Maybe once or twice you have found your open rate to be just too low, or having problems with spam. Rest assured, this happens to all of us at some point. And it’s one of the main reasons why you have to prepare your domain for an email campaign. Here we will be explaining just that. How to warm up your email account for your future campaigns.
For instance, regarding your cold emails and outreach campaigns. You may know that cold emails are one of the most efficient ways to get customers in B2B. However, according to the statistics provided by return path, 21% of all opt-in emails never arrive at the intended mailbox. The good news is that you can find a way to solve this in our article about increasing your email deliverability.
But coming back to our topic at hand. This happens largely due to problems with your email account. Think of your email account, in this aspect, like you would of a car. You need to warm it up for a long road trip, if you expect the engine to perform properly.
Here we’ll cover some of the best ways to take care of your email reputation, set up SPF and DKIM records. But not only that, but we will also tell you just what aspects of your profile settings need your attention. Let’s take a brief overlook at this before beginning.
Table of Contents
You will find answers to the following questions and issues.
Without further ado let’s begin answering these questions.
People like to tell others what to do without actually have done it themselves. This is something that you have to be largely aware of. In order to avoid issues like this, you have to know exactly what position you’re in and what to do next.
Based on analysis on email campaigns we can tell you that there are 3 clear patterns when it comes to the domains that people use for email outreach. Let’s take a look at each individually.
This poses a really high chance that the email address you’ll use for any campaign hasn’t been warmed up. This means that is not ready to handle such a volume of emails successfully. Thus, you’ll have a high risk of being blocked if you try to do anything that even resembles mass mailing.
The first thing that you should do is trying to email few but key subjects. Also doing this by personalizing your emails as much as you possibly can. You actually have two options to follow with that.
You can buy another domain for your email outreach. As an example, if your domain is “example.com” then you can try to use “example.co” for all your outreach efforts. This way your main domain is protected against being blacklisted or flagged as spam. This is at least until your main domain has enough reputation to do mass emailing.
Keep in mind that your competition might also send fake signals to your audience. So, this option isn’t always a good one.
The second option you have is to start up small. Send few emails with a lot of personalization and start building your email reputation from the very basics. This way you’ll generate more awareness of your efforts and people will know your main domain to be a reliable one.
Any fast-growing company will experience a great change in the number of emails that it will send and receive. The number of people in your subscriber list will likely increase drastically and quickly. This means good news for one part and problems for another.
Yet, as you might know, all problems pose opportunities for improvement. For this specific case, the problem is that your sales team will consist of more and more new people whose email addresses won’t be properly warmed up.
If you use your own domain you even take the risk of being blacklisted and decreasing the deliverability of all your emails. So, what we recommend is to use another domain for all your outreach. At least while you follow the steps provided below.
When you’re scaling outbound, one of your main concerns is to increase the number of emails sent quickly. However, it usually pays more to build a strong foundation from which you can direct all your outreach efforts in the future.
If this is your case then you have likely sent a decent amount of emails by now. If you’re successful and well established then you have a good domain reputation at your disposal. This will be the main strength, one that you should take advantage of.
Following the basics of a great outreach practice for emails, the risks of getting blacklisted or flagged as spam are very low. This is by giving email personalization the spot it deserves in your business. This will also provide you with a decent number of replies and meetings booked.
So, basically, if you’re in this point you just have to follow a good outreach practice. Just in case you need help with this you can read our 7 actionable tips to boost your sales.
Your domain reputation is exactly that, the reputation of your domain with internet servers. It works, in essence, the same way that our day to day reputation does. If you have a good one people will trust you and be more open to hearing what you have to say. Otherwise people, in this case, internet servers, will be closed to your opinion.
When you have a bad domain reputation, your emails will be target by spam filters more often. Overall your emails will get denied entry to the desired mailbox. The good news is that you can follow these simple rules to maintain a good domain reputation.
The last point, domain authentication, works much like and ID of sorts. It’s the ID of your domain in this case. It helps servers know that you’re a valid user and a real human being. We’ll be dealing with this very subject in the following section.
This is a crucial part of every and any email strategy that even attempts to be successful. When an email provider performs an “ID check” on you, it basically looks for your credentials. This is done in order to make sure that the person sending the email is really who they say they are.
This has been standard practice for fighting spammers since a long time ago. There are two main ways to set up email authentication.
Those are SPF and DKIM.
SPF (Sender Policy Framework): this is an email validation system that works by verifying the sender’s Ip address
DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail): This works as an indication of ownership of the email message by a particular organization.
For any user of G Suite you can follow these two guides to help you set up each. For DKIM and for SPF.
This part is really simple actually, using Gmail as an example. Let’s say that you’ve created your address and you need to fill all the pertinent information about you.
Ideally, you want to make sure to fill every field with your real information, in addition to that, you want to use a good and clear profile picture of yourself. This makes you seem like exactly what you are, are real and trustworthy person.
Filling out all your information will only take a few minutes and it adds incredible value to your personalization efforts. Let’s face it a really good and personalized outreach emails will surely fail if it comes from an account with little to none information available and no profile picture.
Depending on the way that you’ve been using your email account the internet servers will be more or less accustomed to your activities. Also, in order to actually have a good domain reputation your email address needs to be warmed up first.
This whole warm-up process is simply about an email address that has been sending and receiving messages as a real person would do. For the actual warm up process, you have two alternatives. The manual way and the automatic way.
This way the whole warm-up process will be done by you. The easiest way to start is by actually sending emails to your friends and acquaintances. Also, you should make sure that everyone that you send your emails to will reply to them.
That’s just the beginning. You want to slowly increase the number of emails you’re sending every day. During your first week of warm-up, you should send between 10 and 20 emails per day. During the second week, you want to increase that number to about 20 – 40 emails per day. For your third week to 40 – 80 emails per day. For the fourth week, you should be sending 80 to 100 emails per day. Keep up this process until you reach your intended goal for the number of recipients.
The process above serves as an example. The number of emails that you’re going to send will depend on who you’re emailing and your complaint rate. The problem with this method is that it really takes some time to reach your goal. Not to mention that you have to make sure your recipients actually reply to your emails.
This actually doesn’t reduce the amount of time required to properly warm-up and email account. What it does is offering to take the heavy lifting off your shoulders.
The automatic way is basically going online and finding a good and trusted service that can handle this process for you. An email warmup tool, such as OutreachBin, is a great choice. It provides an easy-to-use UI, it's fully automated for sending, replying, and even moving your emails from spam to inbox. You get some nice metrics as well for where your emails are landing. The best part about it is that it doubles as a cold emailing tool as well. So you get more for your money.
Of course, you can do this yourself by using a service like MailChimp to send emails to a list of trusted recipients, say your friends, and then have them reply to your emails but imagine trying to organize this on a daily basis again and again but it's possible. However, in order to do this, you need to have a clean a valid email list. We can also help you out with that.
VerifyBee is a service that can verify and validate your email list, so you know exactly who you’re sending your emails to. This great service offers 99% accuracy for each validation and can really save you more than a few times.
Remember that warming up the email account is just one part of the job. You also need to make sure that the account stays that way. This will make internet servers more accustomed to you sending that volume of information.
Your email deliverability is a measure of whether or not your emails are arriving at their intended destination. It’s affected by lots of different parameters, however, 5 are the most important ones.
Let’s take a look at each one individually.
The main way that you can take care of this parameter and make sure that it doesn’t affect your deliverability is by making sure not to send lots of emails right out of the blue. Again, warm up your email account before sending a high number of emails.
Sending lots and lots of emails right out of the blue is exactly what spammers do. Internet servers and emails providers do take notice on this. Thus, decreasing your domain reputation and lowering your email deliverability.
Always warm up your email accounts before attempting to do mass mailing or emailing to a large list of people. The best you can do for this is to actually behave like what you are, a real human being.
The number one problem people face when running email campaigns is complaints. People that are no longer interested in your emails will report them as spam just to make sure they don’t receive any in the future.
A good idea to prevent this is to always add an unsubscribe link with each of your emails. At least that way some people will use it and your complaint rate will stay low. You can also combat this with personalization.
Yet another reason to always verify your email list before sending any emails. If you’re sending emails to inexistent addresses these emails will bounce and in time this will lower your emails deliverability.
This happens because every time that your bounce rate increases, your domain reputation lowers. This has a sort of counterpart in the real world. The more places reject you the harder it will be for you to get into others, at least for a while.
Again, to prevent this use EmailVerify to validate your mailing list before using it.
With this parameter you have two options, you’re either in the clear or you’re not. If you’ve got a perfect reputation then this is great news and means that you’re free to actually escalate even further your email operation. If you’re blacklisted, this is very bad for your email campaign overall. You’ll need to get back on your ISP’s good side, and that is no easy feat.
Blacklisting occurs due to your email account having a behaviour that is too similar to that of a spammer. The good news is that you can check this online tool to make sure whether you’re blacklisted or not.
Tracking is something essential for all outreach campaigns, it allows you to know the performance of your email campaign. The problem is that sometimes link tracking and open tracking can affect the deliverability of your emails. This happens mostly when the domain used for tracking is different than the one used to send emails.
One way to work around this is to actually set up your own tracking domain. This does allow you to increase your deliverability and it does so almost instantly.
The goal for most of the emails you’ll send will be to generate sales. However cold emails are a bit different when it comes to goals, at least in the short term. The main objective of an outreach email is to get you a reply and establish a connection between you and our prospects.
With this in mind, personalization is one sure-fire way to get the attention of your recipients. This does account for more work, but the pay off is certainly great. All the difference between a successful outreach campaign and an average one, is found in the amount of personalization for each.
You will have to do your research about your subjects and make sure that you understand what they want. Every email has to be about what they want and how you can provide value to them, this is something really simple once you get it right.
For more information about this you can always check our article about the importance of personalization for outreach campaigns.
As you might be aware right now, there are different ways to tackle your preparation for an email campaign. You can warm up your email account yourself or let a paid service do it for you. However, now that you know how to do this your aim should be set in the future.
Take into consideration the importance that personalization has over your outreach emails. Make sure that you understand the basics of the process and once your email account is ready for an outreach campaign, you can make sure to absolutely get your prospects attention.
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