If your business uses email for marketing and transactional messages, you need access to a reliable email infrastructure for sending and receiving messages - commonly known as a mail transfer agent, or MTA.
An MTA is a mail server that’s responsible for relaying messages between the sender and recipient. The mail transfer agent receives a message from the sender’s email client, determines the destination domain, and passes it either to the final destination or to an MTA closer to the end location. If the email delivery fails, the MTA will repeatedly attempt delivery for a set period of time, and eventually generate a bounce message if it is unable to deliver the message. If the message reaches the recipient’s server, the email will be handed off to a Mail Delivery Agent (MDA), which will deliver the message to the recipient’s inbox.
However, not all solutions are alike - and choosing the wrong MTA can lead to devastating consequences, such as operational outages at critical times or security breaches that compromise your customers’ data.
When using an MTA to power email marketing campaigns at scale, your brand needs access to a reliable and scalable solution that provides your customers with enterprise-grade security, without sacrificing performance or deliverability. In this article, we’ll examine the role of an MTA in email marketing in depth, and showcase why Halon is the ideal email infrastructure solution for growing brands to help them optimize their email marketing strategy.
Understanding the role of MTAs in email marketing
As a brand sending email marketing campaigns to thousands, or even millions, of customers, selecting the right email marketing technology is critical to your success. While you’ll likely use a marketing automation tool to segment and send your campaigns, your email marketing operations rely on access to a reliable, flexible, MTA that supports your team’s workflows and technology infrastructure requirements.
Some of the core issues that an MTA can support include:
- Email deliverability
Choosing the right MTA can help you ensure a strong sender reputation, so that your messages get through to recipients instead of ending up in their spam folders. An MTA with a strong reputation, combined with proper authentication protocols (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), improves deliverability by proving to receiving mail servers that the emails are legitimate and not spam. - Scaling email marketing campaigns
Your MTA should be optimized for bulk email sending, with enhanced segmentation capabilities to ensure that your email campaigns don’t get delayed during high-traffic times. With a robust MTA, you should be able to manage tens of thousands of concurrent connections per instance, with no loss in performance. - Security and compliance
Your MTA should offer seamless integrations with threat protection and anti-spam software that will detect abusive or compromised accounts and prevent them from reaching their recipients, helping you keep your sender reputation high and your customers safe. Your solution should also adhere to all of the latest compliance standards, including emerging standards like DANE, MTA-STS, BIMI, EdDSA and ARC. - Tracking and analytics
A best-in-class MTA should make it easy for you to understand when your emails are having deliverability issues, and why. You should have real-time access to data including delivery rates, bounce rates, and open rates, helping you tap into actionable insights that will help you improve your deliverability metrics.
Challenges in email marketing success without the right MTA
Many brands rely on legacy MTAs, such as PowerMTA and Postfix. These MTAs have been around for many years, but they’ve failed to match the pace of business innovation. Some of the major shortfalls of legacy and open-source MTAs include:
- Deliverability issues
Out of the box, these MTAs lack functionality that senders need to ensure high deliverability rates, such as queue management and throttling. Without carefully controlling your email volume, your brand can end up with a disproportionate number of bounces or spam reports. - Scaling problems
MTAs that don’t use load balancing are likely to deal poorly with high volume campaigns, which can overload mail servers and cause bottlenecks. That can lead to delivery delays, when time is of the essence to a successful marketing campaign. - Security and compliance gaps
To scale email marketing campaigns, it’s important to maintain compliance with global regulations, including CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and CASL. Legacy MTAs often require advanced configuration to adhere to these requirements, and can easily include gaps in coverage that leave your company liable to fines and damages. - Lack of innovation
Legacy MTAs are products of their time—which means that if you want to extend your capabilities based on today’s technology, it’s up to your team to build the integrations and features you need. That can require a lot of additional development time, putting you behind your competitors. - Limited support
With most MTAs, customer support options are transactional and ticket-based, or non-existing in the case of open-source MTAs. These MTAs are unwilling or unable to work with your brand on a strategic level to help you understand the tool’s capabilities, or provide support to extend its functionality.
On the whole, MTAs aren’t built for the custom needs of brands that manage high-volume email marketing campaigns, and don’t provide the components and integrations that you’ll need to set your brand up for success with performance at scale and high deliverability rates. As such, your business will need to engineer your solution around the MTA, requiring an excess of development time and money that may set you behind your competitors when it comes to innovation.
Alternatively, you could choose an email infrastructure solution that includes all of the features and integration capabilities you need to build world-class email marketing campaigns from Day One.
Halon Engage : The ultimate solution for email marketing success
Unlike other MTAs, Halon Engage was built for high performance at scale - we’ve engineered a custom solution that’s ideal for the complex technological requirements of large e-commerce brands. Built on modern best practices in compliance with all modern email marketing standards, Halon truly is much more than just an MTA and gives you everything you need to hit the ground running, ensuring successful email campaigns that will drive revenue for your brand.
Some of Halon’s stand-out features for email marketing include:
- Advanced customizability
Halon’s scriptable and customizable MTA allows precise control over email routing and handling. That means you can set up rules for how to handle email traffic to remove bottlenecks and ensure that time-sensitive campaigns always arrive on schedule. - Unmatched deliverability
High deliverability rates are crucial when it comes to email marketing. Halon uses domain reputation management tools, advanced filtering, and spam prevention features to protect your brand’s sender reputation and remove abusive or compromised accounts, helping you keep your deliverability metrics high. - Scalability and performance
Halon is built to scale with your email marketing campaigns, handling large volumes without compromising performance, even during high-traffic campaigns like Black Friday. Whether you run your application on-premises or in the cloud, Halon uses containerization to manage server loads and manage changes in traffic levels without impacting performance. Take a look at how Halon ensures your email infrastructure is ready to handle peak traffic even during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. - Security and compliance features
Halon comes equipped with built-in support for DMARC, SPF, and DKIM to authenticate emails, ensuring strong security and compliance thanks to our SenderShield feature. Stay current on compliance regulations effortlessly, and gain peace of mind that your customers’ data is well protected. - Intelligent bounce management
Halon’s superior bounce handling system improves list management and overall campaign health. With Halon, administrators can respond to bounce events in real time, rather than waiting for batch processing. - In-depth analytics
Halon provides access to granular data associated with delivery rates, bounce rates, and spam reports in real-time, empowering account administrators to respond to alerts immediately. Our in-depth data analysis gives your brand the insights you need to monitor trends and optimize your email strategy for maximum deliverability. - Innovation-focused
Halon does way more than fix bugs when it comes to feature releases—we focus on future-proofing your brand. We regularly update the platform with new features and integrations to stay current with modern email marketing technology and compliance regulations, ensuring that you can get up and ready immediately to meet new regulatory requirements and adopt new technology integrations. - Top-of-the-line support
Where Halon really shines is in our customer support. We don’t simply respond to issues—we work with our customers as a collaborative partner to help them solve their problems and build technology that aligns with their strategy, even if that means adding new features to the platform. Our team of consultants can engineer tailored solutions that meet your brand’s unique needs, with on-call support to help you troubleshoot issues as soon as they arise.
How Constant Contact optimizes email marketing success with Halon
Constant Contact is one of the leading email marketing solutions for hundreds of thousands of small businesses. As the brand scaled, they realized their existing email infrastructure was too rigid to handle increasing traffic without impacting performance, and sought a more flexible and customizable solution that would accommodate their needs as a growing business.
After evaluating their options, Constant Contact chose Halon to serve as the backbone for their email marketing solution. The decision came down to a variety of factors, including:
- Scalability
Halon’s load balancing and containerization technology ensure that Constant Contact is able to scale effortlessly during high-volume times, without negatively impacting delivery speed or deliverability rates. - Operational efficiency
Because of Halon’s library of pre-build components and seamless integration capabilities, Constant Contact was able to minimize the amount of time spent on development and maintenance, enabling them to deploy the new system quickly. - Strategic partnership
Unlike other MTAs, Halon offers strategic guidance and ongoing support during both the implementation process and maintenance phase. Constant Contact was confident that Halon’s support team would partner with them to build a best-in-class solution that met their unique technology requirements, and would respond quickly to resolve any issues. - Improved email delivery
Halon’s technology integrations reduce email bounce rates and improve Constant Contact’s customers’ sender reputations, resulting in improved email deliverability rates.
With their new email infrastructure in place, Constant Contact is well-positioned as the number one email marketing solution for small businesses, thanks to its high speed and great deliverability rates, even at peak sending times.
Best practices for implementing Halon in your email marketing strategy
Whether you’re using Halon to power a best-in-class email marketing platform or to run an individual brand’s marketing campaigns, here are some tips that will help you achieve optimal results:
- Optimize your IP reputation
Before sending out large volumes of email, it’s important to gradually “warm up” your IP addresses by sending messages in phases. If the emails don’t bounce and aren’t marked as spam, you’ll be able to improve your sender reputation, so that you can ensure high deliverability rates for larger-scale campaigns. Halon’s scripting capabilities can be used to set up an IP warming schedule for maximum deliverability. - Customize routing and filtering for maximum impact
Tailor your email campaigns based on user segments and other criteria to prevent bottlenecks and improve deliverability. Halon enables you to configure your email campaigns based on domain, location, message type (transactional v. marketing), and other criteria. By putting policy rules in place for which types of messages should be routed to which servers, you’ll be able to enhance delivery speed and deliverability rates. - Use delivery insights to improve your strategy
Halon’s delivery insights can help you to track metrics including deliverability, bounces, and user engagement. With this data, you can both respond to issues in real-time, and conduct strategic analysis to improve your delivery performance over time. - Integrate Halon with your email marketing platform
Halon offers a wide range of pre-built integrations to ensure seamless connectivity with your email marketing tech stack. Connect Halon with your CRM, ESP, and other tools for a fully integrated look at your email marketing performance.