What is a domain warm-up?
A domain or IP warm-up is where you slowly send emails from a new domain name or IP address, gradually increasing volume over time in order to establish a positive reputation. Whether you’re just starting with email marketing, switching to another email service provider, rebranding or merging, warming-up your email is crucial. Without properly warming-up, your emails can end up in junk folders marked as spam.
Internet Service Providers like Gmail determine whether emails should be delivered to the inbox or spam folder based on factors like positive email engagement. By establishing a reputation and building trust with your recipients, the more likely it is that ISPs will send your emails to the inbox. As your reputation builds up, you can increase your send volume.
When do you need to warm-up a domain?
If you meet any of the following criteria, you should definitely be warming-up!
- New IP address and new domain
- New IP address and same domain
- Same IP address and new domain
- New subdomain
What should you avoid?
Here’s a list of the main things you should avoid when warming-up your domain:
- High frequency of email sending
- Low quality address list
- Multiple email accounts on the same domain
- Using spammy words e.g. FREE, Urgent, Apply Now
- Poor email formatting
- High unsubscribe rate
- High bounce rate
the best way to warm-up a domain
Warm-ups are an excellent way to make great first impressions. Identify your best-performing emails from the last 6 months and send those first, e.g. emails with the highest click-to-open rate (CTOR). Send these to your most active audience, such as those who regularly open and click on your emails. It’s a good idea to start by sending high engagement emails like transactional emails, including thank you messages, account creation emails and account notification emails. It’s also a good idea to implement email authentication, where servers can verify your emails and indicate to ISPs that your IP address is reliable.
You should be creating a timeline for your warm-up – but make sure you don’t rush it! The average timeframe for IP address warm-up is 4-8 weeks, which allows you to send emails slowly and avoid trashing the domain/IP reputation.
Domain warm-ups take longer than IP warm-ups, usually around three months. Keep a close eye on how these emails are performing to catch issues early! Continue to monitor open and click rates, ISP performance, unsubscribe rates and recipient engagement. When you get replies to your emails, keep the conversation going! These conversations indicate that your email account is trustworthy and increases your warmup speed.
💡 Keep an eye on your Google Postmaster reports, SpamHaus lists, and SpamCop.
The further along you get on your warm-up plan, you can increase the volume of emails, but avoid big spikes. You can also increase the number of subscribers you send these emails to. We recommend starting off with 1%, and doubling this each week. However, know your sending limits.
Focus on writing good email content, as irrelevant content decreases clicks and increases your chance of ending up in the spam folder. You can do this by personalizing the message, writing at an optimal length and making it readable by splitting it into paragraphs and using an easy-to-read font.
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