Imagine, you’ve set up a new email account for your business, spent days planning your email campaigns, worked hard to write and produce all the content and when you send it out, you end up in your customers spam folder, all because you haven’t warmed up!
If you’ve set up a new email address, you need to go through the process of warming it up. This way you will be able to establish a reputation for your new email account, as well as increasing the email sending limit.
What is the email warm up process?
The email warm up process involves selecting a small group of engaged customers and sending your content to them before you send it to those who engage less, it also involves slowly and steadily ramping up the number of emails you send. Remember to continually monitor your bounce rate, if you start to receive a high number of blocking or throttling notifications then you should cut back on the number of emails you send.
Email service providers can determine whether to accept or reject a message based on the reputation of the IP address that it was sent from. The reputation of an IP address is based upon several factors, an important one to highlight is whether the IP address is known for previously sending emails that are of a high-quality. This means that email providers are less likely to accept an email from a new IP address.
Many consider the warm up process to be tediously slow, but if you want your emails to appear in your audiences’ inbox, then it’s imperative that you take the right steps to build up your reputation. The period of time required to complete this process can and will depend on an email provider, some will allow you to build a positive reputation in roughly 2 weeks, whereas with others, it can take up to 6 weeks.
How to warm up
There are lots of elements to consider with the warm up process, below we talk you through what to expect:
Start Small
Building up the number of emails you send out is an important stage of warming up your emails. To do this, you should select a number of emails to send for each Internet Service Provider (ISP) that you target, and limit yourself to that number. From there, you should monitor the open and engagement rate daily, if these are performing well for a particular ISP then you should double the sends for that one, for the following day. Similarly, if an ISP isn’t performing well, you should cut back your sends. Continue to review daily until you can send your target total.
Monitor Open Rates
Following on from the above point, is monitoring open and engagement rates. This is crucial for understanding how your emails are being handled by different email providers. They all have a different algorithm that can affect your open rates.
If you find that an email provider has particularly good open rates, then great news! You can continue to increase your daily limits for sending. If you encounter an email provider that has poor open rates, it is advisable to remove them from your send list, this will provide you opportunity to improve your open rate in other areas, which can have a big impact on your reputation.
Spam-free content
Certain content can be marked as spam by email providers, including the wrong wording can be detrimental to your email reputation. Try to avoid using words like ‘GRAB’, ‘FREE’ or phrases like ‘75% OFF’. Your content should be simple and plain, it will also be of benefit to you if you were to limit the number of links you include.
Speaking of links, including an ‘Unsubscribe’ link is not only an important step in improving customer experience, but it will also help your emails to bypass the spam filters.
Unsubscribe Link
Knowing and understanding your unsubscribe rate can be the key to learning about your email marketing strategy and whether it is successful or not. You can collate information on whether the content you’re sending is relevant and whether your recipients receive too few or too many emails.
Including an unsubscribe link, as previously mentioned, helps your emails to bypass the spam filters, however, it’s also important you include one for the sake of your customers too. You should craft a notice that enables audiences to easily unsubscribe should they wish to, this should be clear, readable and in an easy to find location.
How do you know it worked?
After you’ve gone through all these stages to warm up your emails, you want to know that you’ve been successful, right?
Well of course you do!
And the answer will most likely lie in your event logs. Have there been any failed events or errored messages? Have you managed to send out your target total of emails with very few finding their way into the recipients’ spam folder?
Chances are, even after warming up your emails, you won’t achieve a 100% deliverability rate, however, it will likely be much higher than if you were to completely ignore the warm up process all together.
Now you’ve learnt a little about the email warm up process, you can get started with sending out emails that cleverly avoid the spam folder. Check out our guide on how to achieve this using the Intilery platform and remember…
- Don’t email the same customers too regularly
- Ensure you produce consistent, high quality emails
- To begin with, only send to engaged customers
- Exclude any domains that seem to be responding badly
