High email deliverability can seem like a tricky task–and with so many factors affecting your sender reputation such as content quality and email list health, getting your email to the inbox can feel harder than ever. In this blog, we will see what is warm-up IP in email marketing.
If you are sending an email on a brand new IP address, this variable can be one of the largest influencers of your inboxing success. If you don’t properly warm up your IP, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as Gmail and Yahoo may choose to not deliver your email.
What is an IP and Why Warm It Up in Email Marketing?
An IP address is a unique number that indicates your email domain. An IP address is the most important factor that determines sending reputation.
Internet Service Providers use your IP address to identify you as a sender, and track your sending behavior, and give you a reputation score. Greater the score higher the delivery rates.
As marketers increase sending volume, they find that they require an additional IP to handle email load. A new IP doesn’t have a reputation score as no email has been sent from that yet. So it is considered cold. The only solution to this problem is warming it up.
Warming up an IP address means sending low volumes of email on your dedicated IP and then systematically increasing your email volume over a period of time.
During the warmup, ISPs evaluate your sending behavior. The more engagement you receive during the warmup period, the better the ISPs will favor your IP.
How to Warm Up IP in Email Marketing
Every marketer is different and you may require an email deliverability expert to help you determine the right warmup volume. How many emails you send during your warmup depends on your email volume, but you must send enough emails that ISPs can track your reputation.
First, choose a segment of the email list to warm up. ISPs suggest starting with your personal Gmail accounts.
This is crucial if you are building an entirely new reputation or trying to improve one that isn’t performing very well.
Some emails will probably be in the SPAM folder. Pick the emails out of SPAM and put them into your contacts/safe sender lists. That’s why you start with your personal emails.
Next, start sending to your contact list. And choose recipients and mail streams who are engaged. After you’ve gone through the most engaged recipients, move onto your recently engaged users. You can use welcome email as your trail mail for your new IP.
If the new IP is not performing well (fewer open rates, more blocks), be patient and consider slowing your volume, allowing your reputation to catch up.
During the warmup period, pay close attention to engagement. The lower your engagement, the harsher ISPs will be on your warmup process. Take a look at your content yourself.
Sample Schedule
If you expect to send 100k emails in a month, start with 90 emails on your first day and increase volume day-over-day until you reach your desired volume. This is called the conservative approach.
Another one is the aggressive approach.
Start with 70 emails on the first day then increase your sending volume by no more than a 10x day. From there, you can aggressively increase your volume as long as the email metrics are performing as expected
IP Warm Up Schedule in Email Marketing
Conclusion
Warming up your IP is an important task of creating and maintaining a healthy email program. Although proper IP warmup may take longer than you’d like (we know you’re busy!), the efforts truly pay off no matter what type of email that you’re sending.
