Before businesses go big, they must warm up to their audience and build trust. The same goes for when you’re talking about email marketing. As an email marketer, you can’t just send high volumes of emails to potential leads from the get-go. You’re asking to be labeled as a spammer that way.
You need to do IP warming first. This is the process of sending increasing volumes of email by a predetermined schedule to build a good reputation and trust among internet and email service providers. But it’s not going to be that simple. You have to consider who you’re sending to and what type of content you will send during warmup. Discover more do’s and don’ts below.
Do’s of IP Warming:
1. Get Your Recipients’ Permission to Send Them Emails
Before you send email campaigns as a way of promoting your small business to your customers, you must first ask for consent if they want to receive your emails or not. There are a few ways to do this. One is to set up a cookie consent generator, and the other is to give your site visitors the option to subscribe to your mailing list.
Users who haven’t given consent to receive your emails will be surprised to receive emails from you and most likely ignore and mark your emails as spam. This ruins your email deliverability, sending reputation and defeats the purpose of IP warming.
2. Focus On Your Engaged Subscribers
The more your subscribers engage with your email campaigns, the better your sender’s reputation score is. Your sender’s reputation will be reviewed by internet service providers and email service providers.
If your sender’s reputation is good, your messages will be directed to every customers’ inbox. If not, your email campaigns will be rejected, bounced back, or sent to the spam box. Send campaigns to the users who open, click, and make purchases from your emails.
3. Be Consistent With Your Email Schedule
Following an email sending schedule makes it easier for ESPs and ISPs to monitor your sending patterns and the engagement you receive from your customers. If your sending pattern varies from time to time, ISPs and ESPs will reduce your sender’s reputation and limit the numbers of emails you can send to customers.
Follow a good IP warming schedule such as the two by five pattern. Send 50 emails today, 100 tomorrow, 500 the next day, and so on.
4. Monitor Your Performance
Even if you send your email campaigns to active subscribers for IP warming, there’s a chance that these users will go cold ignoring your messages mostly because you’re sending emails at times when users aren’t ready to open their email inbox.
By monitoring your performance, you’ll be able to make adjustments to your content, templates, and sending consistency that keep your customers engaged and your sender’s reputation reasonable.
Don’ts of IP Warming:
1. Including Inactive or Unsubscribed Users
Cold users have usually forgotten email addresses, disinterested subscribers, or people who have already marked all your email as worthy of being sent to the spam box. If you have unsubscribed users from your mailing list, remove them immediately.
These users contribute to your campaign disengagement rates, making ISPs and ESPs mark your domain, IP address, and email address as a spam sender. You can try to reach out to cold users at least 2-3 times with re-engaging content, but if you receive zero interaction, it’s best to scrub your mailing list for good.
2. Sending Irrelevant Emails to Subscribers
Subscribers join your mailing list for one reason: They like your content. If you send them content they don’t like, you’re going to get ignored and worse – marked as a spammer. To avoid this from happening, immediately put your new subscribers into segments, they’re interested in and make personalized content for the users in each specific segment.
3. Purchasing Email Lists
Purchased email lists are no use if you’re just getting into email marketing. Yes, they make your mailing list grow, but many email addresses cause email marketers problems. Mostly when you talk about keeping your sender’s reputation clean.
Some addresses in a purchased list are already inactive, others do not give consent to their emails being sold, and there are also addresses with spam traps. If you want to grow your mailing list, do it the straightforward way.
It might take time, cost you, and be challenging to do, but it’s also much safer.
4. Not Following Your Email Service Provider’s Recommendations
Each email service provider sets a maximum amount of emails you can send in a day with one account. Sometimes you start with 500 a day and eventually progress to 2000 every 24 hours if you do IP warming right. Going beyond this recommended number too soon will have your email address automatically labeled by your ESP as a spammer.
Conclusion
The rules for IP warming might seem complicated, but here are simple ways to do it: Send campaigns to those who respond and consent. Keep your email content relevant. Send campaigns with a consistent schedule. Don’t send campaigns to purchased email lists. Follow your ESP’s recommendations and keep on monitoring your engagement rates.