Name: Introducing E-Mail Deliverability in SAP Marketing Cloud
Uploaded: 2024-7-3
Duration: 538 s

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<div><div><div><div>E-mail marketing is a very effective marketing tactic, becoming one of the most important channels for marketing in today’s digital economy. But it’s not easy to reach your recipients’ inbox. Check out this video and learn the secrets to become a deliverability hero.<br><p>This video will guide you through e-mail marketing best practices on initial setup, the creation of a warm-up plan, and content relevancy, which will help you maximize your e-mail deliverability.</p></div></div></div></div>

Introducing E-Mail Deliverability in SAP Marketing Cloud

In this video, you'll be introduced to email marketing best practices that will help you to maximize your email deliverability. First, we give you a quick overview of what you will learn in this video. At the beginning, we'll show you why email marketing is still relevant. We'll then give you a quick overview of the technical journey of an email and help you to understand which parties are involved. After that, we'll introduce three aspects that will help you to become a real deliverability hero. In particular, we focus on how to become a trusted sender with the right email service provider setup and a solid warm-up plan. Finally, we'll show you that using the right audience and creating relevant content can help you to increase your email deliverability performance. Email marketing is a very effective and relevant marketing tactic with a broad acceptance and high reach within B2C and B2B industries. Although sending emails might be cheaper than other marketing tactics, it doesn't mean it's easier. Many people think that email marketing is just about sending a lot of marketing messages as part of a campaign. Factors like the right setup of your email service provider, your reputation as a sender of emails, a healthy contact list, as well as relevant content influence the number of emails that reach the recipient's inbox. And that is what you should focus on to minimize the number of emails that get lost in the sending funnel and don't make it to the recipient's inbox. The journey of an email from its creation to the point where it shows up in the inbox of a recipient is complex, and many factors influence this journey. Let's have a look at it step by step. First, you must create the required elements of your campaign, an audience you want to target, and creative content to be communicated to your customers. The content creation process and the audience selection are typically done in a marketing automation engine, such as the SAP Marketing Cloud. However, a marketing automation engine provides much more marketing capabilities than just sending out marketing emails. A marketing automation engine is integrated with an email service provider for the actual sending of emails. The right email provider setup is a prerequisite for successful email campaigns. The Internet Service Provider, or ISP, provides an email inbox to its users, for example Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook. The Internet Service Provider tries everything to protect the customers from unwanted messages, such as spam emails. If the Internet Service Provider identifies a sender as trustful, the email will be placed in the recipient's inbox. As you can see, the delivery process of an email is very complex, and many different parties are involved. In addition to these technical aspects, you should never forget that only campaigns and messages which are relevant will be opened and clicked by your recipients. A high engagement of your recipients will skyrocket your reputation and will keep your inbox placement rate high. Let us start to dig a little bit deeper and find out how to become a real email deliverability hero. First, you need to become a trusted sender. Second, you should identify the right target audience. And third, you need to create content which is relevant for your recipients. However, the best driver for a high inbox placement rate is recipients who are interested in your messages and show engagement. If you want to know more about how to create a campaign with a design thinking-like approach, check out this blog entry. In this video, we'll focus on the first three aspects. Let's start with the first one. In order to be perceived as a trusted sender, there are some technical aspects to consider. The technical configuration needs to follow industry standards around domain setup and and message authentication. The setup and configuration that is required when integrating a marketing automation engine with an email service provider is particularly important. The correct setup helps your internet service providers to perceive your sent emails as trustworthy. Following the industry best practices and setting up a proper message authentication can be seen as the groundwork. Message authentication is essential for professional email transmission and there are three standards which need to be configured for your sending domain. One example is to enable your domain for domain keys identified mail. If you want to learn more about how to build trust with the right email service provider setup, please look at our dedicated CX Works articles on that topic. But before an internet service provider can decide whether a sender is trustworthy, they need to identify the sender of the message. Both the IP address and the domain name are used for this. The IP address represents a unique identifier of a device and is a unique combination of numbers. The IP address will be assigned to you by the email service provider. In addition to the technical IP address, there is also the domain name to identify the sender of the message. You can choose a domain name yourself. To find out how trustworthy a sender is, both IP reputation and the domain reputation are used. The IP reputation is an important factor for Internet service providers, but the importance of domain reputation continues to grow. As we learned before, the right technical setup of your email service provider is essential to build trust. In addition, a solid warm-up plan is of great importance to achieve a high trust level. As you see, trust is a volatile construct. Would you trust someone you don't know? It takes time and continuous work to build a trustful relationship. The same applies to internet service providers. A solid warm-up plan is essential to make yourself known to the internet service providers and build up a good IP and domain reputation over time. There are many cases in which you should think about warm-up activities, such as a new domain or a new IP address. As you send emails to your customers, their mailbox providers will check your reputation as a sender. The mailbox provider will then either place it in the inbox or send it to spam folders. In order to protect recipients as best as possible, the various spam identification logics and algorithms remain a secret of the internet service providers. This makes it difficult to define a warm-up plan that fits to all scenarios. In our blog, we share our experiences, best practices, and tools, which you can use to define a warm-up plan that fits to your needs. Have a look. Using the right audience is another key aspect reaching the goal of a high email deliverability performance. Mailbox providers look for suspicious behaviors around your audience, such as too many invalid email addresses or law engagement from recipients. Therefore, it's important to build and maintain a healthy contact list and continuously keep this list up to date with valid and engaged contacts. This helps you to keep your bounce rate slow and build up a good reputation. Content is another key aspect, which influences if your email is placed in the inbox of your recipient. Internet service providers identify the typical structure of a spam email, which is then automatically sanctioned by sending the email to the spam folders. Now, we'll look at three examples on how you can increase your content quality and avoid common pitfalls. Internet service providers pay attention to colorful fonts and backgrounds. Also, try to avoid eye-catching designs and capital letters as much as possible. Nowadays, more and more people read their emails on their mobile devices. It's important to check the look and feel of your email on different devices. Another important factor is the ratio between text and image in an email. Internet service providers tend to classify emails as spam that contain a high percentage of images. In mind, your email should contain about 70% text and only 30% images. This will increase the probability that your email will survive the checks of the internet service provider. Also, it helps your customers to understand the context even if they have images automatically blocked. If you would like to learn more about creative content best practices, please visit our CX Works article "Email Marketing the Content". In this video, you learned that technical aspects are important to maximize the number of emails that make their way through the sending funnel into the recipient's inbox. Following the industry's standards for domain setup and message authentication can be seen as groundwork. Besides that, a solid warm-up plan is essential to get yourself known by the internet service providers. A healthy contact list with valid email addresses and high-quality content will help you reach your goal. But you should always keep in mind that the placement of your email in the recipient's inbox is only one part of the success. Only the engagement of your recipients will make you a real deliverability hero. This wraps it up for a quick guide on email marketing deliverability.