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Marketing automation is easy. But, not abusing marketing automation is not easy. The power of email marketing is unlimited once you have secured yourself a safe and reputable image in the books of ISPs (Internet Service Providers). But, until then, you need to strategically limit yourself and reevaluate your strategy to successfully navigate through the IP Warm-Up procedure. So here is all you need to know about an IP Warm-up, Powered By Mumara.

Once your IP is warm enough you will be able to send out the maximum number of emails you wish to send out. However, being marked as spam and being reported as unwanted are major hurdles between your goal and your vehicle for getting there.

What Is an IP Warm-Up?

The IP Warmup is a practice of gradually gaining ISP confidence in your IP address. This, in a nutshell, is done by actively increasing the volume of email campaigns sent in a day and optimizing these emails to the receiver’s engagement.

The ISPs need to be assured that they are not spamming their users. This is why they have very strict and predefined checks in place to block unknown, young and shady IP addresses. In order to prove to them that your IP is not a spammer, you need to strategically increase the volume of your emails as well as the user engagement. Failing to do either one of these in a consistent and balanced manner can result in a complete red flag from various ISPs. ISPs ban any IPs that they judge are sending unwanted emails.

Even a young IP address can gain itself a clean reputation if a clear strategy is employed and administered to properly warm up the IP.

Warming up your IP address should take about 4-8 weeks depending on the aggression of your strategy and the response you receive from your contacts in return. There is a multitude of factors that affect the success rate and speed of the IP warm-up. These include the listed age, list hygiene, spam reports, domain reputation, content, and domain distribution that in addition to the user response rate.

In case of a weak response or negative feedback, you may lose the chance to gain a fair sender reputation at all. 

How to Make the IP Warm-up Easier?

Despite the artificial intelligence gauging your sending activity, ending for humans through robots, not the other way around. There are recommendations and rules in place designed to help the sender make the process easy and seamless. Following these recommendations will earn you the legitimacy of a good sender reputation and help in establishing the ISP trust.

How to Achieve a Good Sending Reputation Fast

You can induce a good sending reputation by encouraging the receiver’s activity. When the receivers open the mail, when they click on an icon in the mail, or the authentication of your DKIM, SPF, and DMARC are all ways to push for a good reputation among ISPs.

Poor or forced permission to send someone an email, shady content, High recipient complaints (report as spam), Poor list quality/hygiene or bad, fake and inactive email addresses can lead to the opposite effect on your IP’s reputation. 

An even bigger negative effect will be when your IP address and/or domain gets into blacklisting. You can also fall prey to a poor reputation when a Spam trap attacks your server. Lastly, large spikes in the volume of the emails you send can also lead you into the poor IP reputation blackhole. Therefore, you need an effective strategy to help you navigate through this critical stage easily.

Warm It Before You Can FlashIt

How to Start the IP Warm Up

During your early days, you should send in only a fraction of your emails to your contacts. Even this fraction can be further divided over a number of hours. This can help in making your event as well-received as possible. The chances of the mail going directly into the inbox of the recipient instead of the spam folder also increase when you try small and consistent numbers that keep growing week by week or day by day, but systematically. Having a schedule makes the warm-up process easier and simplified.

Empower the customer or receiver. Everybody gets gazillions of emails every day, and nobody has time for unwanted emails. Make sure you give your audience double opt-in freedom. This is whereby they make it very clear that they want mail from you. You should also add a very clear and obvious unsubscribe button for them to unsubscribe if they wish to. This will reduce the chances of you being marked as spam. In return, ISP will not mark you as unwanted.

You should also allow your subscribers to choose how many emails a week they wish to receive. By giving them a range you can show them that you understand their needs. You can also avoid instances where they block or report your IP address out of irritation.

You can also give your subscribers a one-time double opt-in. This allows them to reconfirm form submission and activate their subscription. It further narrows down the serious receivers and reduces any risks to your sending reputation.

Next Up: Optimize the Content of Your Emails

Nobody likes junk. No subscriber wants something mediocre or misleading in return for what they were promised at the time of the subscription. If your customers signed up for an up to 70% discount code, you can not send them a 10% off code. If the customers signed up for 1-2 emails per week, you can not send them 5-6. This is why each contact or customer needs to be sorted in its rightful list and communicated accordingly. Or, you will call upon yourself the inevitable spam label.

Update Lists: Before they Rot your IP

A good reputable IP address will not send another email to the blocker or unsubscribe. An IP that wants to achieve a good reputation will ensure that the mailing list is as updated as possible. This can prevent any more spam tags that can raise the ISP’s attention towards your faulty IP. An updated list can curb complaints and improve the engagements from each set of email marketing campaigns.

In order to appear legitimate make sure you update your lists regularly. You will be required to clean out the inactive accounts that are receiving your emails but not opening them. You need to be proactive in eliminating any clients that report your mail as spam. The contact list is where most of the risk could be hidden. This is one of the primal ways to ensure that your emails are not spamming people. 

Find The Right Mix

You can not keep sending the emails to the same people during your warm-up time or that too may raise concerns of the ISPs. You should aim for a balanced mix of tapped and untapped emails in each sending round.

Unsubscribers should not be sent to another email. At least not until your IP can handle it and you have gained enough reputation. In contrast to the unsubscribers, the subscribers or active clickers who click on the links present in your email should be promoted. Y

ou should maintain a list of these openers/clickers and target these for the early few sending rounds. Although you should still ensure that your emails to these clickers are not becoming a nuisance for them. Also, make sure that the mail sent falls in sync with the number of emails that they signed up for. 

Keep track of your clickers. Then you can retarget them. You can also continuously increase your reach by adding newer contacts into your lists well as combining a few of the old non-clickers. A re-engagement might help in understanding if they want your email campaigns or if was it just a one-time desire on their part to subscribe.

Body Warm Up = IP Warm Up
Body Warm Up synonymous with IP Warm Up

How to Find a Suitable Warm-up Strategy for Your IP?

A well-sustained warm-up is better than a quick warm-up. This is just like working out or physically training your own body. Thus, the better the warm-up, the better the course of your workout and its results be. Recovering from the damage of a heavy workout on a cold body can take a lot of recovery time. This may be weeks or even months. Similarly, your reputation will suffer if you are too eager or unplanned during the actual warm-up period.

During the warm-up phase, you should be thorough with the email list, apt to changes, and consistent in sending rounds. Your volume and frequency should increase gradually according to a fixed formula as suggested below. 

Similarly, you should keep your complaint and bounce levels in check. Doing so will result in a controlled growth rather than a quick rise and crash. Consistency is key here. Sending actively for the first week and then forgetting about it a week later may require you to start again. 

Select An IP Warm-Up Schedule

In the first week using a carefully curated list. Send out small bathes of safe-playing emails with the most likable content and visual style to the user. Use web-safe colors and fonts, and try to appear as user-friendly as possible. The subscribers who formerly opened your links in the recent 3-4 weeks should be targeted here.

Then after these two weeks, during weeks 3 and 4 you should expand subscribers. For this, you should re-engage older subscribers. These can be people who may not have opened an email from you in the past 60 days or so. During the early weeks do not send any emails to the clickers who have been unresponsive in the past 3 months. 

You should also start with as low as 50-100 emails per day. Then, you can multiply the number and keep moving forward day by day. You can further divide this activity among hours of the day with regular, sustained intervals. By the 8th week, you will be able to reach your maximum email volume as provided by your Mumara plan.

IP warm up schedule

By week 8, you will be able to send out the maximum number of emails with great ease. But, this success rests on the reception and recipient engagement.

So Warm it Up Real Good and Start Building Hype! See You In The Next Class.

Also Read: Why are you losing Subscribers?

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Khunsha Javed

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