What if I told you to start running just after you wake up? How will your body react? (I know your body alone will not react; you will hate me, too.)
It’s obvious that it may increase your chances of injury and lower your performance. As your muscles are tense, you can also get cramps, and you can get injured because your muscles did not get the stretch and warm-up they needed before the exercise.
The same happens with your new email address. When you have a new email address and you suddenly start sending a large number of emails, the ESPs (email service providers) will get cautious that you are a spammer, and this might also affect the reputation of your email address.
This will result in your email not reaching directly into the inbox of your prospect, which will ultimately affect your deliverability, making your outreach and email campaigns less effective.
According to Statista, twenty eight percent of emails are considered spam from the total email traffic worldwide. As email marketing is a cost effective method of marketing, it is getting harder to reach your target audience via emails.What is email warm up?
Email warm refers to the process of sending emails from a new email account and gradually increasing the number of emails being sent to build a good reputation of your email address and increase the day limit of emails being sent.
This process includes sending emails daily, getting engagements for your email accounts authentication of your email address and more. It might take up to 8 – 12 weeks to establish a good reputation for your (new) email address.
Before we dive deep in our understanding about email warming, I would like to give a brief of some technical terms that will make it easy for you to understand email warming. These are not detailed explanations but just enough to better your understanding on warm email.
Send personalized cold emails after warming up your account using SendBuzz.
Key terms that will help you understand the email warm up process
Domain and Subdomain: A domain is the address of your website on the internet. A domain consists of your brand’s name or business name. It helps a business have control over its brand, increases credibility and SEO.
A subdomain operates within the main domain; they have a unique URL that operates on the main purchased domain and is used to identify a certain section of the website. Subdomain helps to target specific audiences, allows to experiment with new content, and helps with SEO.
Example: If a domain is example.com, then the subdomain can be new.example.com
IP address and Dedicated IP address: An internet protocol (IP) address is a unique address given to individual computers, servers, domains, or devices. When you access a website, your computer communicates with the web server through an IP address. A dedicated IP address is an exclusive IP address as compared to shared IP addresses assigned to multiple users in a group.
Sender’s Policy Framework (SPF): Sender’s Policy Framework is a protocol designed to restrict the use of an organization’s domain as the sources of an organization’s domain as the sources of email messages. It blocks spammers and other attackers from sending email messages which could appear to be attackers from sending emails which could appear from a legitimate organization.
Domain Key Identified Mail (DKIM): A Domain Key Identified Mail refers to a protocol that allows an organization to take responsibility for transmitting a message by signing it in a way that ISP’s(internet service providers) can verify. Adding a digital signature to every outgoing message, which lets the receiving services know the message actually came from your organization.
Example: Let see an example to get a good understanding in two steps:
Step 1: Sender’s identify the field they want to include in their DKIM record signature. Fields include the “from” address, the body, the subject and more. The field should remain unchanged in the transit otherwise DKIM authentication will fail.
Step 2: Create a hash of the text field by including it in the DKIM signature. Following are the text field
From: Emily Rose <[email protected]>
Subject: Latest updates
This will map to this hash string
2202cbe9897g101820bceghb708e94g43
Once the hash string is generated the encrypted key is only accessible to the sender.
Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformation (DMARC): DMARC is a technical standard which helps protect email senders and recipients from spam, spoofing and phishing. It tells the receiving servers what to do when the outgoing mail is received from an organization that does not pass SPF or DKIM.
Following are DMARC establishes for a domain owner:
- Publish its email authentication practices.
- Determines action that should be taken if the mail fails authentication checks.
- Enables reporting of the following actions that are taken on mail that claims to be from its domain.
IMAP, POP and SMTP methods: Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) and Post Office Protocol (POP) are two methods to access your email. IMAP is mostly used when you need to check your email from several different devices such as phone, laptop, and tablet.
IMAP allows you to access your email without downloading or storing it on your computer; i.e. you’re directly reading it from the email services. IMPAS only downloads a message when you click on it.
POP directly contacts your email service and downloads all of your new messages and downloads all of your new messages from it. Once downloaded it can only be accessed by the same computer.
Simple message access protocol (SMAP) is a set of communication guidelines that allows software to transmit an electronic mail over the internet. SMTP is a push protocol which is used to send the mail whereas POP and IMAP retrieve those emails at the receiver’s side.
Embedded image and Hosted Images: Embedded images are appended to the emails itself which makes them a part of actual email. You don’t have to download the images manually using “Click here” to download images. Demerit of embedded images is that the images can turn into attachment if converted to plain text format.
Publicly available images which are hosted on web servers that can be viewed by anyone are called the hosted images, it can be used in your email signature by providing a li9nk to the image with the HTML code.
The main difference between the two is that embedded images are stored within the email itself in comparison to hosted images which are stored on the web server itself, they are downloaded when the email is opened.
Plain text email vs HTML text email: HTML email is a traditional markup language that is used by web developers to create documents for display on a web browser. In these emails you can portray elements like text colors, front styles, in text links, graphic and more.
Plain text email contains no styling or formatting codes. They are useful for generalized messages to a large audience, enabling you to embed links and make some marketing strategies suitable to HTML.
TOS violation: Terms of services are the legal agreement between a services provider and a person who wants to use that service. The terms of services can also just be a disclaimer for the person to which he has to abide by using the services offered by the services provider.
Spoofing and Phishing: Spoofing is a fraudulent activity in which the attacker tries to forge the identity of the legitimate user and acts as another person and when an attacker wants to find any sensitive information of users in a fraudulent manner by intending to be related to a trusted organization.
Difference between warming up of domain name and warming up of IP address.
Domain Name: A domain warm-up is the process of improving the current reputation with an internet service provider. It improves the current reputation of domain names. Currently many ISPs are more domain focused rather than IP focused.
IP address: IP warm-up is a process in which email senders gradually increase the volume of emails sent using the volume of email sent using a particular IP address over time. This process concerns improving the current reputation with internet services providers.
Is Google saying no to automated email warm-up? 🤔
Google has announced to stop the practice of cold email warm-up services. Google has is also planning to take actions by removing their Gmail API access if someone uses the best email warm up services. To maintain access to the Gmail API the email warming feature should be shut down by 13th February, 2023.
As an alternative to email warm up, it has recommended users to set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC email standards for Gmail. So, basically automated warm-up is being discouraged by google. That translates to manual warming up is the way to go.
Now that you know what an email warms a new email account is, let’s understand the warm up process.
How to manually warm up an email account?
Authenticate your account: The first step to manually war-up your email is to see that your new email account has been verified against SPF, DKIM, DMARC because ISP’s associates the sender reputation to the authentic records.
Send individual email and create a seed list: Before sending emails to the subscribers from your new email account send it to co-worker, friends and family.
Initially send approximately 10-15 individual emails and ensure that the emails you are sending have a consistent engagement (i.e.) it’s not enough that the emails are just opened, it is important that there should be consistent engagement and they are replied back to, marked important and if they are marked unspam if they land up in spam. Personalizing your subject line would get you a proper response.
Send emails at intervals: If the emails are sent continuously the ISP’s would get suspicious and consider that you are a spammer which may not be in favor of your new email account. Hence send emails leaving a time gap between sending emails.
IP and Domain infrastructure: Maintain the infrastructure and authentication pieces in order like updating DNS records, passing SPF, signing with DKIM and protecting the system.
Examine your email campaign: Analyze your email campaign in great detail and adjust the email send volume according to the necessity or to solve the problem that arises. To make your email warm-up successful, personalize your engagement. This can be achieved by
- Right personalized message and avoid spammy words.
- Your subscriber should have an option to unsubscribe your email as this will limit the possibility of the recipient marking your email as spam.
Be consistent with your practice: Warming-up email is not a one time practice it is an ongoing process therefore ensures maintenance and a good reputation as this will determine the long term impact on your ability to reach your audience.
Importance of email warm-up
Imagine that you wanted to surprise your grandma, so you decided to write her a letter. You put your thoughts into it and wrote a beautiful letter.
After sending the letter that you have put so much effort in writing you were expecting a reply.
But a strange thing happens, you did not receive any reply for the letter when you looked into the matter you realized that your grandma did not reply because at first she did not receive the mail.
Now you know why email warm up is important. For your prospect to read the email that you have drafted, your mail should first reach the inbox of the recipient and email warm-up helps you in increasing deliverability.
It helps you to be able to send your email to the full limit. According to Google’s policy, you can send up to 500 emails for a free account and 2,000 emails for google workspace and, you can also minimize the chance that google will suspend your email account.
Another way how good deliverability can increase engagement and revenue can be understood by an example.
Deliverability: It refers to the ability of an email to reach the inbox of the intended recipient.
Example: Let assume that out of 2,000 emails that are sent effortlessly on the deliverability front, 1,600 were delivered to the primary inbox.
Now, only 15% (240 emails) were opened and out of these emails that were opened and out of those emails that were opened 20% (48 emails) got a reply back and 10% (4 emails) of those got converted each having a lifetime value of $100. So, the total profit earned is $400 dollars.
Let’s assume you have improved the deliverability in percentage of email that were delivered and their inbox placement.
Continuing the example: 1,800 were delivered (earlier it was 1,600) with a 20% (360 emails) open rate and same as before 20% (72 emails) got replies, 10% (7 emails) converted each of the lifetime value of $100. Hence the total profit is $700 which is closer to the double of 400.
So, this is how email warm-up can increase your revenue.
Best practices for warming-up your email account
Below are some best practices which will help you in your email warm up.
Consider using spam reporting in Google postmaster
Google postmaster tools help you monitor the prospect’s who use G Suite. This is a great resource as Google is one of the most popular email providers.
It will give you an idea about the number of prospects who manually flag your message as spam. This will increase your understanding about how your approach towards your prospect if it is to aggressively adapt accordingly.
Note: Do not completely depend on GPT, as if the messages are automatically filtered to spam you may not get any spike in the report as the email lands automatically in the recipients inbox.
Maintain your subscription list
One of the crucial factors that enhances your reputation is how much engagement your email is receiving. Generally people make a mistake by engaging with the client that doesn’t respond.
The important thing here is to understand that the disengaged client not only affects the reputation of your email account but also the possibility of future engaging prospects by decreasing the deliverability of the email account.
Engage across channel
While engaging your prospect via email is an effective way to engage but reaching your prospect across multiple channels can improve your email engagement as well. If a prospect is expecting your mail it increases the possibility of them being engaged via email which would ultimately result in increased engagement.
Ways to engage with your prospect via multiple channels are LinkedIn, Calls, Direct mail and social media.
Send cold email via subdomain at scale
Using different subdomains or root domains for cold email outreach is a common practice now as it gives you more control and visibility over the sender’s reputation of the domain being used for prospects.
There is always a risk associated with the sender’s reputation when sending cold email. ISP’s primarily categorize sender reception on a domain basis. Therefore, warming up email domain comes handy while managing your email marketing outreach.
By using different subdomains or domains you can hedge your bets and ensure outreach to inbound leads and consumers to the maximum level.
Conclusion
In this blog, we discussed details about using email warm-up, its importance, usage, and how it will impact your campaigns in general. When it comes to reaching your prospect or customer it’s best done with a methodical approach keeping the needs of the prospect in mind. You can always take help from professional email warm up tool to make your email warm up process scalable.