You might have heard the horror stories: a company spends hours crafting the perfect email only to have it wind up in the Spam or Promotions folder – or worse, get blacklisted!
Email campaigns are undoubtedly the most effective way to reach thousands of new prospects in a day, and this outreach channel, like no other, can generate huge sales volumes. However, not all campaigns are equally effective. Do you know that one-fifth of all sent emails fail to be delivered to their addressees?
If you want to avoid this frustrating scenario and run a successful email campaign with a high deliverability rate, it’s vital to warm up your email account beforehand.
This blog post is designed to guide you on how to warm up your email so you can start seeing results from your email campaigns and not just sit and wonder why your messages fail to reach your prospects’ Inboxes.
Outline:
What is email warm-up, and why does it matter?
Email outreach is a bit like the beginning of a romantic relationship between two people. It requires some warming up at the initial stage of your relationship with your prospects if you want them to commit to you. 😉
To start with, your prospects need to get to know you, that is, receive your message in their mailboxes. And this is only possible if you first earn the trust of your email service provider (ESP) — the main intermediary between you and your prospects.
Email warm-up is a step-by-step process of building your unsullied reputation in the eyes of the ESPs who are suspicious of new accounts.
If hundreds of emails a day are sent from your fresh account, then it’ll be easy for you to earn a reputation as a spammer, and you’re just one step away from the abyss, that is, from a ban. With the consistent increase in the number of emails per day, you lull the vigilance of the ESPs and reduce this risk to zero.
Here’re just a few reasons you can’t do without warming up your email account:
- Email warm-up prepares your account for the high volume of messages you’ll be sending. By gradually increasing the number of emails, you’ll build a better sender reputation, which will help you in your email campaigns.
- Your messages will be delivered to the recipient’s Inbox instead of being sent to their Spam folder, and your deliverability rate will grow.
- You will escape the risks of your new email account getting blocked and blacklisted by your ESP as soon as your campaign begins.
- Your open and response rates will increase, which will give a huge boost to your sender reputation.
So, before you launch your first email campaign, it would be best to create a brand new mailbox for this purpose and then ensure you warm it up.
How to warm up your email using email warm-up tools?
As the saying goes, you’re ready to strike while the iron is hot with your email outreach campaign. The faster you reach out to your prospects after they show interest, the more likely you will convert them into customers.
But in reality, the iron is still cold, and it’ll take some time to take it to the right condition. And here, you face a dilemma: which email warm-up strategy to choose — automatic or manual?
Well, we’ll surely advocate using an automatic email warm-up tool. With it, all you need to do is just set it and forget it with no headache by simply signing up.
The whole process will take you just 2 minutes. Intrigued? Let me show you how to warm up your account with the Snov.io Email Warm-up tool:
Step 1. Set your reply rate and campaign deadline
After signing up, create a new Snov.io email account, add your fresh mailbox to the warm-up campaign, and set up the reply rate, which can be up to 45%. A higher reply rate may look suspicious to your ESP.
Then spend a few seconds on your campaign scheduling — put the warm-up end date and specify a sending window when you want your emails sent.
The longer the warm-up campaign, the better results it will yield! 30 days would be just right.
Step 2. Choose a warm-up strategy
If you use a freshly-created email account, the choice is evident. The Progressive strategy was specially designed for new accounts to gradually increase the number of emails sent. You can start from 2-5 emails daily, and the system will progressively add more emails till you reach your maximum sending limit, which can be up to 40 messages daily.
The other option — the Steady strategy — aims to improve your existing account’s deliverability and fix your domain reputation.
Step 3. Pick your email content type
Now you face another pool of options to choose from. Which content type would you pick for your emails — AI-Powered or Specific?
For your first warm-up campaign, I recommend going with the AI-Powered message content type. The hyper-intelligent AI will craft unique human-like email texts and create realistic same-thread conversations for the best warm-up results.
Step 4. Review your settings
That’s it! 2 minutes sharp, and your warm-up campaign is set. The last step is to check if all settings are correct.
Email warm-up automation tools are the fastest and most effective way to warm up an email account before starting an outreach campaign. But there’s another, the more traditional method to do it — a manual warm-up.
How to warm up your email manually?
Frankly, I’m curious why people still choose to do things with their own hands when they can automate these processes. It’s somewhat like a chef chopping everything with his old knife despite having a great modern food processor in his kitchen.
But hey, to each their own. 😊 You can read further about how to warm up your email manually and then decide which method is the best fit for you.
Step #1. Prepare your fresh email account
Before you start blasting off emails left and right, you first need to configure your email account for a successful warm-up period:
- Create a fresh email account specifically for your outbound outreach efforts. This email account should be different from your personal email address, and it needs to be configured to accept messages from unknown senders. Our tip here is to use the domain you’ve already used for some time.
- Set up your ‘from’ line and signature that includes your contact information, company, and the offer you’re promoting. You can either create a text signature yourself or have a designer make an HTML signature for you.
- Create a template for your emails that is easy to customize and quick to send.
- Test your sending limits to ensure you’re not exceeding them, as this can result in bounces and other delivery problems. For example, if you’re using Gmail, you have a rate limit of 20 outgoing messages per hour. If you exceed it, Google might suspend your account.
Step #2. Authenticate your email account
Email authentication is the process of verifying the legitimacy of an email before it gets delivered. This helps prevent spoofing and phishing attacks, which are two of the main ways scammers try to bypass spam filters.
There are several different email authentication methods, but the most common are SPF, DKIM, and DMARC:
- SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework. It allows you to specify which mail servers are authorized to send emails from your domain.
- DKIM or DomainKeys Identified Mail helps verify the sender of an email by adding a cryptographic signature to the header of an email message.
- DMARC or Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance aligns the above two mechanisms. It defines how the recipient’s mail server should process incoming emails if they don’t pass the authentication check (SPF, DKIM, or both).
By configuring the above records, you can ensure that your emails reach their destination and aren’t accidentally flagged as spam. In our SPF, DKIM & DMARC guide, you can find general settings for all domain providers. But remember, since you have your own domains, they can all be configured differently.
Step #3. Set up a system to track responses
The next step is to get your email account properly configured to track the success of your cold outreach campaigns. You’ll want to be able to track how many people opened your email and clicked your links.
Step #4. Subscribe to newsletters
It’s a good idea to subscribe to newsletters to help manually warm up your email account before your outreach campaign. This will help to show your ESP that your new mailbox has incoming mail; it’s alive and functioning.
How many newsletters should you subscribe to? As a general rule, subscribe to at least 10-15 different newsletters for optimal engagement.
Step #5. Send a few emails a day to friends and partners
Collect a list of addresses you know for sure are valid. These can be the email addresses of your friends, relatives, colleagues, and business partners.
There’s no need to send them any marketing or sales content you’ve prepared for your prospects. You can say hello, write a friendly personal message, and send them any content you find interesting. Then ask the people to do you a small favor:
- Reply to your message.
- Click the link.
- Forward your message to their friends to increase engagement.
It would be best to start slowly with no more than 10-20 emails a day. Crucially, try to reach out to addresses on domains from various hosts — Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Outlook/Exchange, GoDaddy, and others. Doing so will help your new email address gain credence in the eyes of various ESPs.
Besides, make sure you space out your emails so that you’re not flooding your recipients’ Inboxes with too much content at once. If you’re not careful, your emails could be marked as spam or get you blacklisted, severely impacting your deliverability rates.
Email automation tools like email drip campaigns help simplify this process and make it quick and smooth, with pre-arranged time spaces between messages.
Step #6. Test your email account before you start outreach
Have you prepared your clean list of target contacts already? Now you can start emailing them.
But first, setting up a test campaign seems to be a good idea. It lets you see how your email account will perform under real-world conditions and identify any potential issues before launching your whole campaign.
It’s recommended to send up to 20 individual emails from your fresh email account during your test campaign. This series of emails may include a mix of content types, such as blog posts, product announcements, case studies, offers, and others.
And crucially, don’t forget to create and add a personalized subject line to your email. This can boost your open rate sufficiently.
How long does it take to warm up an email?
It can take time to warm up an email account and start seeing results from your cold email campaigns. The length of time required will depend on several factors, including the goals of your email campaign, the size of your email list, the quality of your leads, how often you send emails, and, most importantly, your ESP.
Various ESPs may need different periods to stop considering a new email account suspicious. Some of them will wait weeks to start trusting a newbie. And the longer and harder you work on your excellent sender reputation, the more they trust you.
Generally speaking, you should allow at least a week for your email account to warm up before launching your first cold email campaign.
If you have an extensive email list of high-quality leads, you may need to give your account more time to achieve optimal results. We recommend sending your email campaigns after 8-12 weeks of warming up.
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Top tips to help you run your manual warm-up smooth
Off to start your first ever warm-up campaign? Hold on; some pieces of advice below will come in handy.😊
Be patient and slow
First and foremost, you shouldn’t send too many emails too quickly. It’s a bad, very bad idea to send hundreds of emails automatically within just a couple of days! If your mailing list grows too fast, ESPs will start to see you as a spammer and might block your emails entirely.
Keep your contact lists clean
Don’t forget to regularly remove contacts who have not opened or clicked your emails in a while, as well as those who have unsubscribed or marked your messages as spam.
If you’re using an email marketing automation service, you can regularly export your contact lists and scrub them for invalid addresses. You can also use a tool like Snov.io Email Verifier to verify the validity of email addresses in your contact list.
Monitor your sender reputation
Keep an eye on your sender reputation by using a tool like Sender Score. It will measure your reputation and provide a score from 0 to 100 (with 80+ being a great result). A high email sender score translates to a high sender reputation!
Learn the art of scheduling your email warm-up campaign
Interestingly, the peculiarity of outbound campaigns is that you might not see the desired results when sending emails too infrequently. Try sending messages at least once a day. You can do it manually, with high precision and attention to every detail, or choose email warm-up automation tools if you value your time.
Bottom line
When you’re ready to start your next cold email campaign, do not hurry and make sure to warm up your email account first. This will help ensure that your emails are delivered to the right people and that your message is seen by as many prospects as possible.
Use an automatic email warm-up tool like Snov.io to make the process fast and painless. And let your email campaigns be off to a successful start and never land in either Spam or Promotions folders!
