Email marketing, when done right, can be extremely effective at reaching customers, when done badly and used improperly can simply become Spam. 

“Spam is any kind of unwanted, unsolicited digital communication that gets sent out in bulk.” (Malwarebytes)

According to Forbes (2020) 320 billion spam emails are sent every day. Therefore, it’s more than worth the effort not to become part of that statistic. 

To avoid your domain gaining a bad reputation as a Spam sender, it is always best to provide transparent opt-in features combined with legitimate email address lists.

However, even with all that and with the best intentions as a legitimate business, you may still be labelled as Spam. By sending too many emails, along with impersonal, irrelevant content, it is far more difficult to reach your audience’s Inbox. 

The last thing you want to do is send unwanted emails to customers and be known for doing bad business.

You need to show that you are a trusted sender, that you are who you say you are when sending emails. 

So apart from following the good practices of a good email marketer, we strongly encourage you to get familiar with three pillars of email authentication and while it’s not required to use them, we definitely recommend setting them up.

So let’s look closer at the three pillars: DKIM, SPF and DMARC.

• SPF (Sender Policy Framework) allows a domain to be authenticated, which in turn allows mail from that domain to pass freely to a receiving server instead of being blocked. By way of a comparison, it is akin to a person being more likely to open a letter if they know who sent them the letter.
• DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) makes sure the content of your email has not been interfered with and it can be trusted. It allows a receiving domain to know an email was authorized by a sending domain.

In other words, if SPF is like a return address on a letter, DKIM is like sending that letter via Registered Mail – it gives more credibility.

• DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) links the sender’s domain name with what is listed in the From: header, which adds another layer of authentication to emails. Also, DMARC helps to unify SPF & DKIM.

So, why do we need these three pillars (SPF, DKIM & DMARC)?

SPF, DKIM & DMARC can improve deliverability rates and increase the chances that Inbox is the final destination of your email campaign. 

Authentication solves the problem of determining who the email is coming from, not whether the email is wanted by the recipient. Authentication also allows good senders to both enhance their reputation and protect their domain from hijacking.

SPF, DKIM and DMARC are crucial standards that help to ensure the proper deliverability of your email campaigns.

Sagitari.ai automatically configures the security protocols for all the customers so contact us for more information.