05 Sep Email Marketing WARM-UP phase

You are new to email marketing? Then this is a must read for you.

When you start your email marketing project, it is crucial that you start it the right way. Your deliverability and inbox placement depend on it. Why you ask? Because ESP’s adopted the warm-up process to decide whether you are either a legit sender or a spammer. Based on finding during warm-up period ESP’s decide to deliver your emails to inbox, the spam folder or completely reject them. Your sender reputation is measured by whether you manage your email list responsibly, removing undeliverable and spam complaint email addresses, building a strong relation with your email audience, not being annoying or in any way hurtful to your recipients, etc. Do the warm-up phase the right way, and your will be able to start emailing at a normal volume without risking your sender reputation.

Start the right way, follow this 3 tips:

Start sending at a very low volume, as slowly as possible. At least the first couple of days. Ramp up email volume too quickly in this crucial period and you will experience inbox placement problems that are very hard to get out off! Especially at Gmail. Remember even with a 100% permission list and a responsible email list management your emails can find themselves into a spam folder if you ramp up your sending email volume too quickly. Then after a week or so start to slowly increase sending volume until you reach your normal volume. Complete warm-up phase should last at least a month or two, depend on your contact list size. The larger it is, the longer the warm-up phase should be!

Make sure you review your list regularly. Keep only active recipients, those that producing high engagement with your email marketing content. Be very careful who you add to your list. Sometimes hitting just one spam trap is enough to get blacklisted.

Don’t take shortcuts! Take time to build volume and establish a good sender reputation.