Email marketing is still the most effective strategy for reaching and engaging your customer base. You can get opening rates ranging between 18% and 22% and a high ROI averaging a $40 return on average for every dollar you spend on your email campaigns; email is a 40 times more effective way to acquire customers than social media.
However, you have to deal with the issue of email deliverability. Your email address must have a high sender reputation, or your internet service providers (ISPs) will flag your emails as spam or even block them outrightly if you send them at scale without a proper IP warm-up strategy.
What is IP warm-up?
An IP warm-up is the means of establishing a good email sender reputation for a new internal protocol (IP) address or an IP address you have abandoned for a long time. To warm up an IP, you send low volumes of emails from the IP address and subsequently scale up your sending rate until you reach your daily targeted volume.
For example, if you have a list of over a million subscribers, you can gradually start by sending 200 emails on the first day, increase to 500 on the second day, and shoot up the number to 1,000 on the third day. An IP warm-up is a painstaking process; for a list with more than a million subscribers, you may have to send your emails gradually for about 4 to 8 weeks.
The idea is to build a solid reputation with your ISPs; your target is to achieve the requisite deliverability; you must concentrate on your target volume and engagement rates. Organizations rightly consider time a veritable resource, but the time you take to build a solid sender’s reputation will prevent deliverability issues from cropping up.
What is an IP warm-up for email marketing?
Email marketing is part of a cross-channel marketing strategy; IP warm-up for email marketing entails taking time to validate your email list and ensuring you are in tune with IP warm-up best practices. IP warm-up helps you to build a good sender reputation and enhances maximum deliverability for successful email marketing.
IP warm-up aims to have a strong and engaged email list that you can utilize as part of an effective email marketing and a cross-channel marketing strategy.
When should you warm up a new IP?
You need to warm up a newly added dedicated IP address to your account; if you have not sent emails through your IP address in more than 30 days, you must warm it up. The essence of a warm-up is to establish a good sender reputation.
Usually, if you start sending large volumes of emails from a new or “cold” IP address, your ISP becomes suspicious and may flag your emails as spam. To ensure you don’t encounter such problems, you need an IP warm-up; that’s gradually sending emails through your new or cold IP address.
Your ISP will closely monitor your sending procedure and observe how your subscribers engage with your emails during the warm-up stage. After you have concluded the IP warm-up, you can start sending large volumes of emails without the fear of being flagged as spammy.
When you don’t warm up a new or cold IP, you will experience slow delivery; assume your projection is to send 10,000 emails to your subscribers; without warming up your IP, you may only be able to send about 2,000 emails within the first hour. Even at that, your ISP will monitor the engagement, open rates, click rates, and spam rates.
The metrics will be the yardstick to determine whether to allow the remaining emails to go through. If your engagement rates are poor and you have a high spam rate, the remaining emails can be flagged as spam.
If you have built a good sender reputation through IP warming, you shouldn’t be afraid of delayed email delivery or spam reports. Another issue you can encounter is getting backlisted; If your IP address becomes blacklisted, your ISP will not allow the passage of any email, and it’s almost impossible to recover an IP address that has ended up on the blacklist.
Warm-up strategies
Choosing an IP warm-up strategy depends on the user; goals usually vary, and the needs for the IP warm-up will determine any strategy you may deploy. The generally accepted IP warm-up strategies are manual and automated.
Manual
You can manually warm up your IP address. The goals you want to achieve determine the strategy and your schedule.
For example, you can decide to set hourly or daily email-sending limits. No automation is required here, it’s purely a manual process, and you gradually increase the volume of emails you send hourly or daily depending on your decision.
Automation
Technological advancements are penetrating all spheres of life and the business landscape. We now have email warm-up tools that can automate an IP warm-up process.
Automation enhances your email-sender reputation without requiring as much manual work input, unlike the manual process.
Conclusion
Choosing an effective strategy for IP warm-up is critical to building a good sender reputation; it’s vital to the success and relevance of your business in the very competitive global market that your subscribers engage, open, and click on your emails. A good sender reputation ensures that your ISP does not flag your emails as spam.
Spammy emails can greatly hurt your business.
