What is email warm-up?

When you have an email list, you can’t just start sending to everyone at once. Instead, you need to do some email warm-ups. 

Warming up your emails is an essential step that every sender must take. Otherwise, your campaigns might end up in the spam folder.

Learn from the email experts here at EcoSend what email warming up is and how to do it properly in just a few simple steps. 

Email warm-up explained

Email warm-up is the process of building reputation and trust with an email domain before you start sending emails at scale. 

Your sender reputation is important because email providers look out for various signs of spam.

If your account looks suspicious because it’s a new domain or due to sudden bulk sending, your emails might land in the spam folder. This seriously reduces the chances your emails will be seen by your target audience, and it can harm your sender reputation over the long term.

When you warm your emails up properly, your campaigns are more likely to be whitelisted. However, going ahead and bulk sending without warming up increases the chances of being greylisted or blacklisted. 

What’s greylisting?: A temporary rejection method used by mail servers to filter out spam. For instance, you might receive a message telling you to try again later. It works because spam bots will blast and move on, whereas genuine senders will indeed try again later. 

What’s blacklisting?: A permanent or semi-permanent block of a domain, IP address or sending service. If you’re blacklisted, your emails are rejected outright or routed to spam folders. Blacklisted domains are the worst case scenario and it can be extremely difficult to recover your sender reputation. 

What happens if you don’t warm your emails before sending?

If you want to send an email to your entire list but you don’t warm up your email domain first, you risk damaging your sender reputation. There’s also a good chance your emails will be automatically filtered as spam, meaning your recipients are unlikely to even see your emails. 

Not warming up your emails means your email domain (and therefore you) will be treated as a spammer from day one. This will ultimately result in lost revenue, since your domain will have a bad reputation. Your email provider could even ban you, since you’ll also be making their platform look bad too. 

This message couldn’t be simpler: If you want to make money from email, you need to put the effort into warming up your emails before sending. 

How to do email warm-ups

Before you send a single email, you first need to set up your account fully. This starts with getting your SPF, DKIM and DMARC in check. 

Another top tip is to create a dedicated domain and subdomain for your main email sending, ensuring you don’t use the same domain for cold outreach. 

Now comes the warm-up!

In a nutshell, to warm up your emails, you will need to start sending small quantities of emails, rather than bulk sending at once. 

For instance, say you have a list of 12,000 contacts. Warming up could involve sending emails to only 4,000 contacts per day over 3 days. 

👋 Psst: Grab a 15,000 subscriber plan to cover a list of this size from EcoSend, priced at just $124.17* per month on an Annual plan! 👀 (**Price correct at the time of writing). 

Sure, there would be a delay in when all of your contacts would receive that email. But the risk of being greylisted or blacklisted would be reduced, especially if you had also set up your domain property as mentioned above. 

To warm up your emails, you also don’t need to email every contact on your list. In fact, that can work even better to build trust. Instead, you can try sending personalised campaigns to a small number and gradually work your way up.

This is something that worked for Rightmove, which saw them gradually warm up their sender domain to be able to eventually send campaigns to 6 million recipients. Overall, Rightmove achieved a 99% deliverability rate and a 50% reduction in bounces, just by employing the right warmup techniques. 

Why you should avoid email warm-up tools

We’re always searching for shortcuts. In the world of email warm-ups, there are various tools and AI assistants which offer to do all of the work for you. 

How email warmup tools work is that they try to game the system by simulating human engagement with your emails. They fake conversations inside a controlled network to trick email providers into thinking your domain is trustworthy and engaged with.

Unfortunately, these tools actually put your email domain at greater risk of being blacklisted, and here’s why:

⛔ Violation of email provider policies: Did you check with your email provider before giving a third party tool access to manipulate your account? As you might expect, email providers frown on this and may close your account. 

🥴 The use of shared networks: Many email warm-up tools use shared pools of inboxes. If any spammers are also in the pool, their poor reputation can also impact your email domain due to association. 

🥷 Security concerns: When you hand over your email accounts to a third party tool, how trustworthy is it? Some warm-up tools require access to your mailbox via OAuth or SMTP/IMAP. In turn, this creates security and data compliance concerns. In some industries and locations, this can even create regulatory violations (i.e. GDPR or HIPAA). 

🤦‍♂️ Setting yourself up for a fall: Email warm-up tools provide artificial engagement. But, this doesn’t replicate real recipient behaviour. Initially, it might make your campaign metrics look great. But once you start sending for real, important email metrics (like open and click-through rates) will plummet.

So while it’s tempting to ‘cheat’ the system, remember that not doing things in the right way will ultimately cost you more in the long run. 

Improve your email deliverability with EcoSend

Email deliverability is our priority here at EcoSend. 

We work tirelessly to monitor signups, ensuring that only genuine users send emails from our platform.

Once you start sending email campaigns via EcoSend, you’ll also benefit from EcoSend Insights, which is our analytics dashboard. 

Start your free trial of EcoSend today to get started. 

Or, feel free to drop us a message if you have any questions about email deliverability with EcoSend, or our sustainable email platform.