Please do try to use the official example domain, which is example.com (this is an internet standard and avoids confusion because it cannot be mistaken for a real registered domain).
Anyway...
As such, I've sent instructions to their IT team to create 2 CNAME records (one for email and one for the landing pages) in the DNS for the subdomain quick.coffee.com for go.quick.coffee.com and go2.quick.coffee.com pointing to the appropriate information from Marketo for each. Will this present an issue at all when setting it up in Marketo by having multiple "dots" in there? Sorry I don't have the correct terminology here. |
No, that's fine. The subdomains just happen to have 4 labels (go, quick, example, and com). That's quite common: subdomains like pages.example.co.uk also have 4 labels (the private domain suffix takes up the rightmost 3 labels in that case, instead of the rightmost 2 labels example.com but that makes no difference as far as DNS naming rules).
It's true that IT people (inexperienced ones) might be confused by the request, but it's a totally valid request for you to make.
There are some parts of your question that don't quite tie together, though.
You say "they want to use quick.example.com as their email send/reply to". You mean their From: (not Sender:) and Reply-To: headers will be mailbox@quick.example.com, to be exact when talking to them.
This still doesn't mean you need to do anything vis-a-vis SPF. The only time SPF matters is when you've specifically set up a branded sender domain with Marketo. Branded sender can be included in your subscription if you have a dedicated instance or if you're on the trusted IP range, or can be purchased separately, but a generic shared Marketo instance doesn't have it. And if you do have it, the branded sender domain you'd want would be another subdomain of quick dedicated for this purpose, like marketing.quick.example.com. It would not be merely quick.example.com. And the SPF record would be for that subdomain, not its parent domain. Again, that's only if you need SPF; trying to set up SPF when you don't need it has broken many a Marketo instance. That's because neither the requester nor the requestee (IT) usually gets the rules of SPF, they just ask for Marketo's SPF record to be included -- and Bam! SPF is broken* for email that really needed it.
As for DKIM, a 5-label TXT record (m1._domainkey.quick.example.com) is totally legit. Again it's like m1._domainkey.example.co.uk. Nothing particularly long about it, just may take a bit of insistence on your part: Yes, person in charge of DNS Control Panel who isn't an experienced DNS admin, I need a subdomain that's a level deeper than you usually set up. 
* "Broken" in this case typically means only "de facto nonexistent". It doesn't mean SPF fails,
but that SPF errors out because of the malformed record. So you neither pass nor fail.
