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Create Sender Profiles, Delivery Profiles, and Send Classifications

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

  • Create a sender profile.
  • Create a delivery profile.
  • Combine your profiles into a send classification.

Same Settings, Every Time

An email message may seem fairly simple, even if you include the latest content types and interactivity. However, each message requires some basic components that must be included, or else you risk not complying with accepted standards and legal regulations. For that reason, Marketing Cloud Engagement provides three entities you can use to standardize your email messages and include all the necessary (and legally required) components. Better yet, you can reuse these components whenever you want!

  • Sender profile
  • Delivery profile
  • Send classification

Let’s take a closer look at each one.

Sender Profile

The sender profile standardizes the From name and email address you use for email sends. Marketing Cloud Engagement stores this information so you can simply select a sender profile whenever you perform a send. Not only can you create several different sender profiles to fit your needs, but you can also use personalization strings or AMPscript to populate the field. For example, if you send to an audience with the data extension field customer_rep, you can include %%customer_rep%% in the From name field when you create the sender profile.

Note

Always include a fallback address in case the data extension field is not populated. Otherwise, you end up with send errors and a less-than-ideal customer experience.

Delivery Profile

While the sender profile includes the From information for your sends, the delivery profile includes some important message information for each send.

  • A header with a link to view the email message as a webpage
  • A footer containing the physical mailing address required by CAN-SPAM regulations
  • An unsubscribe link allowing users to remove themselves from your mailing list (also in the footer)

You can choose to include the default account information for a delivery profile, select a different delivery profile, or even forgo the delivery profile altogether. If you choose that last option, the email itself must include the physical address and the unsubscribe link. Otherwise, the message will not be sent until you add the information.

Bring Your Profiles Together with Send Classifications

So, why not just include all of this information in a single place? You can! In fact, you may want to mix and match different sender and delivery profiles—whether you’re sending a marketing or transactional email, sending to different countries, or any other reason. Send classifications allow you to create sender and delivery profiles, then join them together in whatever combination you need for your sends.

Basically, a send classification includes three things. First, you set a CAN-SPAM classification of Commercial or Transactional. Commercial emails are traditional marketing emails that honor subscription and opt-out requests. Transactional messages occur as the result of a purchase, opt-in, or other activity. However, you can set your send classification to honor opt-outs as well. After that step, you can set a sender profile and a delivery profile. Just choose the proper send classification when you send your email messages, and every one goes out with the most appropriate information.

So how does this help you manage your sends? The standardization and personalization of send classifications make sure that your email messages contain the information necessary to comply with regulations and correctly label the types of messages sent from your account. These efforts help establish your reputation as a trusted sender and get your email messages to the inbox. You can do your part by using trusted IP addresses, too. Let’s talk more about IP addresses in the next unit.

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