How to Handle Email Warm-Up for Cold Outreach
Email warm-up process
Without first warming up your email addresses, it's impossible to achieve an effective cold email campaign. Increasing your sender reputation is one of the benefits of warming up your email. It is crucial in order to ensure that most of your emails reach the inbox of the recipients. This article will reveal the essentials you need to know to get prepared for warming your email account.
Why warm up an inbox?
A google spam update in 2021 has made the inbox placement of emails complicated. More emails are now marked as spam, and it negatively affects any email campaign of a company. Email deliverability is the core foundation of a successful cold email campaign. A study by ReturnPath showed that more than 57% of emails land in places other than the inbox. Other studies have also found that new email accounts are getting blocked soon after the beginning of a test campaign. As such, to maximize email deliverability and avoid getting blocked, you need to warm up an email account.
Importance of email warm-up
Warming up is essential for improving the reputation of your IP and domain. It helps increase the inbox placement. While the warm-up email process might seem slow, you should fully complete it. Taking shortcuts and hurrying to perform a cold email campaign will result in dreaded outcomes that include throttling, getting placed in a spam folder, and, ultimately, ending with a blocked account. Therefore, email warm-up puts you in a better position to start a cold email campaign.
What is the email warm-up process?
The email warm-up process is a way of improving your sender reputation and, consequently, increasing the number of emails that land in the inbox. The platform accumulates positive engagement with your emails, such as marking as important, spam and promotion removals, opens, clicks, and, most importantly, replies.
Email service providers have daily limits for sending cold emails. A G Suite account in Google email services has a limit of 2000 emails a day. However, when an organization opens a new email account, the limit is reduced. A good sender reputation allows the initial limit to be gradually increased until it reaches the 2000 limit.
Normally, an average of 10 weeks is the time required to achieve maximum email deliverability. The recipient engagement in the warm-up process determines how fast one can reach the limit. If the engagement levels are high, the warm-up process speeds up, and the emails reach their full potential faster. However, if the engagement is low, the warm-up email process might take longer to achieve the email's full potential.
How to warm up your mailbox before sending out cold emails
Now we understand the importance of warming up your email account. The next section will provide detailed stages of warming up an email account to enjoy the immense benefits.
Account authentication
Account authentication increases the reliability of your email address. Authentication safeguards your account against spam filters and improves deliverability.
Main authentication methods involve:
- SPF. Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is a text file that is created in your Domain Name System (DNS). It includes authorized servers allowed to send emails. When the ESP from the recipient side encounters an SPF during a spam test, it increases the reliability and credibility of the domain.
- DKIM. Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) authenticates your email by adding a digital signature with your domain. The DKIM prevents spoofing.
- DMARC. Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance combine the DKIM and SPF to further increase the reliability of your account to the receiver’s ESP.
- Custom domain. A custom domain increases the authenticity of the domain and email. It assures the receiver's ESP that the email and links are from an authentic source.
Starting small
After ensuring that the email authentication process has been covered, you can start the email warm-up process. There are two methods: manual and automated. Manual method involves sending a small batch of individual emails, and its volumes are limited. With email warmup tools, the process is much faster, easier, and more efficient.
Another important thing to note is you must send the emails to different email service providers. By sending emails to friends who use G Suite, you will only increase your reliability with Google. Therefore, sending to email service providers, such as Yahoo, Outlook, Zoho, and Exchange, will enable you to build a good reputation with most major service providers.
The focus here should be around automation because handling email warmup along with the other tasks can become overwhelming.
Engagement rate
An engagement rate is one of the metrics used to determine the credibility and authenticity of your email account. As such, your email account also needs to receive emails. To improve the engagement, use attention-grabbing headers and be ready to swiftly respond to the replies.
Make it a point to have continuous email conversations for the whole warm-up period of 10 weeks. For those who have a website, they can increase the inbound emails by providing the email address for subscribers to use. Regular engagement authenticates your email activities to the service provider. It also increases the credibility of your account to start sending out cold emails.
Subscribe to newsletters
To ensure regular inflow to your inbox, it’s better to subscribe to other newsletters. After subscribing, you must confirm the subscription in your inbox to ensure that you will receive the emails and warm up your account. Receiving emails is essential in the email warm-up process. It helps to improve the credibility of your account.
Sending emails
During the initial stages of the email warm-up process, it's critical to know how to send emails. For a new account, send one email at a time to individuals. Avoid using automatic tools that send numerous emails at once. It triggers spam filters to assess if you are not a robot. Having a time interval between emails sent is essential in the warm-up process to prevent getting your account blocked temporarily and, in worst cases, permanently.
Next Step
After 10 weeks of warming up the email account, you’re good to kick off the email campaign. The automated email campaign must start small. A list of not more than 30 email addresses will do. Ensure to include friends and trusted recipients for maximum response. Below are some tips that you can use to accelerate the warming process and increase your credibility score.
Personalize the subject line
The primary objective of an email campaign is to get subscribers to open your emails and reply. As such, creating a personalized subject line increases the chances of the recipient to open your emails.
Write good content
The content of your emails must be relevant and engaging at the same. It enables you to increase your relevancy. A well-written email will always raise your recipients’ anticipation for the next email. A high open rate is also essential for improving your email account credibility score.
Also, the email must be free of spam content, which will make your account a target to keep an eye on. These are FREE, DISCOUNT, exclamation marks, percentages, and other words and symbols. Research more on spammy content to prevent falling for spam traps. Fortunately, there are spam tester tools and software to minimize spam content in your emails. Use a few outbound links and a simple outline to avoid getting detected by spam algorithms.
Unsubscribe option
All your emails must include an unsubscribe option. It allows uninterested recipients to opt-out from receiving your emails. It is a much better option than to have them spam your email account. Getting your email account spammed negatively impacts your sender reputation. This feature provides relief for the recipient and you. The recipient won’t feel pressured to continuously receive your content as they can unsubscribe any time they want. For you, it will minimize getting your account spammed.
Conclusion
Therefore, before starting a cold email campaign using a new email account, make sure to warm up an email address first. It puts you in a better position to effectively achieve a higher deliverability rate. Warming up the email account improves your credibility score with email service providers. Ultimately, it's a good decision to use the above-described methods to perform an email warm-up. Warming up your account also helps you avoid getting trapped by the spam filters. After you have done the warm-up process, the next step is to check the email deliverability of your emails.