel tracking. So what happens is, basically, any email that’s opened on an Apple device, that’s presented on an Apple device, will appear to be an open for that particular email. So the open rates have been inflated due to Apple mail privacy.

Alana’s going to have a couple of links in the follow up here. One of them is going to be a link about deliverability into Gmail. There’s also a link here about the Apple mail privacy with some tips on how you can try and figure out, kind of rule out some of those Apple mail opens to try and keep the numbers, get the numbers more closer to reality. I’ll say this, our guidance with regards to improving deliverability or our warm up plans for brand new dedicated IP addresses, we really haven’t changed the guidance on that, simply because it’s really still just focusing on engagement.

Even keeping in mind that it may seem that someone’s engaged if they opened on an Apple device, even if they haven’t. But using the same guidance that we’ve used the past couple of years, it still holds true. We tend to see really good results with our warm up plans. The final topic was the bot activities.

That’s one thing that’s been around for a number of years. It seems to ebb and flow, at least within our customer base, when they see it, when they don’t.

It’s a battle that we continue to fight.

We have a debate every now and then, is it worth fighting? I’ll say this, when we initially started seeing this, it was very consistent that the customers that were having the issues with an increased level of bot activity were customers that had issues with their data quality. So that’s the way we would approach it. If we saw the high levels of bot activity, we would do a data quality review, figure out where the issues were, where the holes were in their practices. And we would make suggestions and have them make the changes. And we would typically see improvement in their overall deliverability. And we would typically see drops in the bot activity. We then started to see this increased bot activity for clients that we couldn’t find any issues with their overall data quality. But that’s the way these things are designed. The bots are designed for us to not really be able to try and figure out that it’s a bot. They don’t want us to know what’s going on there. But what these bots are doing, they’re just trying to look for nefarious links, just trying to protect. It’s the spam filters at those companies that are these bots. They’re going in, they’re checking these links as they come in. And then they’ll deliver it on if they don’t see any issues with the links. So things that you can look for with the bot activity, looking for links that are clicked before the mail’s delivered, links before it’s open.

And then also, clicks without a web page, without a web page view. What’s going to happen? These aren’t using a web browser. They’re just clicking the links and then seeing where they reside. But they’re not actually using a web browser. So also looking, again, looking for a click without a web page view is another way to look for that bot activity. We do have some things built into Marketo to try and minimize these bot clicks and try and remove them from the reporting. But just know, we’re always chasing this one. And it’s as designed by those companies that have these bots that are scanning the mail.

OK, that’s it for hot topics. So I will then pass it back to Alana for our Q&A. Sure thing.

So we’ve got a bunch of questions coming in live. And we also had a couple other questions that came in during registration. So I’m going to kick it off with our first one here. Does your subdomain matter? It does. It does matter. And as a best practice for clients that we engage with, especially one of the biggest sets of clients that we engage with are clients that are migrating over from our shared IP pool or to a dedicated IP address. Or we even have some clients that will, they come in and buy the dedicated IP and they use the dedicated IP from the beginning. When we engage with those folks, one of the best practices we recommend is that they do send from a subdomain of their root or their corporate domain. It just allows a separation of reputation.

In the last session, when I talked about domain reputation, that domain reputation can go down to the subdomain level. So I’ve been in sessions where the ISPs have told us to encourage clients to use subdomains. The postmaster at Gmail was at one of those. His suggestion was have a different subdomain for each line of business, each type of email that you use. The more that you can separate that mail out, it’s going to separate the reputation based on that subdomain. And the reason we recommend it for all clients, even if it’s just one subdomain, is that again, it does separate that reputation. And not wanting the marketing mail to damage the reputation of the overall corporate mail, you don’t want anything to go wrong there so that your employees just aren’t getting their mail. I’d say nine times out of 10, when we have that initial call with clients and if their IT folks are on the call, you can just hear the clapping because they really want that to happen. They want that separation between marketing mail and just the regular corporate mail. I actually had one client that wanted to do it because they weren’t happy with what some of their sales folks were doing on the root domain. They were afraid that the root domain was going to ruin the reputation of their mailing domain. So they wanted to have their own subdomain for that purpose. So that one was interesting, but same concept. So it certainly does. There certainly can be changes based on the use of a subdomain. It’s not often that whatever happens on the subdomain rolls up to the root domain. You got to have some pretty bad practices in place for that to happen. Typically, it’s just isolated to the domain or subdomain that’s having the issue. It’s a good question.

All right, interesting information. Thank you for that. All right, next question. How can Marketo determine if emails are making it into primary inboxes? Great question as well.

The only way to really notice that, to know that kind of systematically is the tools that I just demoed. The seed list itself and specifically Gmail. Gmail has its tabs. When you can log in, when you log into the tool, look at the results. The Gmail results, you can dig in, you can dive down to see. So for example, we talked about the seed list. I said it’s about 800 to 900 addresses on the entire seed list. Each provider is going to have a different number of seed addresses, really just based on its kind of place in the industry. So for example, Gmail being one of the largest, there’s about 20 seeds in the seed list for Gmail. In the seed list for Gmail, some of the smaller providers may only have a couple. But with each, in your results, you can dig in, dive down to your individual seeds at Gmail, and it can tell you where each one of them landed. If it landed in the primary tab, the promotions tab, it will go down to that level. So that’s really the only way to know that. Kind of a side note here, I typically tell clients not to worry too much about the placement of that mail in the primary tab versus promotions tab. We consider, if it gets delivered to one of those tabs, we consider that to be inbox placement. And there are all sorts of reports out there that will debate whether or not this is a good thing.

We do see that one of the things that we hear about promotions is that customers will go to that promotions tab when they want to get that type of mail. So if they’re looking to buy something, if they want to do some web shopping, they can go to the promotions tab and look and see what’s in there that they may want to offer, that they may want to take a look at. Also, clients all the time, I see people promising, services out there promising to get your mail delivered to the primary tab. Look, that’s a never-ending battle. You’ve got to understand that Gmail’s filters are ever-changing, very dynamic. And so if you think you figure out a way around that and getting that mail out of the promotions tab into the primary, it may work today, may not work tomorrow. It may work for a few months, but the likelihood is that Google’s going to figure that out. And they are pretty confident in the fact that their mail goes to where their customers want it. So just keep that in mind with regards to the tabs as well.

Great. I am guilty of going into that promotions tab myself. So you are spot on. I turned the tabs off. I couldn’t stand it. So I still like my old school Gmail view. So you can go in your settings and turn those off. So I couldn’t deal with it.

All right. Next question. We have over 95% deliverability. What other ways should we be looking to improve? Great question.

Try to get it to 98, 99. 98, 99% is my goal for clients that I work with.

Figure out what’s preventing you from getting to 99%. Also, looking at those inbox rates could be important. 95% delivered rate doesn’t mean 95% inbox placement. Look at your opens and your click rates. Keep an eye on those. If those are low, if they’re down in the teens and single digits, you need to work on getting those numbers up.

And again, the seed list, the tool set can help you with that as well, keeping an eye on that. And again, back to that demo that Cynthia gave last month, implementing those programs, again, allows Marketo to do some of the work for you to keep that database fresh and allow you to focus on some other things. So keep an eye on those engagement rates.

Try to keep your… And try and figure out where those… Again, what’s preventing you from… Why aren’t you in the 98 to 99% range? Pull your numbers, look and see where… Is it soft bounces? What did those soft bounce reasons look like? It could be you’ve just got some older bad domains in there. If you just clean those out, then it’s just gonna help your numbers to improve. Great. Thank you for the tips. I’m gonna switch to a question from Megan in the Q&A pod. If an email gets caught in someone’s spam, will it show on the Marketo end as delivered? It will. It will. And that’s why it’s so important or helpful to have those tools, because they accept the mail. It just shows delivered. It doesn’t show what happened with it after that. It may not… A lot of corporate email platforms these days, some of these filter providers, these hosting providers, they will quarantine the mail, meaning they just drop it. We call it dropping it on the floor or putting it in quarantine. Not all companies will allow access to their employees to that quarantine. So sometimes the corporation or the company has a… You’ll get a notification in your mailbox, hey, you got this email, it’s in your quarantine, go to your admin panel and see if you want to release that email. But not all mail admins give you the ability to do that. So it could just appear to be going into a black hole, but it’s just… Sitting in a quarantine somewhere. So, yeah, it’s certainly… If it goes into a spam folder, it’s going to show as delivered. Another thing too, along those same lines is, can we get questions about this? I just thought I’d talk about it real quick.

Sometimes when you’re looking in your data, you may see that an email was delivered and then it bounced. Not uncommon to see that. What’s happening in that scenario is, for the most part, the way the mail transfer process works is we open the connection to the receiving mail server and all of that filtering and all that decision making happens real time. So we open that connection, we start trying to push that mail and get it delivered. And the mail servers or the filter companies, they’re doing real-time processing. Is this a valid address? Yes. Do I consider this message to be spam? Does this IP have a bad reputation? Does this domain have a bad reputation? If it’s an invalid address or there’s some reputation issues, it’ll bounce it back and it’ll give us a…

It’ll show us a bounce.

So again, most of that happens real time. There are some mail providers, mailbox providers out there that do what’s called, accept all. So what that means is they will… You open that mail connection and they just allow you to deliver all of it. And then they close the connection. But they haven’t yet sent it onto the mailbox. So once they’ve closed that connection, they then go through that process to determine, is this a valid address? Do I think this message is spam? And anything that’s a not a valid address or they think is spam, they open up a new connection and then they send it back. So we call that an out of band bounce. It’s out of band because in band would be real time. So that’s why you would see, yeah, it got delivered because they accepted it. But then they turned right around and they decided they didn’t want to keep it and they sent it back. So anytime you see that sort of behavior in the lead record, that’s what happened there. They accepted it. They then decided that they didn’t want to keep it. And so they bounced it back.

Great. Thanks for all of that. All right.

Does resending emails to non-openers impact deliverability? Oh, yes, absolutely.

I’m sorry, Alana, can you repeat that? Sure.

Resending emails to non-openers impact deliverability.

It’s certainly good.

They haven’t opened it. They didn’t open it the first time or the first two times you sent it. So what’s the likelihood that they’re going to open it the second time? I would actually, if I were you, I would take a look at what the success rate is there and run some reports.

How many times did we send it to someone on the second try? Did they open it? And just try to figure out, kind of weigh your odds there.

Again, as I’ve mentioned multiple times, engagement is really important. So sending to people that aren’t engaging with your email is going to have a negative impact on your reputation, ultimately your deliverability, if you continue to do that. So I wouldn’t do it multiple times. If you’re going to do it, I would say cap it at one retry. But again, look at the success rate and see how successful you are on that second attempt.

All right, great. Thank you.

Another question from the chat from Cesar. What is the best metric to follow for deliverability? There’s not really one main metric. I look at a combination of things. I look at the delivered rate, of course. I look at the open rates and the click rates. Again, the higher those numbers, the better. I’d like client open percentages to be at least above 20%. And the higher you get, the better.

The click to open rates. So taking a look at the people that did open, what percentage of them clicked? Again, I like to see those at least in the mid teens and higher is greater. But also looking at those metrics with regards to inbox placement and spam folder placement.

One thing I should have said earlier with the tools is I don’t take one set of data as gospel. So if I send to the seed list and I see that Office 365 should spam folder placement, I’m not going to just automatically assume that all of my Office 365 mail is going to the spam folder. I do want to go take that extra step to look at the quote unquote real world data, which are those opens and clicks and see if that seems to verify what I’m seeing there. Also with those seeds, another factor there too is the seed list uses out of the box settings for those different providers and know that especially at the hosting providers and the filter providers, the mail admins at those domains, they have the ability to go in and make some changes to the settings. So just because you’re seeing the seed list shows spam folder placement for the seeds, it may not be the same for all domains that you’re mailing to there simply because there can be some changes there from the admin, by the admin.

Great. All right. I think we have time for one more question. Let me just see if there’s anything else in the Q&A pod.

What is the best practice to handle low, not sure if I’m saying this correctly, DMARC success rate? Our rate sometimes drops to 30% and then comes back up. Yep, DMARC. DMARC is a, that’s quite all right. That’s the, I’ve called it authentication to the next level. One of the key components of DMARC is the reporting aspect. My suggestion there would be get a hold of that reporting. When that DMARC record is set up, part of the setup process is telling the receiving mail servers, the ISPs, where to send those reports. Those reports are going to be, any time DMARC fails, they will generate a report and they will send it back to you. And again, you designate in your DMARC record where those reports should go to. So those reports are going to tell you why it failed. So looking, going through those and figuring out what’s going on there. I’ll tell you this, one of the most common things that I see, one of the most common problems I see with DMARC is our customers sending from a domain out of Marketo that’s not verified in the admin panel. So they may, customers may have a sub domain set up. I actually saw this yesterday. A client had a sub domain set up and verified in Marketo, but they were using their root domain to send mail. And so because that root domain is not in the admin panel, we’re not going to sign that, we’re not going to sign any email that uses that root domain with a DKIM signature. So the DKIM check for that domain is going to fail because there’s no DKIM signature. So first thing I would check is that, look at the domains that are verified in your, the SPF and in the admin panel and email on that SPF DKIM tab. See what domains are there. Look at DKIM for each of those domains, make sure it shows verified and then look to see what domains you’re mailing from. There might be a good chance that you’re using a domain that’s not listed on that page.

All right. Thank you, Sean. All right. We’re going to wrap up because we are at time. Just as a reminder that as we’re leaving the session today, you’ll see a very quick, brief survey pop up. It should take you less than two minutes to complete. In the survey, you’re going to be asked if you’d like to share your 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ story and we would love to hear from you. So if that’s something you’d like to share, please check that box and we’ll reach out to you.

We really appreciate you taking a moment to fill that out. And if you have a specific question to your account that we weren’t able to answer today, please reach out to your success account manager. And as a final reminder, you will receive the recording of today’s event in an email from Coach Rebinar in 24 hours. So thank you everyone for attending. Thank you, Sean, for the presentation and we hope everybody has a great day.

Thanks all. My pleasure. Thanks a lot. Thanks everyone. Thanks. Bye.