How to warm up your email accounts

This article explains how to add your email accounts to warm-up, how the process works, and how to set up warm-up settings.

Step 1: Choose an account and set warm-up settings

Step 2: Select a warm-up strategy

Step 3: Add email content

Step 4: Start warm-up and monitor progress

Before starting a cold email campaign, your email account needs to be prepared or "warmed up," regardless of whether it's new or old.

How Email warm-up works

The main goal of a warm-up is to improve your sender's reputation. A better reputation means better deliverability—your emails will reach the Inbox, not the Spam or Promotions folders.

Snov.io's Email Warm-up achieves this by creating a real emailing history and positive activity for your email account. Once you start a warm-up, it becomes part of the warm-up pool.

Your email account will automatically exchange emails with other real users' accounts and our dedicated system mailboxes for warm-up. This guarantees optimal warm-up results and ensures the activities are authentic and consistent.

Helpful actions during warm-up:

• Sending emails and replying back
• Pulling emails out of the spam folder
• Marking emails as read
• Marking your emails as important (starred)

How to set up a warm-up

Go to the Email Warm-up page and click the + Add mailbox button. 

Step 1: Set warm-up settings

The core warm-up settings are prefilled with the recommended defaults. You can adjust the available parameters as needed to optimize for the best possible results.

Sender account:

Add the sender email account you want to warm up. The menu shows the accounts you've connected to Snov.io. To add other accounts, connect them on the email connection page first.

This email account will be added to the warm-up pool. During the warm-up, it will send and receive emails, using its daily sending limit and some mailbox storage.

Email providers:

Select the providers you want to warm up your account with. During the warm-up, your email account will exchange emails only with mailboxes hosted by your chosen providers.

A targeted warm-up helps build a positive reputation with specific providers. Use this option to improve deliverability for recipients who use those providers when you send actual campaigns.

If you leave this setting empty or select all providers, the warm-up will run in general mode, equal across all providers.

Premium sender pool:

By default, your email account will be warmed up with accounts on free domains (e.g., gmail.com). Enabling this option adds you to the premium warm-up pool, where you'll exchange emails only with business accounts.

This mode means a more effective warm-up than the default pool.

Your sender's reputation will grow faster, as positive engagement with business domains has a greater impact on the sender's reputation.

Reply rate:

This parameter sets the final reply rate (% of your emails that will receive replies) your account will reach by the end of the warm-up period.

Replies have the most positive impact on the sender's reputation. A high reply rate tells providers that your emails are desired and not spam. After the warm-up, this will transfer to your real campaigns, and your emails will have a higher chance of reaching the inbox.

The default setting is 30% (recommended). The maximum rate you can set is 45%. Setting a higher value may look like bot activity and negatively affect the sender's reputation.

Campaign deadline:

This setting determines the duration of the warm-up period. Set the date when you want your warm-up to end.

We recommend setting it to at least 30 days to build the account reputation from scratch and prepare it for sending campaigns.

In some situations, a 14-day warm-up period may be enough to restore a damaged sender reputation (depending on the current state of your account at the start of the warm-up).

Schedule:

In the schedule, you can set the specific time and days of the week for your warm-up to be active. For best results, align the warm-up schedule with the time and timezone you plan to use for sending real campaigns. This helps establish a consistent activity pattern for your email account. If no schedule is set, the warm-up will run at default intervals throughout the day.

Step 2: Select a warm-up strategy

Select a strategy that is suitable for your warm-up goal.

Email Warm-up prepares your email account for sending a higher number of emails safely. You can set a daily sending goal based on your planned email campaign volume.

Progressive strategy:

A progressive warm-up will gradually increase the volume of emails sent each day by a set number until it reaches the Daily sending goal.

This strategy is best suited for preparing a new email account or an account with low activity, and for building up your email account's sending volume.

The recommended default settings are:

• Starting volume (the limit for the first day of warm-up): 2, with a maximum of 5.
• Daily volume increase: 2 (maximum 5).
• Daily sending goal: 40 (maximum depends on your plan).

Set your warm-up goal to match your planned daily volume in real campaigns. If your plan is to send 50 emails daily in campaigns, this should be your warm-up’s daily goal. If you plan to send 100 emails daily, your warm-up goal should also be set at 100. We recommend setting a daily goal of 40 emails because it is a super safe number for your account’s reputation.

However, you have the flexibility to increase this number as needed based on your plan—sending up to 100 emails per day is generally considered a safe goal. Be cautious with higher values; sending more than 100 emails per day increases the risk of being blocked by your provider.

Steady strategy

The steady warm-up maintains the same email volume every day.

This strategy is most effective for recovering a damaged sender reputation and improving your email deliverability.

Based on your needs, you can set a higher limit for Messages per day. For best warm-up results, this number should match the volume of emails your email campaigns are sending.

Step 3: Add email content

To maximize the effectiveness of the warm-up, the email content should look like human communication.

Our system uses a GPT language model to generate human like text for initial emails and replies. You have the option to regenerate an email copy until you find one that suits your preference. Any of the generated copies will serve their purpose effectively.

Step 4: Start warm-up and monitor progress

During the warm-up process, your email account will send emails and receive emails from other warm-up users. There's no need to reply to these emails, as the warm-up will automatically generate a reply.

You'll find the warm-up emails labeled with "snovio" in your inbox.

You can monitor the progress on the warm-up dashboard. It will show your total Deliverability score and a breakdown by provider. If you've selected specific providers for the warm-up, you'll be able to view the progress of your providers in the warm-up.

Once your score reaches 90% or higher and the volume reaches the daily sending goal, continue the warm-up for a few more days to strengthen the results.

If you have a question that we haven't covered, feel free to reach out to our Customer Care team. You can contact us at help@snov.io or through live chat. We're here to assist you!