Email service providers (ESPs) like consistency. Changes, even small ones, can increase the chances that your email winds up in the spam folder and will also affect your deliverability. If you do make any changes such as switching your email program to send from Targeted Email or changing the domain you send emails from, you’ll need to warm-up your email domain again to make sure your messages are not blocked as spam.
To warm up your email domain, you will need to send to a smaller, focused group of email addresses at first to rebuild your “credit” with email providers. You can then slowly widen the list from the initial targeted group until you’re sending to your full email list.
Warming up an email program correctly can take a good amount of time as it can typically take at least a month for email providers to adjust to your new normal. There is no shortcut here and any potential attempts to do so can hurt your long-term reputation.
Implementation
To warm-up your email list, you first need to determine how best to divide up your email list.
The two most important pieces to consider while planning your organization’s warm-up are the volume of emails you plan on sending to normally as well as the engagement activity of the emails on your list.
In the warm-up process, you’ll want to send the first emails to your most active recipients and then slowly widen the list out while never going over double the size of your previous email send.
It's important to begin with the contacts most likely to open and respond to your email. This signals to ESPs that your email is wanted and will result in better inbox placement, even to your less active contacts. This will also introduce a steady curve to your warm-up, so you never need to worry about volume problems.
Typically, the first group you’ll want to start with are any contacts that have clicked in the last 30 days. From there you’d want to send roughly 3 emails to the 30-day clicker group. The content of these emails could just be your normal planned sends, but the key here is to push your most engaging content as much as possible.
After 3 emails if you’re seeing good engagement rates and low bounce rates, you can expand your list out to the next group: your 30-day openers. Repeat the process of three emails to your 30-day clickers and openers and again monitor the engagement rates. If you’re seeing engagement and bounce rates that are in line with your normal expectations (in reality they should be much higher than your average open and click rates), you can continue to expand the list. Eventually, you will expand out to your full list and should be able to send as normal.
Warm-up example
In the below example we will take a standard 90-day active email list of 50,000 and create a warm-up plan using the method outlined above.
The first step is to determine how many have opened in 30-day increments until you get to your full email list. Below are generic splits for our example email list.
- 30-day clickers: 5,000
- 30-day openers: 10,000
- 60-day openers: 10,000
- 90-day openers: 25,000
Once you have these segments created, you can start your email sends in the following cadence:
- Email 1 Audience: 30-day clickers
- Email 2 Audience: 30-day clickers
- Email 3 Audience: 30-day clickers
- Email 4 Audience: 30-day openers: 15,000 (this would also includer clickers)
- Email 5 Audience: 30-day openers: 15,000
- Email 6 Audience: 30-day openers: 15,000
- Email 7 Audience: 30-day + 60-day openers: 25,000
- Email 8 Audience: 30-day + 60-day openers: 25,000
- Email 9 Audience: 30-day + 60-day openers: 25,000
- Email 10 Audience: 30-day +60-day + 90-day Openers: 50,000
- Email 11 Audience: 30-day +60-day + 90-day Openers: 50,000
- Email 12 Audience: 30-day +60-day + 90-day Openers: 50,000
If you run into a problem and see a drastic drop in open rates or a spike in bounces, stop and look at the data. What domains are you having problems with? Did these problems exist with the previously sent to list?
Based on the data, you can then make a decision to cut a particular domain from your wider audiences or maybe stick with the previous grouping as your new active email list. Or, you may try to stick with the previous audience for a few more emails before trying to widen up the list further. All of these are options you can consider if your email program runs into any snags along the road to warming up your list.
For more about how to create lists that help you improve your sender reputation as well as running reports to analyze and detect potential issues, read Best Practices for email deliverability: Optimizing your list