Delivery profiles and sender profiles in Marketing Cloud can be combined to make send classifications. These essentially work as templates that can be applied by other users for email sends, meaning you can keep control over the definitions of multiple types of email sends going out of your Marketing Cloud account.
This is a quick guide to explain how these three concepts work together. By creating sender and/or delivery profiles, these can be combined to form send classifications.
Sender Profiles vs. Delivery Profiles
- Sender profiles in Marketing Cloud define the sender information, i.e. ‘from’ name and email address.
- Delivery profiles define the delivery information for a message, including IP address and headers/footers.
Create a Sender Profile in Marketing Cloud
To view/create sender profiles in Marketing Cloud, navigate to: Marketing Setup → Profiles.
Fill in the name, description, and external key (the sender profile ID that auto-populates in this field, unless specified).
In the sender information section, the ‘from’ information (i.e. name and email address) can either be:
- Chosen from a list, to take from a selected Marketing Cloud user’s record.
- Specified information, either typed in free text or personalization strings which dynamically pull in ‘from’ information specific to the subscriber – for example, the user that ‘owns’ the record (%%owner_name%% and %%owner_email%%).
Note: The domain of any address (i.e. @company.com) should be one that’s authenticated in your account; if not, you will be prompted to verify it. If your organization has purchased Sender Authentication Package (SAP), then ‘from’ email addresses ought to align to that domain.
There are other sender profile fields to note:
- Fallback address: Populates the ‘from’ email address at send time in cases where the addresses in your data extension are unverified.
- Rule collection: Part of the Reply Mail Management (RMM) settings, rules define what routing/automated actions should happen when a recipient replies to an email sent from Marketing Cloud. For example, you may have a rule setup to handle manual unsubscribe requests (i.e. someone replying with ‘unsubscribe’). Rule collections, therefore, are essentially rules grouped that can be applied to items, such as sender profiles. See a tutorial by Kaelan Moss below:
Create a Delivery Profile in Marketing Cloud
To view/create delivery profiles in Marketing Cloud, navigate to: Marketing Setup → Delivery Profile.
Fill in the name, description, and external key (the sender profile ID that auto-populates in this field, unless specified).
In the delivery information section, the IP address, i.e. where emails appear to originate from, can either be:
- Account Default
- Private, if you are using dedicated IP (select from a list if your organization has multiple set up).
Headers and Footers can either be set as your Account Default, or none.
- Account Default is set using Header and Footer Rules, which an admin sets up.
- If you choose none, users will be prompted to add an unsubscribe link and mailing address, at a minimum, before sending the email (to remain compliant).
Create Send Classifications in Marketing Cloud
Once you have the sender and delivery profiles set up, you can now combine any one of each type to make a send classification.
Sender Profile + Delivery Profile = Send Classification
Key points to note about creating send classifications are that you can:
- Override the sender profile and delivery profile properties within the send classification properties.
- Define send classifications as either commercial or transactional (i.e. marketing vs. operational emails). When transactional is selected, you can choose whether sends honor the opt-out list associated with your chosen list (more information here).
- Use send priority (normal, low, high) to determine where sends using this send classification are placed in the sending queue, relative to sends using other send classifications.
Summary
Send classifications in Marketing Cloud are the combination of sender profiles and delivery profiles, and therefore, essentially work as templates that can be applied by other users to email sends.
By using these three concepts in tandem, you can keep control over the definitions of multiple types of email sends going out of your Marketing Cloud account.