Email deliverability is the measure of how many emails in a campaign have been bounced, ignored, and rejected by the receivers’ internet service providers (ISPs) and email service providers (ESPs).
It also tells how many emails from the campaign were sent to the promotion and spam box. In a nutshell, email deliverability tells you how much of the marketing emails you’ve sent have successfully reached your customer’s inbox.
The higher the ratio of the emails getting into customer inboxes versus those that didn’t, the better your email marketing campaign’s performance. But no matter how well crafted or honest your email campaigns are, if you aren’t a reputable email marketer and you start sending large volumes of email per hour, day, week, or month from the get-go, your messages will never reach your customers’ inboxes.
You have to build and improve your online reputation first not to be labeled by ISPs and ESPs as a spammer. IP (Internet Protocol) warming will help you with that.
What Is IP Warming And How Does It Work?
IP warming or IP warm-up is the act of establishing and increasing an IP address’s email sending reputation to ISPs and ESPs like Google. This is done by sending volumes of email using a specific IP address and gradually increasing the schedule’s volume.
On the receiver’s end, the email service provider and ISP will examine the traffic coming from your IP address and the interaction coming from their client (your email recipient). This is the standard protocol by mailbox providers and ISPs when detecting spam, especially if the email comes from a cold or new IP address.
That is why you should start by sending small volumes of email to your customers and work to medium volumes before doing large scale email campaigns. The IP warming process is also done typically within a 4-8 week period, depending on your target volume and engagement rate.
Why Should You Warm Up An IP Address?
Because the purpose of IP warming is to establish and increase your IP address’s email sending reputation score, IP warming makes sure that future email campaigns sent from your IP address won’t be bounced, blocked, or be rejected by internet service providers.
Some mailbox services put a limit to how many emails senders can send in one day. But once a sender has built a solid reputation, the limitation is lifted, giving the sender the ability to send unhindered and massive volumes of marketing emails daily.
A hot IP address increases your marketing emails’ deliverability, thus increasing lead generation, conversion, sales, engagement rates, and your business exposure in the digital marketing field.
The high deliverability of your emails also makes your metrics and marketing analytics more accurate. This helps you address and avoid bad marketing strategies while conducting testing, which allows you to make better strategies driving your business to success.
How To Warm Up Your IP
There are two ways you can warm-up your IP address. One is a manual process, and the other is automated.
Manual IP Warming
You need to manually send emails on gradual volumes based on rate and schedule with manual IP warming. For example, you can follow the x2 – x5 frequency. This is done by sending 50 emails today, sending 100 emails tomorrow, then 500 emails the day after, 1000 emails the next, 5000 emails on the fifth day, and so on until you reach your desired email volume sent daily.
It is crucial that you warm-up ISPs and email service providers at equal frequencies. This can be done by segmenting your customers based on their ISP and your choice’s mailbox service. For example, segment your Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail, and AOL-using customers into a list first. Then pick the 12 users from each of the lists to receive an email from you since 50 divided by four is 12. Send emails to twice the users from each list the next day and x5 after that.
Manual IP warming is highly suggested to new email marketers who use an in-house email system with a dedicated SMTP service and IP address.
Automated IP Warming
The automated IP warming system is set up using your email marketing tool because warming automation is usually included in a tool’s features. Automated warming up tools typically uses hourly schedules following a predetermined maximum amount of emails to be sent per day.
For example, if you set the automating tool to send 1200 emails today, the warming automation tool will automatically divide that day’s email cap into 24. You’ll then have your emails sent to 50 of your users per hour. You can set the next day and the other next to have a higher email campaign cap than the other in advance.
The Bottom Line
IP warming is significant to learn for startup email marketers with a rapidly growing customer base. By warming up an IP address for email campaigns, an email marketer ensures increasing email deliverability from their business.
This then drives success in an email marketer’s brand because their customers are sure to receive all promotional emails and other business updates. Not only that, but high deliverability rates will also expand a brand’s subscriber pool because a business can reach out to more potential customers in the future.
