What is email warm-up?
The email warm up is a way you establish a reputation for a new email account and increase the email sending limit.
The warmup process includes sending emails from a new email account, starting with a smaller number, and gradually increasing the number of emails each day.
When a user creates a new email account, the email service provider gives daily sending limits. However, a fresh account can’t use it entirely.
For example, Google provides 2000 emails/day for a G Suite account. But from day one, you can’t send it all; you get a smaller limit.
To use it to its full potential, you have to build a good reputation, which can be done by email warm up.
Warming up is the gradual process of establishing a reputation as a legitimate email sender in the eyes of ISPs (Internet Service Providers). When an ISP observes email suddenly coming from a new or “cold” (recently dormant) IP address, they will take notice and immediately begin evaluating the traffic coming from that IP.
ISP spam filters look at volume as a significant factor when determining whether or not you are sending spam. Because of this, we recommend that you begin sending a low to moderate volume ( up to 1 million emails/month), eventually working your way up to larger volumes (over 1 million emails/month). This gives the receiving email providers a chance to closely observe your sending habits and the way your customers treat the emails they receive from you.
How to ramp up email without spamming!
While the warmup process can seem slow and tedious, it’s vital if you want to avoid the dreaded spam folder. Otherwise, you’ll start to experience other issues like throttling, grey listing, or outright blocking of your messages.
If you try to push too much email volume through your dedicated IP before the reputation is solid, you’re gonna have all sorts of delivery issues. In fact, you might get mislabeled as a spammer with ESPs and not even know. They can even decide to drop or filter your messages without telling you that it’s happening.
The email warm up is a way you establish a reputation for a new email account and increase the email sending limit. The warmup process includes sending emails from a new email account, starting with a smaller number, and gradually increasing the number of emails each day.
When a user creates a new IP address, the email service provider gives daily sending limits. However, a fresh account can’t use it entirely. For Example, AWS provides 20k emails/day. But from day one, you can’t send it all; you get a smaller limit. To use it to full potential, you have to build a good reputation, this process is called warming up
This is where IP warmup comes in: a new dedicated IP will be “cold.” In other words, the IP hasn’t 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
When determining whether to accept or reject a message, email service providers consider the reputation of the IP address that sent it. One of the factors that contributes to the reputation of an IP address is whether the address has a history of sending high-quality email. Email providers are less likely to accept mail from new IP addresses that have little or no history. Email sent from IP addresses with little or no history may end up in recipients' junk mail folders or may be blocked altogether.
The amount of time required to warm up an IP address varies between email providers. For some email providers, you can establish a positive reputation in around two weeks, while for others it may take up to six weeks. When warming up a new IP address, you should send emails to your most active users to ensure that your complaint rate remains low. You should also carefully examine your bounce messages and send less email if you receive a high number of blocking or throttling notifications.
The warmup
When starting to send from a new domain or IP configuration, you will probably want to warm up that configuration first.
You can do this by selecting appropriately engaged customers and sending to them first before sending to less engaged customers.
Use a strategy where you will select a number per ISP you are targeting and limit to that number. Each day, review how successful the opens and interactions are for that IP and if your rates are good, then double the sends to that ISP for the next day. If it doesn't go well, then you need to go back to a lower level. Monitor each day until you are sending the total you are aiming for. You will need to start with a low daily limit (e.g., 100).
When a user creates a new email account, the email service provider gives daily sending limits. However, a fresh account can’t use it entirely.
For example, Google provides 2000 emails/day for a G Suite account. But from day one, you can’t send it all; you get a smaller limit.
To use it to its full potential, you have to build a good reputation, which can be done by email warm up.
How to warm up an email account before sending a cold email?
Authenticate your account
With a new email account, the first thing required is account authentication. Authentication makes your account guarded against the spam filters and makes your emails delivered right in the inbox.
There are four essential email authentications:
- SPF
SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is an authentication technique that creates a record in your DNS (Domain Name System), which lists down all the servers that are authorized to send emails on behalf of a domain. Whenever the recipient’s ESP finds an SPF Authentication from the sender side, it provides a clean chit to the sender’s domain.
- DKIM
DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) is an authentication method that adds a digital signature with your domain, which prevents email spoofing and makes your email reach the right place.
- DMARC
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) records to use your SPF and DKIM records to assure the receiver’s ESP that no deceitful activities are associated with the email.
- Custom Domain
Adding a custom domain with your emails, make your links, and documents more authentic by providing it with your domain. This makes the sender, as well as his ESP, assure that the links and documents are from an authentic source.
- Avoid spammy content
Including spam content in your emails makes your account more vulnerable to the spam filters. Avoid using words like FREE, GRAB, 50%, etc. in your emails, which attracts the attention of spam filters.
Avoid content that creates an adverse effect on your sender’s reputation. Keep the content clean, simple and plain with limited numbers of links to get the best delivery.
- Add unsubscribe link
Even though you are sending a test campaign(sequence) to a small list, it’s advisable to include an unsubscribe link in your email.
While warming up your email account, you should limit every possibility that the recipient gets to spam your emails. Even a single spam report against a new account can negatively affect your reputation.
Adding an unsubscribe link in your emails allows your recipients to choose if they want to receive your emails or not. This feature not only makes your recipients happy but also keeps your emails away from SPAM filters.
Best bonus practices
Following the above best practices to warm up an email account before sending cold emails will help you activate your account’s large list of cold email campaigns.
Below, we are listing some other bonus tips that will be helpful to you for maintaining your sender reputation and email deliverability.
- Write like a real human
- Use limited links in your email content
- Choose your email service provider wisely according to your need
- Use limited media files like images, videos and GIF
- Avoid automation while email warmups
Increasing Amazon SES sending quotas
To avoid being blacklisted across SES, you need to ensure that you’re sending high-quality production email. Providing you send high-quality and low volumes you AWS may automatically increase your quota.
To qualify for automatic rate increases, all of the following statements have to be true:
- You send high-quality content that your recipients want to receive –Send content that recipients want and expect. Stop sending email to customers who don't open your email.
- You send actual production content – Sending test messages to fake email addresses can have a negative effect on your bounce and complaint rates. Also, sending messages only to internal recipients makes it difficult to determine if you're sending content that customers want to receive. However, when you send your production messages to non-internal recipients, we can accurately assess your email-sending practices.
- You send near your current quota – To qualify for an automatic quota increase, your daily email volume should regularly approach the daily maximum for your account without exceeding it.
- You have low bounce and complaint rates – Minimise the number of bounces and complaints that you receive. Having a high number of bounces and complaints can have a negative impact on your sending quotas.
As an example
If we are to assume your limit is 200K / day you can…
- Send 1000 on day 1, and check that they get a good delivery, open and click rate across all mailbox providers
- providing all was good... send 2000 on day 2, repeat checks
- providing all was good… send 4000 on day 3, repeat checks
- providing all was good… send 8000 on day 4, repeat checks
- providing all was good … send 16000 on day 5, repeat checks – at this point Intilery will request increase if AWS automation has not commenced. For the purpose of this example, we have got up to 100K on the next increase)
- Send 20000 on day 6, repeat checks …
- providing all was good … send 40K on day 7, repeat checks
- providing all was good … send 80K on day 8, repeat checks, ask for increase (looking at up to 1M / day)
- providing all was good … send 100K on day 9, repeat check
- providing all was good … send 200K on day 10 and going forward
If any checks are poor quality, then your quota will resume to your previous high quality send volume. You will need to address the issues, which has caused your quota to be reduced, before AWS will increase your quota again.
Remember!
- Don’t hit the same customers too often - must keep complaints below 0.1% and bounces below 5% or Amazon will pause your sends. You can get your bounce/complaint rates from the reporting built into our platform.
- Produce high quality emails
- Only send to engaged customers
- Exclude domains that are responding badly and do a separate ramp up for different domains
- We use AWS SES for sending, but you won't have direct access to the account. Health, limits and rates will come eventually in a health dashboard.