In this article, you'll learn how to warm your email accounts before starting outreach and the importance of your email reputation.
Before starting a cold email outreach, you need to warm up your email accounts, whether they are new or already have a campaign history. This helps prepare new email accounts for campaigns and get them in shape. Warm-up also prevents issues related to a low sender reputation, which could ruin your campaign.
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.
If you start sending large campaigns when your account is still very new and doesn’t have much of a sending history, such campaigns will likely fail and email providers may treat your emails as spam. This happens with many new campaigns and accounts that don't take the preparation step seriously.
To make sure you reach the inbox for more recipients when you launch a larger campaign, start small and warm up your email account. It will yield a good deliverability when you send it to bigger lists.
There are two ways to approach warm-up: manually or automatically through Snov.io's dedicated Email Warm-up feature.
Manual warm-up
Step 1: Prepare a test prospect list for a warm-up
Get ready for the actual warm-up first. Make sure your sending list contains valid emails only. We do not recommend sending to unverified and Unverifiable (Risky) emails. If some of them are invalid, you will end up with a high bounce rate, and this lowers your email account's credibility in the eyes of the ISPs. Here’s how to verify your email addresses for safe bulk sending.
Step 2: Send emails to a test list
Start with a smaller number of emails per day and gradually increase the number. If you have a brand new account, you will need at least 2 weeks of preparation before beginning bulk mailings.
Send manual emails to your friends and acquaintances at first to be sure they get opened and answered. Ask your friends to open your emails, mark them “not spam” in case the email was delivered to their Spam folder, and reply to you. Try to send it to different email providers, such as Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.
Now get ready to send the emails out to your list in small batches, increasing the number of emails each time. Take the new contacts you have, divide them into lists, and send them emails over time.
At first, your sending schedule should look something like this:
Week 1: 25 emails/day
Week 2: 50 emails/day
Week 3: 75 emails/day
Week 4: 100 emails/day
The numbers may differ depending on who you're emailing. If there are fewer opens or more blocks, be patient and slower with your email volume growth, allowing your reputation to improve. Even though this may cause a delay to your email campaigns, the risk of getting blacklisted will be way lower, helping your future bulk mailings.
Additional tips:
- Monitor recipient engagement. The lower your engagement, the harder the ISPs will be on your account. If this continues, take a good look at your content and analyze whether it is valuable for your recipients or if something needs changing. If your initial batch of recipients doesn’t think it’s good, your entire list probably won’t either.
- Consider the email sending limits. Every email service provider has their own email sending limits per day/month. Set as big as possible delay between sendings, considering that the recommended delay is 30-120 seconds between each email.
- Personalize your email as much as you can. Personalization is a key when bulk emailing. The more variables you use, the more your emails differ, the less your chances of being suspected as a spammer, etc.
Automatic warm-up
Let Snov.io take care of your account preparation with an automated warm-up.
Our Email Warm-up will automatically create an email history and positive engagement for your account.
During the warm-up campaign, your email account will automatically send and receive emails from other users' accounts and our system mailboxes for warm-up. This guarantees optimal results because the activities are authentic and consistent.
Why use Snov.io Email Warm-up:
1) Free to try and scalable – Included in every plan. The higher your plan tier is, the more email accounts you can warm up at the same time with higher limits.
2) Works with any provider – Supports accounts from any email provider and can perform a targeted warm-up.
3) Fully automated – The process runs automatically once you start it. Your only task is to track the warm-up progress and check how your deliverability grows.
4) Specific strategies – for new email accounts and accounts with deliverability issues.