How to warm up email domain – you have 3 options

In other words, how to make sure that my emails sent from my email account won’t end up in spam? With the rise of demand for email outreach automation and tools being used with it, more and more companies started to be more aware of cold email outreach requirements. Warming up email domains is one of the important aspects that will define the success of your email campaigns. It’s especially important to do it if your domain and email accounts are fresh but we believe it’s very beneficial if the warm-up runs continuously.

Keep in mind that we are talking about personal cold email outreach with the purpose of sales. This might not apply to campaigns like newsletter or mass campaigns.

Why asking “How to warm up email domain?” The Problem:

The question is not only to how to warm up email domain but basically refers to how to warm up your email account(s).

The problem with automated email campaigns is that many of the sent emails end up in the promotion folder or even worse – the spam folder. The more of the emails end up in spam, the higher the chances that your domain might get “bad domain reputation”. It’s like with people. It takes ages to build up the reputation, but very little to lose it.

You might ask how can we get a bad domain reputation and what does that mean for my company?

Receivers in email providers are keeping track of your email messages and are alert about how the messages that you are sending perform in the inbox. Based on that data, each email provider makes a score of that performance linked to your domain and account. Better the performance, better the trust in your sent messages. That scoring then distributes the messages into appropriate inbox folders (e.g.: Inbox, Promotions and Spam). Note that sending emails to emails that don’t exist also contributes to domain reputation. Make sure you keep your emails lists verified. There are various tools available for that.

“Lost” of affected domain reputation will affect your email campaign deliverability significantly. And therefore your campaign performance will be trash.

How to solve the problem?

So major problem is deliverability. Keep the emails clean to avoid email bounces (with email verification tools) and keep warming up your domain.

There are basically two options for the warm up, manual and automate. The automated one can come with extra features;

1. Manual warm up (Cheep and time-consuming)
2. Automated warm up as a solo solution (Payable but fully automated) e.g.:
   – Mailreach – Starts at 25$ monthly
   – Mailwarm – Starts at 79$ monthly
   – Warmup inbox – Starts at 9$ monthly
   – Gmass – Starts at 0$ monthly
   – Lemwarm – Starts at 29$ monthly
3. If you are looking for a solution that comes with automated email outreach tool then Gmass or Lemlist(with lemwarm) are your prefered options.

Manual warm up is very complicated and we do not recommend doing it. It’s too cumbersome and it takes too much time. Apart from that, it doesn’t provide as good results as automated warm up.

Automated “solo solution” is a good call if you already using an email campaign (drip) provider that doesn’t offer email warm up (or maybe warm up module is too expensive). You can get an email warm up tool for as little as 9$ per account.

The most optimized and convenient solution is to get an email campaign tool that comes with that solution already built-in, ideally for an affordable price. Lemwarm from Lemlist is such tool. It is also the only tool that we tried but it works great for us.

How does automated email warm up work?

Email warm up tries to mimic human behaviour. The services are using all the signed-up users that also need the warm up service and automate email sending among those users. The service will be sending emails to other users on your behalf with replies(yes, you can read them in your mailbox) and you’ll receive emails and replies from other users too.

That way the email service providers will “mark” you as being human and that your emails have content of importance, therefore those should land in peoples inbox for them to see it.

If your email starts landing in spam (maybe you have sent too many messages or emails started to land in spam, or people started to mark your emails as spam, …) the smart warm up systems will move those emails form spam to the inbox, letting the email service provider know that this specific sender is OK.

Keep in mind

Monitor email warm up

It makes sense to continue warming up your account. While warming up the service should be providing you with data. The metrics you are looking for are reports about how many emails has been sent on a daily basis and how many are landing in spam or categories. The system will also let you know how many emails were retrieved from spam and got moved to the inbox.

Send limited amount of emails

Cold email outreach will work as long as your emails are landing in the inbox folder for the recipients to see. Sending too many emails will affect that visibility and therefore – email open rate. The best number to limit yourself to is 100. If you are just starting, go with 50 per day and slowly increase to 100. Keep monitoring the performance of open rates and warm-up report of how many emails might be landing in spam. If the open rate falls under 45-50% you need to revisit your strategy.

Aim for clicks and replies

It’s healthy to assume that if a high percentage of people click on what you are sending them and reply to your messages, then the email service provider should treat your score as “human”. You can achieve that with killer copywriting and sophisticated personalization of emails and follow up emails!

Conclusion

I hope we have answered your question about how to warm up email domain. If you need a short summary of what we have said, look below:

1. You should always be warming out your email account
2. It helps if you choose the email campaign provider that already has warm up module built in
3. Don’t send more than 100 email per day and count them with sent warm up emails
4. Monitor the warm up activity
5. Verify emails before you use them in email campaign

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