Building a good reputation for your IP address is crucial to maintaining strong email deliverability for your email marketing campaigns. When sending marketing email through a new IP address, marketers start afresh without a reputation score and need to establish a positive reputation to let the ISPs know they are legitimate senders. This is known as ‘warming up’ an IP address.
Warming up an IP address is a gradual process. Over time, ISPs need to be given the opportunity to recognise, identify and evaluate sending behaviour so they can determine how healthy email lists are and how committed marketing departments are to sending relevant information to responsive users. ISPs will examine email marketing behaviour in detail, right down to how many recipients open emails, scroll to the bottom, and move messages to other folders.
The biggest hurdle for marketers is knowing where to start when warming up IP addresses. As a rule, marketers should begin by choosing a segment of their email file to warm up. Welcome messages work well as a trial segment because that mail stream tends to have strong permission practices.
Once a segment has been chosen, the next step is to decide on how many emails to begin sending before increasing the volume gradually over time.
The volume of email to send at the start will vary from sender to sender, but it is vital to send enough email for reputation to be tracked. As a rough guideline, if taking a conservative approach, divide your total monthly volume of email by 30 – so if you usually send 90,000 emails a month, this would be 3,000 emails per day for the first month in order to warm up your IP address. A more aggressive approach would be to divide the total monthly volume of email by 15.
To determine the speed at which email volumes are increased, marketers should use results as a guideline. If email deliverability is good, and engagement rates are high, then marketers should increase email volume at a quicker rate. While some SendGrid clients complete the warm up process in 1-2 weeks, it tends to take around 60 days on average.
Reputation systems tend to work on a 30 day view, so it is important to send email content consistently throughout the month, not all on one day – inactivity for over 30 days will result in having to begin the warm up process from scratch.
The warm-up period is generally a good opportunity to remedy any deliverability issues prior to sending email to an entire mailing list. Using email deliverability tools, it is possible to check if email is being delivered based on campaign, ISP, day and time, and then adjust campaigns accordingly.
This period is also the perfect opportunity to reassess the content of your marketing campaign – use it to assess which email campaigns are generating interest and engagement and why. This could help to optimize your entire marketing campaign.
Warming up your IP address and improving email deliverability within your marketing campaign will save time in the long run. Instead of following up with problems, you can dedicate the time to focus on acquisition strategy and product development. Every email delivered is another opportunity to better understand your customers and their needs.
By Carly Brantz, marketing professional at SendGrid.
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