What is Warmup?

Let’s first go back to your past email sending experience. Where you wanted to send out a lot of emails but when you did you found that a lot of them either bounced (undelivered) or landed in the spam folder.

Let’s try to understand the warmup with a real-life example.

When you hit the gym what you do before start working out? You first do the “Warmup”. Correct?

Why you do that? Because you want to make sure that if I do the warmup properly so that I will not injure myself when I go for heavy weight lifting.

The same is true for when you start sending out your email campaigns. An excellent warmup process is needed to ensure that you don’t overdo it and damage the sending reputation of your Domain and IPs.

What is a Warmup Process?

You might already be familiar with the need for warming up a new IP, and domains are much in the same. Still, it’s crucial to note that both reputations are important considering that IPs and domains build and maintain separate reputations.

Proper warmup time assures that your IP and Domain both build a good sending reputation with all the mailbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo, etc, which helps to increase the high delivery.

While the warmup process can seem slow and tedious, it’s important if you want to avoid the spam folder. Otherwise, you’ll start to experience other issues like throttling, greylisting, or outright blocking of your messages.

Here we going to talk about two major forms of warmup:

1. IP warmup
2. Domain warmup.

Depending on your current scenario and warmup needs, you will need to look at doing one or both of these.

Different Warmup Scenarios:

1. Established Domain, New IP
2. New Domain, Established IP
3. New Domain and New IP

Established Domain, New IP:

In this scenario, you already have an build a reputation for your domain by sending good emails in the past.

But, now you are looking to increase your sending volume and you require another dedicated Ip to the load of that sending.

This is where you need to do the IP warmup: because a new dedicated IP will be “cold.” In other words, the IP hasn’t sent any emails in the past and will not have a sending reputation. To build up sending reputation, you need to warm up your new IP.

You can do this one of two ways: Manually or automatically. When you are sending emails using SMTP or API in that case you need to do warm up manually, you need set hourly sending limits in your application or program and slowly ramp up as you go. Alternatively, you can use Mail250’s automated IP warmup using a web app.

New Domain, Established IP:

In this scenario, you want to add a new domain to send another set of emails using the already warmed IP. Volume-wise, you are still fit within recommended sending limits for your current IPs, but want to build good sending domain reputations with more concise sending domains ([email protected], [email protected], etc.).

Here is where many email senders would say, “Well, my IP is already warm and has a good reputation, so I can just start out the volume from day 1.” While this is technically true, you could run the risk of your domain getting assigned a poor domain reputation due to its newness. In doing so, you endanger your overall deliverability.

New Domain and New IP:

Lastly, this is the scenario where your domain and IP both are new and need warming up. In this case, you will want to warm them up in tandem with each other.

Here you need to maintain the sending limit for your both domain and IP.

Check out the hourly/daily sending limit here.

The daily send limit can also vary based on multiple factors such as list hygiene and engagement. Your sending needs to be monitored during the warmup process so that changes can be made as necessary if you see a high rate of errors or your emails consistently go to the spam folder.

Warmup Tip: Engaged Recipients

We recommend you to first target your most engaged recipients during the warmup process to ensure that you see good open and click rates. Sending emails to engaged recipients is a huge boost to sending reputation, and for some mailbox providers like Gmail, it is especially important. Gmail uses engagements as one of its main metrics to determine mailbox placement. Every little bit helps, right? Regardless, it’s worth asking…