If you are an email marketer and you think that email is dead, you need to think again. Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to communicate with your prospects and customers.
Did you know that working professionals spend 13 hours per week in the email inboxes and that 247 billion emails are sent everyday?
You want to ensure that your emails are getting delivered to your recipients inbox and that they see your emails among all the noise.
The importance of IP warm up prior to venturing into bulk email marketing is vital.
Why you need to do an IP warm up
Most marketers have good intentions with email marketing. People are genuinely trying to promote their products or services and grow their customer base and business. There is unfortunately a growing minority of people who abuse the system and send emails to large groups of people who have not agreed to receive them.
You also have more sinister abusers of email marketing such as cyber criminals and hackers blasting out phishing emails to hundreds of thousands of email addresses every day for their own sinister motives.
The result of this is that ISP and inbox providers will not trust unfamiliar email senders. Unfortunately this will apply to us all and especially when you set up a new inbox from a new domain.
This means IP warm up is essential for anyone who wants to ensure good email deliverability before cranking up their email marketing activities.
Protect your IP address
Why IP warm up is needed:
Internet service providers or inbox providers will flag or remember
- Email traffic from your IP address.
- Which IP addresses are sending bad traffic
- Which IP addresses are sending good traffic
- IP addresses they don’t recognise or they have never seen traffic from before.
What is IP warm up?
By nature inbox providers are distrusting of any sequence of emails that they don’t recognise. They have been forced into doing this in order to protect their users from potentially dangerous spam or phishing emails. Inbox providers are more prone to blocking an email and sending it to spam if it is sent to many inboxes in bulk from a new domain or IP.
How to do an IP warm up?
- IP warm up at a high level means sending emails from your new IP address or domain gradually.
- Make sure any emails you are sending are sending to clean email addresses and you are confident the data is clean. Use tools like Never Bounce (Insert link) to clean lists before sending.
- If you want to send in batches send 10 per day for one week for a new IP
- The next week send 20 per day for one week
- Make sure you are using your internal work emails to communicate regularly with your colleagues. This gives an indication that this IP and Domain is legit.
- You can now begin to ramp up your email sends by doubling your email sends per day. For example
- Day 1 - 100 emails
- Day 2 - 200 emails
- Day 3 - 400 emails
- Day 4 - 800 emails
- Day 5 - 1600 emails
- And so on….
Analyse your email sends
Gradually increasing your emails sends is not enough in itself to prove that your IP and your Domain can be trusted. You must watch out how people are interacting with your emails. For example are you getting a lot of unsubscribes, are people reporting spam etc.
Try and keep the number of links in an email to a minimum and don't go too heavy on the HTML rich content.
Think about emails that you have interacted positively with in the past… Keep it simple, think of the end user and just remember this is a game of patience.