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The Role of DKIM in Email Marketing

by Ahona Rudra on June 29, 2023

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) plays a crucial role in email marketing by providing authentication and verifying the integrity of email messages. There’s no doubt that email marketing is crucial to your business growth, but the effort pays off only when messages reach the targeted recipients’ primary inboxes. DKIM is one of the ways that help improve email deliverability and reputation by verifying the authenticity of senders sending emails from your domain.

Why is DKIM Important in Email Marketing?

DKIM verifies if the senders using your domain are genuine or not. This helps recipients identify you as a legitimate sender, boosting subscribers’ trust and engagement. Not just this, but DKIM deployment shields your business against email-based phishing and spoofing attacks attempted in your company’s name.

Boosting Email Deliverability with DKIM

Your outgoing messages can land in the spam folder or get outrightly rejected by recipients’ mailboxes, failing all your email marketing efforts. But DKIM ensures your messages reach the audience. It operates using a pair of digitally signed public and private keys that confirm whether the email is sent by an authorized server. It also validates that no part of the message, including attachments, has been modified or torn down in transit.

This whole exercise ensures your emails reach your target audiences’ inboxes and not spam folders, increasing click-through and open rates. With an increased interaction rate, more subscribers follow the call-to-action button or link, and many of them even end up adding suggested products and services to their cart and finally check out!

Establishing Brand Trust Through DKIM

If recipients’ mailboxes identify your domain as genuine and trustworthy, your email reputation and credibility get boosted. As per Google’s online resource, new senders sending emails to Gmail users are required to set up at least SPF or DKIM. Google undertakes random checks on incoming emails, and it has been observed that messages lacking SPF and/or DKIM are rejected with a 5.7.26 error or are categorized as spam. This helps Gmail establish trust in you as a sender, which consequently encourages recipients to identify you as a reliable brand too.

Common Challenges with Implementing DKIM in Email Marketing

Organizations may face several challenges when implementing DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) in email marketing. Here are some common challenges that can arise:

Technical Complexity

Organizations with limited technical resources or expertise may find setting up DKIM to be challenging. It requires knowledge and expertise in generating and managing DKIM keys, configuring DNS records, and integrating DKIM signing into the email sending infrastructure.

DNS Configuration

Implementing DKIM involves adding DNS records to the organization’s domain. This can be a tricky task for certain organizations, particularly those with complicated DNS configurations or numerous domains for sending emails.

Email Deliverability Issues

Email deliverability can be improved by using DKIM, which verifies the authenticity of emails. However, if there are misconfigurations or errors when implementing DKIM, it can cause issues with the delivery of emails. For instance, if DKIM signatures are not properly set up, it can result in emails being labeled as spam or not accepted by the recipient’s email servers.

Managing DKIM keys

Managing DKIM keys can pose a challenge, particularly in organizations that send a high number of emails or have multiple domains for sending emails. It’s important to carefully consider key rotation, storage, and the security of private keys when implementing DKIM.

Third Party Integrations

Integrating DKIM with third-party services can often be complicated. Email marketing platforms or service providers employed by organizations might offer varied levels of DKIM support or integration. Cooperation and coordination between the organization and the service provider are usually necessary.

Incorporating DKIM in Your Email Marketing: Considerations and Best Practices

Your email marketing efforts will pay off when you-

Make DKIM Keys At Least 1024 Bits Long

Include at least 1024-bit long characters for optimum email security and preventing man-in-the-middle attackers to tamper with your emails. It’s even more strongly suggested to use 2048-bit long DKIM keys as the longer the keys, the harder it becomes for malicious actors to break them.

Rotate Your DKIM Keys Properly

The regular and frequent rotation of DKIM keys makes it difficult for threat actors to locate, destroy, or exploit them. It’s also advised to use unique keys for each client.

Expiration

Digital signatures’ expiration period must be greater than the current key’s rotation period. Also, remember to revoke old keys.

Test Mode

It has been observed that some mail providers overlook the presence of the DKIM signature if they notice “t=y” as this declaration is for testing only. You may use this for a brief period and only during the initial ramp-up.

Monitoring

When monitoring how recipients’ mailboxes are accepting DKIM-signed emails sent from your domain, shift your DMARC policy to none. Use DNS to understand how frequently your keys are being queried.

Compliance by Third-Party Mailers

Make sure your third-party email vendors support email authentication practices.

Monitoring and Maintaining DKIM to Ensure Long-Term Email Marketing Success

Often DKIM records don’t perform as they should and face technical issues, impacting marketing campaigns. You can overcome this with proper monitoring and maintenance done using our DKIM checker.

You may discover several errors and vulnerabilities upon performing a DKIM lookup. These should be resolved at the earliest, otherwise, hackers can exploit them and ruin your long-term email marketing journey. It’s no news that it takes a lot of effort to regain the trust of email service providers and your target audience if your brand is taken down once.

We advise monitoring your email-sending domain’s activity upon enabling the DKIM strict policy (adkim=s) to evaluate its performance and catch unauthorized acts. You may monitor authentication results using the DMARC reporting tool or by directly analyzing your email header information.

We understand how all of this consumes a lot of bandwidth and requires technical expertise. So, if you feel like having some technical help by your side for flawless DKIM deployment and maintenance, reach out to our experts. Our team will help you align your emails against modern email authentication technogies so that emails crafted by your marketing team land in your target audience’s inboxes.

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