1. Decide what domain you want to use for your Sender Authentication.

We will need to know the domain name your company wants to configure, this is typically a conversation that happens between your Marketing team and your companies' IT team to ensure everyone is in agreement on the approach. The domain chosen should represent your brand to your subscribers.

Do not include the words exact, exacttarget, salesforce, marketingcloud or sfmc in your domain name choice or subdomain selection. This will lead to confusing branding for your subscribers. Our goal is to highlight your branding to subscribers, not ours. Instead of using exact or sfmc, we suggest using a prefix such as email, em, mail or list. If your domain is bobsrodeo.com, choosing a subdomain prefix of "mail" might be a good choice, giving you mail.bobsrodeo.com to use as your subdomain for use in Marketing Cloud. This domain will brand all of the link and image pathways in the content you create within Marketing Cloud and serve as the authenticated sending From domain for your account.

The domain/subdomain chosen will need to be exclusive for Salesforce Marketing Cloud use only.

2. Delegate a domain or subdomain you own INTERMEDIATE

This option allows you to use a domain/subdomain with a name you designate (Ex. companydomain.com or email.companydomain.com). It requires your IT group to make changes to your DNS. This option is not available from all domain registrars or DNS hosting providers.

A delegation requires an entry in your root DNS zone. Ex. For email.mycompany.com. this might look like:

email IN NS ns1.exacttarget.com.
email IN NS ns2.exacttarget.com.
email IN NS ns3.exacttarget.com.
email IN NS ns4.exacttarget.com.

For more detailed information: click here

3. Self-host DNS using an existing domain/subdomain you own? ADVANCED

This option requires engagement of your IT team/domain host. Skip this if you do not know how DNS works or do not want to handle any configuration. If you have an existing domain/subdomain, and want to use it in conjunction with your Salesforce Marketing Cloud sending, your IT team may request a zone file of all the needed DNS entries that will be required for the domain/subdomain to function correctly with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform. Once provided, your IT team/domain host will need to make all necessary DNS entries, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is unable to support DNS configurations outside of our system.

4. Where will replies be sent?

Reply Mail Management (RMM) handles replies to your email messages automatically. RMM will discard out of office and auto-replies, handle unsubscribe requests, and forward any other e-mail received to a valid email address you specify. You will need to decide which live e-mail address or inbox at your company should receive the replies.

5. Sending for success

For maximum deliverability success, we strongly recommend that you use your new domain as your FROM address in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The private domain will be authenticated with DKIM, SenderID, and SPF. When we allocate a dedicated IP address for your use via Salesforce Marketing Cloud, it is important that you start out sending slowly, and gradually build up your sending volume over time. This will minimize the chances of blocking and bulk foldering due to volume spikes from a new IP address.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud's Deliverability Operations team is available to review best practice guidance for IP address ramp up. Please don't hesitate to contact us via the Help and Training portal (https://help.salesforce.com/home) for more information.

Note that the domain you use with Sender Authentication Package can only be used for Salesforce emails.