1. Know your slabs and base numbers
Before you begin with performing a warmup, you need to know the numbers.
- How many users are you sending an email to?
- How often will you send those emails?
- When do you increase the number of emails that you send out?
If you’re using the image above with Pepipost’s warmup slabs, you are going to start with 500 emails on day 0.
Once these emails are out, you can send the next set on Day 1, where the number of emails is 3000.
As you gradually increase the numbers, within 15 days you’ll be able to send out 200,000 emails per day. However, keep monitoring for inboxing and other relevant engagement metrics. Also, keep a keen eye for any spam complaints, especially on Google postmaster.
2. Segment your email lists
You can send out all the emails you want and your warmup program may still lead to failure.
The purpose of a warmup is to show the mailbox provider, that your emails are relevant and that people are enjoying and engaging with them.
The best way to do that is by sending your emails only to the most engaged users.
By doing that, you ensure that your emails are well-received by the users who are on your sending list.
And when a mailbox provider sees that people are engaging a lot with your emails, they start trusting your emails even more.
3. Send your best content
This isn’t advice only for the warmup process, but for your entire email marketing plan.
But it’s especially powerful during the initial phases.
After you segment your users based on activity, you need to send them your best content.
We want as many users to give their mailbox algorithms the signal that our emails are good. And this is possible when they interact, open, click-through, read your emails, and maybe even share them.
4. Keep a track of what works and what doesn’t
You can’t grow what you don’t track.
When you are sending out these emails and taking all the precautions to ensure a great warmup program, you should track what you’re doing.
- A few examples of the data points to track:
- The content that generates the highest engagement
- Email unsubscribers, and what triggered the unsubscribes
- Spam reports if any
- Average open rates and click rates across all your sent emails
These elements are your starting points to track the performance of your warmup campaign.
5. Start sending your emails, and follow the plan
Stick to your plan. You may be tempted to start sending out your complete volume as soon as you begin seeing some good engagement.
But no matter how well-received your content is, it’s best to gradually grow the numbers to avoid getting put into the spam folder.
The more strictly you follow the plan you set for yourself, the better the results will be.
Essentially, the entire process of a warmup is only to get your trust back up. And at a point where the receiving mailbox providers are unsure about your email content, it’s best to continue slowly.
What to expect before, during, and after a warmup?
Consider this situation. You have a list of over 100,000 email subscribers and you haven’t sent them emails for quite a while now.
In most cases, you can expect your email reputation to reset to neutral. And you don’t have an option to turn it on-off on-demand.
Before the warm-up
When you start from scratch, your reputation is going to be low/zero. This is the same case if you have stopped emails for a while.
At this stage, sending out a large number of emails will affect your inbox placement rate. So you can expect your inboxing to be in the low 50%s or even lower depending on how engaged your audience is, and your list targeting and segmentation.
This is normal and there’s nothing to be concerned about here. Once you begin with your warmup process, the inboxing will move upwards.
During the warm-up
One of the major changes that you’ll notice as you begin your warmup process is the drop in email inboxing during the initial phase of the warm-up.
But that’s temporary.
As the mailbox provider algorithms understand your content and the engagement of their users with your emails, your sending reputation is built up.
It’s a fairly quick process and the algorithms are smart enough to identify good emails.
Once you build up enough reputation, the algorithms allow more of your emails to reach the inboxes of their users. Since the threshold for every mailbox provider is different, it’s important that you do not rush the process, and perform naturally variable email sending. You don’t have to fix a number and reach the goal every time.
For example, if your daily cap is 10,000 and you don’t need to send any more than 9000 emails, that’s alright. You can stop right there.
Our goal is to have an upper limit for each day while the email reputation is built up.
After the warm-up
Once you’ve successfully performed a warmup, your inbox placement will have improved. Compared to the below 50% inboxing before warm-up, you can expect 70-90+% inboxing depending on how good your content was after the process is complete.
As more emails begin reaching your customer inboxes, the higher your chances of converting users. Even if your conversion rate remains the same overall, more people seeing the email will still result in higher absolute conversions.
After a good warmup program, you can expect a statistically significant improvement in all of your email metrics combined.
