Email optimization and deliverability go hand-in-hand when it comes to sending emails, and that’s why MarTech Today created the very first resource for marketing professionals that encompasses the elements of both. The Periodic Table of Email Optimization and Deliverability is a comprehensive resource designed to guide you through the different elements required to keep your emails out of the spam folder and in front of your subscribers.
Explore this new resource with its architect, Jennifer Cannon, Senior Editor at MarTech Today, and April Mullen, Director of Strategic Insights at SparkPost, co-founder of Women of Email during this free webinar. They’ll be taking a look at some of the emerging elements and trends that brands and email marketers need to embrace in 2020, including:
What you need to know about BIMI (Brand Indicators for Messaging Identification)
Artificial Intelligence vs Machine Learning for email marketers
How Voice Assistants will play into how email marketers develop emails this year
Compliance — what you need to know about GDPR, CCPA and maintaining a compliant data set
The impact of AMP for Email on brands’ email marketing efforts
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
About The Author
Marketing Land is a daily publication covering digital marketing industry news, trends, strategies and tactics for digital marketers. Special content features, site announcements and occasional sponsor messages are posted by Marketing Land.
Five years ago, marketing technologist roles were, arguably, in their infancy. At the risk of being nostalgic, it was a simpler time for our industry: the martech landscape was comprised of a mere 1,000 solutions and nobody had even heard of Cambridge Analytica. Adobe hadn’t bought Magento or Marketo and LinkedIn hadn’t yet joined the Microsoft family.
Fast forward to today, as we approach our seventh annual MarTech Conference, that martech landscape now has over 7,000 solutions, with new product launches and integrations happening daily. As the martech taxonomy continues to expand, so do the roles charged with implementing and managing our martech stacks. Marketing technologists are no longer considered “the outsider” among the broader marketing organization, but instead play a key role within the marketing organization. Martech is now marketing and marketing technologists are, simply, marketers.
“The field of marketing technologists has expanded enormously over the past five years,” said Scott Brinker, MarTech Conference chair and the voice behind ChiefMartec.com. He accounts the exponential growth to the massive adoption of martech that is happening across organizations of all sizes. “Gartner recently stated 26% of enterprise marketing budgets are being allocated toward martech,” said Brinker, “You need talented people to implement and harness all that technology, and there’s a lot of room for specialization.”
Specialization is a key factor when considering the marketing technologist role — the more specialized marketing technology solutions become, the more talent is needed to take full advantage of the available platforms and solutions. But when looking at the growing list of marketing technologist titles across the ever-widening martech landscape, it is crucial we understand as an industry which roles are the primary drivers of marketing technology and its place within the marketing organization. Of course, there are the leaders — the chief marketing technologists and other C-level executives driving the martech ship — but how have roles evolved since we first started separating marketing technology from the IT department?
Marketing technologist roles: v2.0
Five years ago, Brinker came up with a list of six primary marketing technologist roles. The roles, or “archetypes” as Brinker labeled them, were based on a survey he and former SapientNitro CTO Sheldon Monteiro conducted via Chiefmartec.com readers and attendees at the inaugural MarTech Conference in Boston. After a recent conversation with Marketing Land’s VP of Content, Henry Powderly, Brinker decided it was time to revisit the roles he had defined more than five years ago.
“Coming back to the concept of marketing technologist archetypes five years later, the split between ‘marketing focus’ and ‘technology focus’ didn’t resonate as much because technology has become much more deeply infused into the marketing organization overall,” said Brinker, ” I decided to step back and try a fresh approach to identifying the dimensions on which different marketing technologist roles focus.”
In the latest version of Brinker’s marketing technologist archetypes, the list has been narrowed from six to four roles: Operations Orchestrator, Brand/Demand Builder, Analytics Architect and Marketing Maker.
Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technologist Archetypes
One of the things that stood out to Brinker when revisiting his original marketing technologist archetypes, was the lack of marketing operations roles.
“Marketing operations has grown tremendously as a discipline over the past five years as a real hotbed of marketing technologist talent,” said Brinker. The explosive growth happening within marketing operations can be attributed to the fact that, as a function, it is what “keeps the trains running” for marketing technology teams, according to Brinker.
The four primary marketing technologist roles
As the number of martech solutions continues to grow — martech roles have become more systematic in the ways they are connected. Brinker recalls, during the original concept of the martech archetypes, he felt somewhat lost when trying to connect the roles. In Brinker’s latest iteration, the four quadrants separating the martech roles are independent of each other, but it’s clear how the roles are connected now.
The Brand/Demand Builder is the usually the marketer using martech to conduct their work, implementing different platforms to run and manage marketing campaigns. Brinker says the vast majority of marketing technologists fall into this category.
The Operations Orchestrator is responsible for implementing and managing martech systems. They are the “maestros” according to Brinker, the ones who support all the other martech roles and are often given a “marketing operations” or “CRM/MAP admin” title.
Brinker defines the Analytics Architect as “modellers” who focus on the structure and infrastructure of data collected by the marketing organization. Usually known within the team as the “marketing analyst,” “data scientist” or “data engineer,” the analytics architects are rarely found at smaller companies, and instead, are part of martech teams within larger enterprises with the resources to dive into the data.
The Marketing Maker, located in the bottom right quadrant, is the builder of custom apps and digital experiences. They have titles like “web developer” and “marketing engineer” and are usually part of the teams working with code. Although, with the latest crop of no-code and low-code martech solutions, Marketing Makers don’t necessarily have to be the expert coders they once were.
The martech leaders
What’s not listed within these four quadrants are the leaders who oversee the entire martech organization — the executives defining strategy and aligning marketing technology goals with the overall marketing and business objectives. Brinker has devised a fifth archetype — The Manager — to fit this role, an executive who essentially oversees the breadth of the marketing technology and operation teams.
Some businesses have added this leadership role to the C-suite, hiring chief marketing technology officers to work alongside their chief marketing officer. But lately, we’ve seen a trend with major brands dropping the CMO role for chief digital officers and chief customer officers — both of which often oversee the marketing technology function. (Sheldon Monteiro, who helped Brinker come up with the original marketing technologist roles in 2014 is now a chief product officer at Publicis Sapient.) Other organizations have opted to onboard vice presidents or directors of marketing technology and marketing operations who report to the CMO.
How the archetypes align with each other
Brinker believes everything in marketing should ultimately be centered around the customer. “That said, there is a lot of marketing technologist type work that serves internal stakeholders in the service of building a great customer-centric business. It’s the ‘back-stage’ workflows, processes, analytics, infrastructure, systems, etc. that enable customer-facing activities in marketing to be more successful,” said Brinker.
With this in mind, he arranged the four marketing technologist roles along an X and Y axis. The Y-axis, which moves from process orientation to technology orientation, separates processes like workflows and customer journeys from technology capabilities such as data engineering and coding. The X-axis stems from the question: Does the role primarily serve internal stake holders or customers?
“There’s a ton of marketing technologist work that touches customers directly on the ‘front-stage’ of the business,” said Brinker, “Personalized campaigns, web and mobile apps, chatbots, conversion optimization — the X-axis in this framework looks across that spectrum of internal orientation to external orientation activities because, while they are deeply entwined, they are different kinds of activities that apply different skills.”
Brinker acknowledges the four archetypes attached to each of the quadrants are not always completely separate roles, and that nearly every marketing technologist connects across all of the quadrants to some degree. The newly defined roles are meant to show how marketing technologists, in general, lean toward distinctly different areas within the martech organization.
A work in progress
The martech industry is pushing forward at a tremendous speed. As stated earlier, the marketing technology landscape is more than seven-times the size it was in 2014, with new solutions — and integrations — being launched daily. The first half of 2019 saw 246 mergers and acquisitions, a steep rise from the 162 deals that happened during the same time period in 2018.
Exponential growth is the nature of technology and martech is no different — every new iteration of a martech solution aims to improve upon itself, resulting in an accelerated rate of progress. And with every new evolution cycle, the marketing technologists tasked with managing it all will have to evolve as well. There is no “final” list of primary marketing technologist roles — as the industry changes so will the players.
As Brinker so eloquently puts it when looking at how these roles will continue to evolve, “Everyone has a horizon that keeps pushing the industry forward.”
About The Author
Amy Gesenhues is a senior editor for Third Door Media, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land, Search Engine Land and MarTech Today. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs, SoftwareCEO, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy’s articles.
As marketers, we value our special skills, or as I often refer to it, our superpowers. I always explain that my superpower is writing because sometimes it’s easier for me to express my thoughts this way rather than talking (although I have my moments with the gift of gab).
So while guarding our superpowers and being really sharp with one particular skill is great, to get hired on an agile marketing team, you need to show that you’re willing to dabble outside of your comfort zone and be a team player.
According to the2019 State of Agile Marketing survey, 50 percent of traditional marketing companies are planning to adopt agile marketing in the coming year. To stay ahead of the curve and market yourself to these companies, you’ll need to broaden your skills to be hired on an agile marketing team.
The most successful agile marketers offer the following:
Dabble beyond your specialty
People have a lot more skills, abilities and desires to try new things than we give them credit for. The problem in most companies is that you’re only known for your job title, not always what you can do or want to be doing.
Too often I hear, “Only John can do video editing – it’s a technical specialty and anyone else would screw it up.”
Well, what happens when John goes on vacation? Or gets sick? Or worse yet – quits the company.
While video editing may be John’s superpower, there are a lot of smart people on your team. If you ask them, there may be another who does this type of work as a hobby and wants to learn more.
Sure, John may be better at it – and we’re not trying to de-value his knowledge – but a good agile team is able to share knowledge and help each other.
I encourage you to think about two other skills that your company needs and try to learn more about them. Maybe you won’t be the expert, but you can help round out the team’s skillset in a pinch.
Put the needs of the team above your own
If you want to be hired on an agile marketing team, you have to approach everything as “What’s best for the team?” rather than “What’s best for me?”
On an agile marketing team, work is prioritized in a single marketing backlog and the goal is to get the most important work done. Most of the time, that work item takes many people from the team collaborating together.
There are two kinds of people that don’t work well in agile marketing—the hoarders and the single laners.
The hoarder is the so-called ‘expert’ and likes being in a position where everyone needs him. He won’t share knowledge and works at protecting his domain.
The single laners only do the job they were hired to do and nothing more.
The problem with both the hoarders and single laners is that the focus is on themselves, not the good of the team. But in agile, the collective need to do what’s best for the customer far outweighs the individual contributor.
So, if you want to work on an agile marketing team, you’re going to have to keep the focus on the team, even if it’s not what’s best for you at all times.
A willingness to venture into the unknown
Agile marketing requires the ability to quickly switch gears, work in a way that’s totally new and different and may require you doing work you’ve never done before in your life!
For those that thrive on learning and change, agile marketing is going to be your best friend.
It’s a lot like being a small business owner. You’re going to wear many hats, do things that you’ve never done before, venture into uncharted waters, fail sometimes and learn along the way.
So to be a good agile marketer, get yourself comfortable with the uncomfortable.
If you’re someone who enjoys broadening your skills, works well in a team setting and is okay venturing into the unknown, you’re going to make a rock star agile marketer!
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
About The Author
Stacey knows what it’s like to be a marketer, after all, she’s one of the few agile coaches and trainers that got her start there. After graduating from journalism school, she worked as a content writer, strategist, director and adjunct marketing professor. She became passionate about agile as a better way to work in 2012 when she experimented with it for an ad agency client. Since then she has been a scrum master, agile coach and has helped with numerous agile transformations with teams across the globe. Stacey speaks at several agile conferences, has more certs to her name than she can remember and loves to practice agile at home with her family. As a lifelong Minnesotan, she recently relocated to North Carolina where she’s busy learning how to cook grits and say “y’all.”
According to this year’s Relevance Report 2020 from the USC Annenberg Center for Public Relations, half-truths and lies are more noteworthy (and acceptable) than ever.
The report features 17 of the 30 essays that deal with or in deceit, aided and abetted by the advancement of technology and social media in the post-truth age.
Erasing the line between paid and earned media
The rate at which influencer marketers are ignoring disclosure guidelines set by the FTC is alarming.
The FTC’s “Dot Com Disclosure Requirements” [PDF] are designed to help the public understand whether or not someone endorsing a product online was compensated.
But ignorance does not appear to be the cause of these violations.
“According to a study conducted by the influencer marketing agency Mediakix, only about 7% of endorsements on social media from the top 50 celebrity influencers comply with FTC’s guidelines of appropriate disclosure verbiage,” writes Cathy Park, a second-year strategic public relations graduate student at USC Center for Public Relations in the Relevance Report.
“Furthermore, Harvard Business Review reported that 28% of influencers were requested by the sponsoring brand to not disclose the partnership. It seems like the ability to deceive has somehow become tied to an influencer’s worth,” Park says.
More than one in four posts by online influencers ignore their duty to disclose in deliberate, profit-motivated acts of defiance.
With interest in artificial intelligence peaking, Burghardt Tenderich, Ph.D., associate director of the USC Annenberg Center of Public Relations explains the problem of bias in developing human-guided, ethical machine learning.
“…AI algorithms can also lead to false conclusions. In the Facebook example, this is due to the common practice by social media companies to deploy technology that is half-baked, at best. At the core of an ethical examination of AI is the desire to understand how decisions are made and what the consequences are for society at large. For that reason, policy makers are calling for AI to be explainable and transparent so that citizens and businesses alike can develop trust in AI.”
– Burghardt Tenderich, Ph.D.
Speak no evil
The essay by a corporate spokesperson from Google says, “Each of our products is designed with an emphasis on privacy and security, including easy user interfaces and features like privacy Check-Ups, which allow people to control their data and keep their accounts safe and secure.”
But there is one stark omission: Project Dragonfly.
Project Dragonfly is a search engine prototype Google created to be compatible with China’s state censorship provisions and which also provided the government with a means for retrieving a users search history by searching their phone number, essentially abandoning their “don’t be evil” motto.
The project was leaked to the public through a Google employee and confirmed to have been terminated in July during a Senate hearing. [Google has denied the project was planned to be launched.]
What’s perhaps most disheartening is that even the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism — consistently ranked first according to the QS World University Rankings — is unable to ferret this post-truth omission from its own academic research, and that the search giant saw spinning the truth in academic research as fair game.
But then if Donald Trump can get away with claiming there was never a drought in California and still get elected president, why shouldn’t corporations be able to ignore their blemishes, particularly when criticizing politicians and brands on social media carriers the risk of public interrogation and verbally abuse?
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
As we’ve been exploring the Periodic Table of Email Optimization and Deliverability in recent weeks, we’ve looked at Permission, Trust, Infrastructure and Audience. This time, we will go into another critical set of elements — those involving Content.
First and foremost, in this age of smartphones and tablets, it’s critical that your emails are designed in such a way that they are Responsive (Rd) – so they are optimized to look good on a wide variety of devices and in many different email clients. You can choose to send emails in HTML or in plain text, depending on the Structure (St) that you prefer or the purpose of the email. For example, you might choose plain text for a Transactional (Tr) email, one sent to confirm an online order or provide shipping information or otherwise facilitate an agreed upon transaction.
Whatever format you choose, you’ll want to carefully craft your Subject Line (Sj), the introduction that tells the recipient about the intent of the message and encourages the person to open it. Once it’s open, the email content should have a Personality (Hi), using images and text that reflect your brand, and it should strive for Readability (Re), speaking your audience’s language in scannable, easy-to-read sentences and paragraphs.
The frequency with which your email messages are delivered also has an important effect on how they are received. Adopt a well-thought-out email marketing Calendar (Ca) structured around your organization’s milestones.
More about the Managed Inbox
About The Author
Pamela Parker is Senior Editor and Projects Manager at Third Door Media’s Content Studio, where she produces Martech Intelligence Reports and other in-depth content for digital marketers in conjunction with Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, MarTech Today and Digital Marketing Depot. Prior to taking on this role at TDM, she served as Content Manager and Executive Features Editor. Parker is a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since its beginning. She’s a former managing editor of ClickZ and has also worked on the business side helping independent publishers monetize their sites at Federated Media Publishing. Parker earned a masters degree in journalism from Columbia University.
Finally, it’s time to discuss the people you’re trying to reach with your email messages – your Audience. Here we shift to the Optimization section of the Periodic Table of Email Optimization and Deliverability, which we’ve been exploring in recent weeks.
The most important element of all is the Email Address (At), the unique identifier for your subscriber. This is the most valuable piece of information that we can collect.
Email addresses are typically assembled into Lists (Ls) – groups of email addresses that are uploaded to distribute email messages to. Each List, however, can be divided into various cohorts — depending on the amount of data you have on them — via Segmentation (Sg). Segmentation allows marketers to choose smaller groups of customers, or potential customers, and communicate with them in a manner that is specifically tailored to their particular demographics, locations or behaviors. Personalization (Me) refers to the practice of using subscriber data to tailor-make content for individuals based upon the information you have about them.
This information can be collected and augmented through the use of an email Preference Center (Pc), which is an interface for subscribers that allows them to manage their subscription preferences. Preference Centers can be used to allow recipients to tell senders how best to serve them by expressing their interests or indicate how often they’d like to receive communications.
Beyond Preference Centers, marketers can learn a lot about subscribers’ likes and dislikes by observing how they interact with messages that are sent. Recipients use an email Client (Cl) to either download their email or access their email through a web interface. The first metric marketers look at is the Open (Op), which occurs when a recipient actually opens an email. Next, marketers can look at whether users Click (Ck), or interact with a link within the email, which demonstrates their Engagement (Eg) with the content.
When marketers are analyzing their Audience’s interaction with the emails they’ve sent, two of the metrics that often have an impact on engagement are Send Time (St), the time the email is sent (typically looked at in terms of the recipient’s time zone) and Send Frequency (Sf), how often a given email address or list receives emails from the brand.
More about the Managed Inbox
About The Author
Pamela Parker is Senior Editor and Projects Manager at Third Door Media’s Content Studio, where she produces Martech Intelligence Reports and other in-depth content for digital marketers in conjunction with Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, MarTech Today and Digital Marketing Depot. Prior to taking on this role at TDM, she served as Content Manager and Executive Features Editor. Parker is a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since its beginning. She’s a former managing editor of ClickZ and has also worked on the business side helping independent publishers monetize their sites at Federated Media Publishing. Parker earned a masters degree in journalism from Columbia University.
Quotient announced last week that it’s buying Ubimo, an Israeli location intelligence company. Ubimo translates location data and history into audience segmentation, activation and campaign attribution, connecting digital campaigns to in-store results.
DSP was the attraction. Quotient and Ubimo had worked together for several years, utilizing the latter’s data for Quotient customer campaigns. But the primary rationale behind the acquisition was Ubimo’s DSP, according to Jason Young is Quotient’s Chief Marketing & Media Officer.
Quotient intends to offer its CPG brand and agency clients a self-service DSP. “The acquisition will accelerate Quotient’s product development of a self-service platform, where marketers can plan, buy, and optimize media campaigns directly from an automated platform,” according to the Quotient’s press materials.
Coupons.com evolved. Quotient began life as Coupons.com in 1998, which it still owns and operates. In 2017, the company acquired mobile marketing company Crisp Media for roughly $53 million.
Quotient distributes digital coupons through its network, which includes Coupons.com and a wide range of retailers and grocery store properties. The company also makes programmatic media buys on behalf of customers.
Quotient influencer marketing campaigns (2019)
Through loyalty cards and point-of-sale (POS) redemption data, Quotient is able to deliver closed loop reporting as well. It also uses POS data for campaign targeting.
For retailers, Quotient offers a range of ad and media solutions. For example, it enables retailers to sell ad space on their sites and apps and distribute digital circulars on social media. It also operates an influencer marketing platform.
Utility of location data. Brands that don’t have access to coupon or loyalty card POS data, have increasingly used store visitation as an attribution metric. That’s one of the primary capabilities Ubimo offers its customers.
But Ubimo also uses location data, which can be combined with other data sets, to enable highly specific audience segmentation and targeting. Quotient will bring Ubimo’s technology into its platform and combine its own shopper data with Ubimo’s location data and analytics, which Quotient “expects to meaningfully improve campaign performance for customers.”
With Ubimo’s assets and customer relationships, Quotient intends to expand beyond its traditional CPG and retail customer/partner base and move into “adjacent markets, such as Out-of-Home.”
Why we should care. Quotient’s main reason for buying Ubimo was the company’s DSP. But from a larger market perspective, the deal shows the increasingly mainstream use of location intelligence, both for targeting and attribution. It also shows a growing recognition of the power of location data for merchants and brands — unless they sell exclusively online — to maximize targeting effectiveness and to demonstrate the real-world impact of digital campaigns.
About The Author
Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes about the connections between digital and offline commerce. He previously held leadership roles at LSA, The Kelsey Group and TechTV. Follow him Twitter or find him on LinkedIn.
While marketers may not be in charge of their company’s email infrastructure – typically the IT department handles such matters – it’s critical that marketers have insight into how everything fits together so they can talk with the engineers that are configuring their email-related systems. The following elements refer to the way email is sent, routed and received through the internet.
The Mail Transfer Agent (Ta) is software that transfers email from one computer to another using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, known as SMTP. When users receive, view and reply to email messages, they use a Mail User Agent (Ua), or MUA. This is also called an email program or email client and it sometimes is used through a web-based interface. Outbound messages use an SMTP server (Ss), while inbound messages use a POP3 (P3) or IMAP server.
An IP (or Internet Protocol) (Ip) address is a number – or “address” assigned to each computer, network device or network that’s connecting to and communicating through the internet. Depending on how you are sending email, you may have a dedicated IP address, which is solely your own, or a shared IP address, which you share with many other senders using the same host or email service provider. This is important because Sender Reputation is often assigned by IP address, as it’s difficult to distinguish between multiple senders using a single IP address. Therefore, if you want to be in control of your own Sender Reputation, you will use a dedicated IP address so that only your own sending practices – and no one else’s – can affect your Sender Reputation.
Typically, your IP address will be associated with a domain name or a subdomain (Sd) – like marketingland.com or mail.marketingland.com – through the Domain Name System (Dns). The DNS maps domain names to the IP addresses hosting the web sites and the IP addresses sending mail for, a particular entity with a particular domain name.
Having your own dedicated domain name and IP address are also important when it comes to getting feedback – through a Feedback Loop (Fl) – from inbox providers about how your messages are being received by recipients. Not all inbox providers offer this service, but the larger ones do, and this feedback loop can include data on complaints and other information that can help marketers optimize their lists and messaging. Typically, these feedback communications will go to your email service provider – the company or software you’re using to send your emails.
Managing your Sender Reputation through the use of dedicated IP addresses and monitoring feedback from inbox providers are elements of Reputation Management (Rm) – tools marketers, their IT staff and their email service providers use to manage the reputation of their domains and IP addresses.
Pamela Parker is Senior Editor and Projects Manager at Third Door Media’s Content Studio, where she produces Martech Intelligence Reports and other in-depth content for digital marketers in conjunction with Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, MarTech Today and Digital Marketing Depot. Prior to taking on this role at TDM, she served as Content Manager and Executive Features Editor. Parker is a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since its beginning. She’s a former managing editor of ClickZ and has also worked on the business side helping independent publishers monetize their sites at Federated Media Publishing. Parker earned a masters degree in journalism from Columbia University.
The year is almost over… do yourself and your career a favor: Attend SMX East for the expert-led training and actionable tactics you need to generate awareness, drive traffic, and boost conversions in 2020 and beyond.
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See you in NYC 🙂
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About The Author
Lauren Donovan has worked in online marketing since 2006, specializing in content generation, organic social media, community management, real-time journalism, and holistic social befriending. She currently serves as the Content Marketing Manager at Third Door Media, parent company to Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, MarTech Today, SMX, and The MarTech Conference.
Gaining permission from a recipient to send them email sets the stage for building trust. This includes both the trust of the recipient and the trust of their ISP, which ultimately controls which emails are delivered, which go into the spam folder and which are blocked entirely.
A number of technical measures, designed to verify the sender of an email, fall under the blanket of Authentication (Au) and represent the basic requirements that mass-senders must fulfill to gain the trust of inbox providers.
Domain Key Identified Mail (Dk), also known as DKIM, refers to mail that uses a public/private cryptography key set to verify the identity of the sender. Sender Policy Framework (Sp), or SPF, is a different authentication standard that specifies which IP addresses are authorized to send mail for a given domain. Domain-based Message Authentication and Conformance (Dc), or DMARC, aims to help brands prevent their domains from being used by other entities for malicious purposes.
Maintaining that trust also means including the Physical Address (Ph) of the entity sending the email which, according to CAN-SPAM regulation, must appear in the body of the email. A sender can also gain credibility by being placed on an inbox provider’s Whitelist (Wi), a list of IP addresses and/or domains that are permitted into a particular network, allowing emails to bypass typical checks designed to quarantine emails.
Finally, the Sender Domain (Od) and Sender Reputation (Sr) elements refer to the fact that marketers need to own the domain from which they are sending emails, and that they need to develop and cultivate a good reputation with inbox providers, since that reputation for abiding by responsible practices will affect how the sender’s emails are placed – in the inbox or in the spam folder – going forward.
Pamela Parker is Senior Editor and Projects Manager at Third Door Media’s Content Studio, where she produces Martech Intelligence Reports and other in-depth content for digital marketers in conjunction with Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, MarTech Today and Digital Marketing Depot. Prior to taking on this role at TDM, she served as Content Manager and Executive Features Editor. Parker is a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since its beginning. She’s a former managing editor of ClickZ and has also worked on the business side helping independent publishers monetize their sites at Federated Media Publishing. Parker earned a masters degree in journalism from Columbia University.
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