Get ready for email marketing

 

Applies To: Dynamics Marketing

Important

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing has been discontinued and is no longer available. All customer data related to this product has been permanently deleted from all Microsoft servers and is no longer available for extraction. This documentation is being provided for historical purposes only.

Sending marketing email is not the same as sending personal email as most people know it. The difference is actually obvious: personal emails get delivered to just one or a few people, while marketing emails get delivered to thousands or more every month.

In response to various email abuses, such as widely targeted spam and scams, most companies and email providers now implement filtering and blocking mechanisms to defend their bandwidth and keep their users’ inboxes clean. So when somebody begins sending very large volumes of email, the Internet takes notice and defensive mechanisms may begin to kick in, which might result in keeping your messages out of your contacts’ inboxes. These systems are not intended to stop all forms of legitimate marketing email, just to block abuse. Microsoft Dynamics Marketing is designed to be one of the good guys—to facilitate collaborative, opt-in marketing—but you do need to be aware of how to work in the context of common anti-spam laws and other mechanisms to help make sure your marketing messages get delivered to your contacts rather than stuck in their spam filters.

Building and protecting your sender reputation

When a message goes out over the Internet, the IP address that sent it is available to each server that processes that message. Third-party watchdog organizations, such as ReturnPath, monitor activity, message content and complaints associated with sending addresses and generate a reputation score for each sending IP. The lower your reputation, the more likely your messages are to get dropped or filtered out; if your score gets low enough you’ll end up on a block list and none of your messages will get delivered.

In addition to send reputation, many countries/regions have laws that regulate commercial email messages, and breaking these laws can expose you to expensive litigation. Examples of these include CAN-SPAM in the United States and CASL in Canada.

So what can you do to maximize your deliverability and remain within the law, and how can Dynamics Marketing help? Here are a few of the most important factors for building and maintaining a good sender score:

• Create clean, collaborative, and responsible content
  Both spam filters and sender-reputation systems analyze the content of the messages you are trying to send. They look for signs that you are working together with your recipients and are identifying yourself honestly. Common requirements here are the presence of unsubscribe links and your organization’s physical street address in the message body. Messages in HTML format should also include a plain-text version with the same information. Dynamics Marketing provides plug-ins and a subscription-center feature to make it easy to include these essential items in your messages, and helps prevent you from leaving them out by mistake. Other types of content to avoid include overuse of exclamation points (especially in the subject), all-caps text, “buy now” buttons, body text hidden in bitmaps, and certain hot-button terms. You know what spam looks like—don’t look like that!

• Authenticate your messages and sending IP
  Several standards are in place to help ensure that sending IP addresses really do represent the organizations they claim to, and that messages coming from those IPs are authentic and untampered with. These include sender policy framework (SPF), SenderID, and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). Microsoft does what it can to maintain a good sender reputation and to sign and authenticate messages sent from our servers, but you can also improve deliverability by associating your Dynamics Marketing sending IPs with your organization’s domain name in the DNS system (as described in the next section).

• Avoid sending to invalid email addresses
  If you send a message to an invalid or canceled email address, the message is typically returned as what is called a “hard bounce”. Hard bounces happen, but the reputation watchdogs will notice, and the more hard bounces you have associated with your sending IP, the lower your reputation will be. Addresses associated with a hard bounce will probably never come back online, so you don’t want them in your database; Dynamics Marketing will automatically stop sending to addresses that report a hard bounce and can optionally purge them from your database. Microsoft needs to defend the reputation of our sending IPs, so organizations that consistently generate a large number of hard bounces may be placed into a higher-risk sending pool or might even eventually have their accounts closed.

• Send consistent volumes
  High sender reputations are associated with IP addresses that send a consistent volume of email. A sudden spike will lower the score, as will intermittent send volumes. Microsoft maintains several pools of IP addresses dedicated to sending messages from Dynamics Marketing, and may share these between customers with similar reputation scores. This means that we can distribute email sends across our pools and thereby ensure a roughly consistent send volume for each IP. Each time we add a new address to a pool, we “warm it up” by gradually increasing the volume it sends until it eventually reaches the same level as the other IPs in its pool. For most Dynamics Marketing subscribers this is handled automatically and invisibly, but new subscribers who plan to send marketing messages to very large numbers of recipients (such as in the millions) may need to start small and ramp up over time before reaching full volume; in this case, Microsoft support will notify you and help you during this process.

For more information about deliverability and sender reputation, see the Microsoft white paper: Best practices for email delivery. Or search with Bing for many more good articles about this topic.

Improve your deliverability with SPF

As mentioned previously, one way to improve your email deliverability is to use the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) to link your organization’s domain name with the sending IPs used by Dynamics Marketing in the DNS system. This will ensure that spam filters and reputation watchdogs will be able to see that the IP address sending your message is a legitimate sender for the domain name shown in the from address. This step is not strictly required, but it is highly recommended as it should dramatically improve your deliverability rates.

To enable this, you must contact your domain-name registrar and tell them which IP addresses or domains you want to authenticate as legitimate senders for your domain. Some registrars may have an online form that lets you do this yourself; if you are not sure how, then contact your registrar for assistance. The information you need to register is summarized in the following table.

Region	Sending IPs	SPF for trial accounts	SPF for production accounts
North America (NAM)	134.170.113.0/26 131.253.30.0/24	@ IN TXT "v=spf1 include:t-dynmktg.com ~all"	@ IN TXT "v=spf1 include:pb-dynmktg.com include:pt-dynmktg.com ~all"
Europe, middle-east and Africa (EMEA)	157.56.120.128/26 134.170.174.0/24	@ IN TXT "v=spf1 include:t-dynmktge.com ~all"	@ IN TXT "v=spf1 include:pb-dynmktge.com include:pt-dynmktge.com ~all"
Asia-Pacific (APAC)	134.170.141.64/26 134.170.143.0/24	@ IN TXT "v=spf1 include:t-dynmktga.com ~all"	@ IN TXT "v=spf1 include:pb-dynmktga.com include:pt-dynmktga.com ~all"

You may also have heard about a related technology called DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), which is used to authenticate and sign messages using encryption keys. Microsoft has already set this up for our sending domains, so your organization will automatically benefit from this technology. (However, you need to set up your own custom DKIM keys if you decide to use a dedicated IP, as mentioned in the next section.)

Using a custom, dedicated sender IP

In a standard Dynamics Marketing setup, all sender IPs are managed by Microsoft and shared among customers with similar reputation scores. This lets us manage reputation, balance the send load, and warm up new IPs as needed. However, some organizations prefer to use their own, dedicated sender IP, especially if they will be sending very high volumes.

Note

Dedicated sender IPs are not part of the standard Dynamics Marketing subscription agreement, and Microsoft does not generally recommend them because they introduce extra complexity and expense—and can result reduced deliverability compared to our standard sender IP pools. Microsoft considers applications for dedicated sender IPs on a case-by-case basis. If you think your organization could benefit from a dedicated sender IP, then please contact your Microsoft Support representative to find out if you qualify.

Though there can be a few advantages to arranging for a dedicated sender IP, there are also disadvantages and it is not for everyone. Consider the following:

• A new sender IP requires time to warm up
  When your new sender IP comes online, you must start by sending just a few messages at a time and then slowly ramp up over several weeks until you reach your intended send volume, which you must then continue to maintain. A sudden spike of email coming from a new IP will severely damage your send reputation and may land you on a block list right away.

• Maintain a regular and consistent send volume
  You must spread out your email sends to ensure that you send roughly the same volume every week or so. Don’t try to send all of your messages at once at the start of each month, for example.

• You should set up your own DKIM keys
  As mentioned in the previous section, DKIM technology lets email servers authenticate the sender and signed content of your messages. In a standard, shared-IP scenario, Microsoft handles this for you, but if you are using a private IP, then you must coordinate with Microsoft Support to get these encryption keys registered and in place. Doing this is likely to greatly improve your message deliverability.

• You concentrate risk on yourself and may pay a high price for any mistakes
  When you are the only one using your sending IP, then any mistakes you make will impact your sender reputation directly, without being diluted by the large volume of compliant messages being sent by a large pool of other users.

See Also

Get started with Microsoft Dynamics Marketing
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Learn how to work and get around in Microsoft Dynamics Marketing
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Dynamics Marketing for Dynamics 365 users
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Experiment using your own test instance
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