Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) is a specification that allows you to prevent email spoofing and phishing attempts. In a nutshell, DMARC allows you to implement a policy that helps verify that your email messages can be trusted by your recipients’ mail servers. DMARC can lower your email bounce rates by improving your domain reputation and email deliverability. It also boosts your email marketing campaigns, improves the sender reputation of your domain, and makes receiving emails more secure.

A high email bounce rate can seriously hurt the success rate of your email marketing campaigns in the future. Surveys suggest that 50% of all emails sent out by the marketing professionals at your organization, never even reach the inboxes of your prospective clients. From there, many face a further challenge in actually getting read, with many more emails ending up in your trash or spam folder than any other location. Luckily for us, DMARC is an email authentication standard that’s very close to a reality where it will fix these issues. Let’s find out how! 

Why Do Email Bounces Occur?  

Sometimes your outbound email gets rejected by the recipients’ mail server. When an email bounces, it is because the email server thinks that there’s a problem or error with how you sent the message. Email bounces can occur due to a wide variety of reasons, here are a few: 

• Server outage 
• Your receiver’s inbox is full 
• Poor sender reputation as a result of spam complaints 

While the first two scenarios are quite easy to handle, the third scenario is where matters get a little tricky and complicated. More often than not your domain can be spoofed by attackers, meaning that your very domain name can be used to send fake emails to phish your recipients. Repeated spoofing attempts on your domain and emails containing fraudulent attachments sent to your receivers can drastically damage your sender reputation. This increases the chances of your emails being marked as spam and aggravates the risk of email bounces. 

A DMARC analyzer helps you stop email spoofing and protects your receivers from accepting fake emails sent from your domain. This, in turn, upholds your reputation and credibility and lowers your email bounce rate over time. 

DMARC and Deliverability

If you run an online business, you already know how important email deliverability is. To maximize profit on your email marketing campaigns, you need to ensure that legitimate emails always get delivered and reduce the chances of your emails being marked as spam in your recipients’ inboxes.

The most effective way to secure user trust is by not allowing phishing and spam emails. But to do this you will need the credibility of appearing legitimate – in other words, your users need to recognize your emails as being real emails and not spam. DMARC is designed to reduce the number of spam emails delivered to your recipients’ inboxes while ensuring legitimate emails from your domain are always successfully delivered. DMARC provides a method for sending organizations to ensure that emails are delivered reliably and offers domain protection using SPF/DKIM records. DMARC is based on the concept of alignment between authentication protocols (the aforementioned SPF and DKIM) and reports describing sender usages such as message repudiation or policy violations.  

Monitor Your Email Channels with DMARC Reports 

While implementing DMARC, experts recommend that you start off with a none policy and enable DMARC reporting for all your domains. Although a none policy for DMARC doesn’t protect your domain against spoofing and phishing attacks, it is ideal when you want to simply monitor all your email channels and view how your emails are performing. A DMARC report analyzer is the perfect platform to do exactly that, and much more! It helps you view all your email sending sources across a single pane of glass, and fix issues in email delivery. 

Slowly, but surely, you can confidently shift to a more enforced policy so as to stop attackers from misusing your domain name. To further increase the chances of your legitimate emails reaching your clients, you can implement BIMI at your organization. Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI), as the name suggests, helps your clients visually identify your brand in their inboxes by affixing your unique logo to each of your outbound emails. This makes your email marketing campaigns more of a success and reduces the chances of email bounces even further!