How To Warm Up Email Domain

Do Keep Monitoring Email Engagement Afterward

While the first year on a new domain or IP is especially important for establishing deliverability, your reputation is ongoing. You should always monitor email engagement and your sender reputation, since it may only take one slip up to ruin your inbox placement. Even the best of warm-up strategies cant make your deliverability error-proof.

How Many Emails Will Be Sent

When warm-up is first activated, the system analyzes your past sending volume to determine the optimal starting volume and the optimal number by which to increase volume every day. For a new email account with no sending history, the system will start by sending 2 emails/day and will increase that amount by 2 more emails every day. A schedule might look like this:

Day 1: 2 emails/day

Day 3: 6 emails/day

Day 4: 8 emails/day

until you achieve 200 emails/day, at which point warm-up will stabilize and continue sending that amount until you turn the warm-up system off.

Every email that is sent is marked as read by the receiver. Some of the emails will also be responded to.

Additionally, if your emails arent landing in the Inbox, this system can help with that. By sending emails that are automatically opened and replied to, youre improving your domains reputation, which should result in better deliverability.

How Long Does The Warm

You should spend at least 3 months working on your domain’s reputation before you start an email outreach. Why? A good reputation is earned over time. When you buy a new domain, it is being treated as a neutral one. Domain’s age is one of the first factors which is checked by anti-spam filters, playing an important role in email deliverability. Warm-up is a process when you gain trust as a sender.

Read about 8 Things to Take Care of In the Meantime You Warm up a Domain for Outreach »

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Live In Your New Account

So youve set up your account, and proven to Google that youre human. Now you need to show your email provider that youre also going to use your account as a standard user would.

Next, email some friends and business partners, and get them to reply to you, then reply to their replies, and so on. These wont be sales emails, and they wont be automated. Think of them as a chance to catch up with people as you warm up your account. Dont send the same cookie-cutter messages to each contact, either emailing similar content to all of your contacts, or spammy content that looks like AI could have created it, are surefire ways to get flagged as spam.

An added bonus here is to target email addresses you know are set up on domains from various hosts, which makes business addresses a strong option.

Dont Just Look At Overall Performance

Beyond looking at open and click rates for warm-up sends, investigate performance on a per-ISP basis. Check performance between ISPs to make sure one client isnt showing deliverability concerns.

If you spy something fishy with a particular ISP, isolate email addresses for that ISP for the subsequent sends. For example, if you notice an issue with Gmail, remove all Gmail users from the next batch of warm-up emails you plan to send.

Then, analyze your list of Gmail subscribers to find the most active of the bunch, and try again with those subscribers. Start with small volumes and work your way up until engagement is as expected.

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Other Reasons For Poor Inbox Delivery Are

• Too many bounces
• Spammy words in the email content: mail-tester.com is a tool that helps you analyze the campaign copy on a scale of 1-10. A score of 8-9 is good but you should try your best to make that a 10. If the score is below 5, the mail will end up in the spam folder.
• Including too many URLs in the email body
• Hyperlinking the same text to different URLs in the same email
• Hyperlinking a text that looks like a URL to a different URL. Some spam filters see it as a potential phishing/fraud attack and flag your emails as spam.

Lastly, email marketing is an ever-evolving process. Though conventional, trial and error has to be made to find what works and what doesnt. Always ensure to be genuine and human in your emails. All of us like to initiate a conversation with humans rather than bots. Focus on engagement, its always that extra value or personalization that makes a difference.

Feel free to reach out to us if you need any assistance with warming up email accounts or setting up an email outreach program for your company.

Thinking To Implement Domain Warming Yourself

We dont suggest that, unless you know what youre doing.Lets start with basic list of what you need to start domain warm up yourself: double opt-in subscribers, perfect content, continuous sending, hourly quota management, etc.Now think, do you have all that or time to manage? If yes, we can help you with our email deliverability consulting but if not dont think twice about this service.

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Challenges To Cold Email Marketing Campaigns

A few hurdles that cold email marketing campaigns have to cross before emails can reach subscribers inboxes include email sending limits, spam filtering, and blacklists. Lets take a quick look at each.

Email sending limits

One way that email servers try to control spam filtering to inboxes is by establishing limits on the number of emails an account can send over a specific time frame. If you exceed this hourly or daily limit, your emails might not get delivered, or, worse, your account could get temporarily banned.

Each email service provider has its own email sending limits. For example, Gmail allows you to send 500 emails per day . If you use the free Outlook or Zoho plans, this daily limit will be even lower.

Spam filters, traps, and blacklists

After youve made sure that you didnt break these sending limits, you still need to dodge other spam filters. Here, the quality of your contact list and email content and the warmth of your email address will play a role.

How so? If you send cold emails to bad quality email addresses addresses you havent cleaned or verified you run the risk of getting flagged as a spammer. Once this happens, your cold email marketing campaign is as good as over.

While you can use tools to clean and verify your email database , you can also mitigate the risks of being blacklisted with a good email warm-up.

Why Do You Need To Warm Up Your Email Accounts

Email clients like Gmail and Outlook have intelligent algorithms that know your email sending history. If you blast emails with a new account, or ever make a mistake, their algorithms put you in Spam Jail.

Your only chance to leave Spam Jail is if somehow their algorithms learn that you’re not spamming any more. Warm Up Your Email receives your email and interacts positively to help you improve your sender reputation.

• Removing an email from the spam folder

These four actions together make an engagement.

Do you promise I won’t land in spam?

Warming up an email account is just one factor, but there are several other factors email clients like Gmail take into account when determining if your email should land in the inbox or spam folder. Content is one other factor. You still need to make sure your other factors are met in order to be a perfect sender.

What do you mean by “sender reputation”?

Email clients like Google score your emails for their content, history, and account age. There may be several other factors as well that are involved in this scoring criteria. If your scores are good, your reputation is good. If your scores aren’t good, your reputation isn’t good.

What do you mean by “Spam Jail”?

How long should I warm up my emails?

Will my inbox be full of warmup emails?

You can create a folder by filtering the subject of your emails in the Warm Up Your Email platform so your inbox emails are always separate from warmup emails.

How does it work?

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How To Change The Delay Between Each Email Sent And The Maximum Number Of Emails Per Day

If you are going to launch only one sequence for now, you can use sequence settings to set up the needed volumes and delays.

To change these settings for any sequence:

• Specify 15 emails per day with a 450 second delay between each email in the sequence settings.

• Set the schedule to send this number of emails with the specified delay during the day .

• In three days, increase the number of sent emails to 25 emails and decrease the delay to 400 seconds.

• On the 7th day , increase the number of sent emails to 40 emails and decrease the delay to 250-300 seconds.

• On the 10th day, increase the number of sent emails to 70 emails and decrease the delay to 200 seconds.

• On the 14th day send 150 emails per day, decrease the delay to 100 seconds.

• On Day 20, set the number to 200 emails per day, keep the delay no less than 67 secs.

• Keep sending only 200-250 emails per day till the end of the month. It is now safe to increase the daily sending limit .

If you plan to create several sequences at once, it would be easier to control the sending process for your email account.

To change the limits for your email account:

The Dkim Factor And Engaged Recipients

Itâs important to note that domain reputation is generally tied to the DKIM authority domain. By default, domains created within Mailgun are created with their own DKIM authority. This means that subdomains do not inherit and share a reputation with their parent domain unless specified during domain creation.

With a new domain, whether itâs a subdomain or a root domain, youâll most likely need to warm up of the domain itself. This is done almost the same way as the manual IP warmup. You start by limiting the volume going out of the domain every day and ramping this up slowly over time.

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Main Factors Impacting Email Deliverability

The algorithms analyzing our emails are very complex. They look at dozens of factors when assessing our emails. Although we dont know their entire specification, years of research gave some pretty clear answers on what matters the most:

1) Sender reputation . However you call it, its your reputation in the network. You build it by sending quality emails that dont bounce or end up in spam folders. Recipients also dont mark them as spam and they engage with them, replying or clicking on links.

When it becomes a typical pattern, ESPs start to assume that youre okay after all and begin to treat your emails with more kindness. Building a solid reputation when youre new to cold emailing may seem like a challenge. That will be the purpose of our IP warmup efforts.

2) Authentications. To fight spam and phishing, some serious people in the email world came up with authentication methods such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. These are sorts of digital certificates, with which you tell an email server Hey, Im Kate, heres my ID. Im carrying this message with me, and I certify that it should look like this and that. Oh, and Im the sender of this message.

ESPs validate your authentications and, if everything checks out, are more likely to accept your email. Forget to authenticate and theyre likely to discard your email right away.

You can also do it in bulk with Bulk Email Verifier. Once the scan is ready, you can download the results and update your mailing list.

Launch Your Campaign But Act Human

Congratulations your email is warmed up and youre ready to start shooting off those cold emails for real.

But remember, your mailbox activity is continually monitored. If you rush, send too many emails at once, or fail to properly personalize your emails, you could be slapped with a poor sender reputation, affecting deliverability and ruining all your hard work.

Currently, 2,000 emails per 24 hours is the sending limit for G Suite accounts. However, this can change without notice, so its worth regularly checking here.

If youre using an automated cold email tool like Mailshake, there are some simple steps you can take if youre worried about being caught in Googles spam filter.

• Adjust your sending calendar to ensure your sent messages are spaced out, and run the campaign over a longer period of time to limit how many emails are going out each day
• Create a custom tracking domain for your team
• Disable open tracking if youre sending very short messages

Other than these tech shortcuts, its important to focus on the content youre sending out to avoid negatively impacting deliverability.

Remember, personalization is key. Sending out similar emails in bulk is a surefire way to get flagged. Also make sure you avoid using spammy phrases or language some automated email tools even offer a spam filter that will flag these for you as you write. And always keep your email content clean and simple dont over-format or include too many images.

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Established Domain New Ip

In one scenario, you already have an established mail stream and domain. However, youâre looking to increase your sending and will require a second dedicated IP to share the load of that sending.

This is where IP warmup comes in: a new dedicated IP will be âcold.â In other words, the IP hasnât seen traffic for a certain amount of time, and will not have a reputation attached to it. To build up this reputation, you need to warm up the IP. You can do this one of two ways: Manually or automatically.

When you warm up manually, you set hourly/daily sending limits in your system and slowly ramp up as you go. Alternatively, you can use Mailgunâs automated IP warmup which takes that work off your hands.

Dont Send Too Many At Once

You may have heard about the best hours to send business emails. Heres what I think about it.

If you try to fit into the golden days and hours, you may end up sending too many emails for very short periods of time. If your mailbox tries to push numerous messages at certain times and is totally inactive at other times, this may be treated as an anomaly by your email service provider. Such anomalies may be a reason for your provider to block your mailbox from sending anything.

Check out and compare the two graphs below.

The first one is what email service providers dont like and get suspicious about. Your mailbox activity looks like this when you try to send all your campaigns during a two-hour-or-so time period one day, and youre not sending anything at all on other days.

The second one is what looks normal to email service providers. This is, more or less, how your mailbox activity looks like when you dont try to squeeze too many messages into the best days and hours, but you send them steadily.

Ok, sending cold emails you probably wont be able to send a very similar amount every day. What you can do, however, is to try to send the emails more steadily by giving Woodpecker more time to send a batch of emails.

So instead of setting your delivery hours like this:

you can set them up like that:

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