How to improve your email campaign deliverability with DKIM

At the heart of any Content Marketing strategy is the have to have tactic of email.

It’s a fact that email performs better and costs less than just about any other online marketing tactic. SalesForce recently reported in their State of Marketing survey that 80% of marketers consider email essential for success in achieving both marketing and business goals.

But email marketing can often be a challenge. That’s because you always have to address the many variables that you need to get right in order to deliver the conversions you’re hoping for. Some of them include:

• List quality
• Message relevance + quality
• Mobile optimized content + design
• Sender domain authority
• Dynamic + personalized content
• Subject lines
• CAN-SPAM compliant subscribers
• Time + date of delivery
• HTML + plain text email
• And more

With so much to continually keep your eye on, it’s easy to overlook the one thing that matters most for email: Deliverability.

Without a doubt, if the email doesn’t get to your prospect or customer, what chance do you have to get a click conversion for all of your effort?

One of the best practices you can implement to maximize email deliverability is DKIM.

What the heck is DKIM?

DKIM | DomainKeys Identified Mail (pronounced dee’-kim), is an important authentication mechanism for protecting senders and receivers from forged Email.

DKIM adds code to your email that can only be created by your authorized senders—including marketing automation providers. And if you enable and deploy DKIM, the code in the emails that you send will be confirmed as genuinely coming from your organization or you.

All the geek you need to know.

In technical terms, DKIM lets a domain associate its name with an email message by affixing a digital signature to it. Verification is carried out using the signer’s public key published in the publicly available DNS records under your control.

A valid signature guarantees that some parts of the email—including attachments—have not been modified since the signature was affixed. Usually, DKIM signatures are not visible to end-users, and are affixed or verified by the infrastructure of the internet rather than message author or recipient.

Overwhelmed with SPAM? Fight back.

It’s important to remember that most email in-boxes are overflowing with unwanted SPAM. The goal of the deadbeats that send this irritating content is to convince email recipient’s that an email is from a sender that they recognize so that they’ll open and read it.

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DKIM technology was created to address this growing volume of SPAM which often has forged addresses and content.

For example, a SPAM message may claim to be from sender@example.com even if it’s not actually from that address, domain or entity. This makes it very difficult for recipients to know whether they should trust or distrust an email message or domain.

DKIM can also be very effective as an anti-phishing technology. If you send lots of email or your domain is prone to or has been phished, it’s essential to sign your sent mail with DKIM to show that it’s in fact genuine.

Without a valid DKIM enabled signature, you’ll be providing recipients with a legitimate indication that your mail is probably forged, SPAM or worse.

What are you waiting for?

So, if email matters for you to successfully achieve your marketing objectives, it makes sense to enable and deploy DKIM on your domain ASAP.

And if you’re working with a qualified resource that’s fluent in the ongoing requirements and continually changing technologies of Content Marketing, they should help you get there fast.

But if they’re clueless, consider someone who can connect all of the strategic, creative and technical dots so you get a better online outcome.

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