Warm-Up

Email warm-up is the process of gradually building trust with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for a new or inactive email sending account. This involves starting with a small volume of emails and slowly increasing the number of emails sent each day.

As a marketer, you must establish a positive sender reputation for an email address before sending huge email campaigns. This practice helps prevent your emails from being marked as spam and increases the likelihood that they reach your recipients' inboxes.

Importance of Warm-Up

Email warm-up is essential when you want to send email campaigns with a new account to ensure emails land in the inbox. With a warm-up, you can distinguish yourself from spammers and make your emails seem genuine to the ISP.

Beyond traditional email campaign best practices, email warm-up specifically improves deliverability. Even highly engaging email marketing campaigns sent to active lists can experience low open and reply rates without proper warm-up.

Here are key reasons to warm up an email account before using it for outreach:

• Establish your email account as trustworthy, not a spam source.
• Increase email deliverability to your recipients' inboxes.
• Build or repair your sender reputation with ISPs.
• Scale your outreach efforts more quickly.
• Send campaigns up to your full daily limits.
• Lower the risk of your account being suspended for suspicious activity.

ISPs are cautious when deciding where to place incoming emails. While proper authentication (DKIM and SPF setup) is important, it is often not enough for ISPs to fully trust your sending. You need to build this trust gradually through consistent positive engagement. If emails come from a new IP address or domain that has not yet built a good reputation, ISPs might handle your emails as follows:

• Accept only a small number of your emails.
• Receive your emails at a slow pace.
• Place all your emails directly into the spam folder.
• Send the first few emails to the inbox, monitor initial recipient engagement, and then decide where to deliver the remaining emails.
• Block your emails if you attempt to send more than a small number.

Guidelines for Warm-Up

During the warm-up process, send relevant emails to a small volume of users most likely to engage with your content. The exact time needed for warm-up depends on your domain's and IP address's current reputation and your campaigns' performance. Here are some high-level guidelines:

• Begin by sending lower volumes and increase them gradually. Prioritize generating positive engagement over immediately scaling up.
• Send emails to users who are most likely to engage positively (e.g., recent sign-ups, active customers).
• Monitor key performance metrics, such as delivery rate, open rate, click-through rate, spam complaints, and unsubscribes. Adjust your strategy based on these observations.
• Check your sender reputation on postmaster sites and analyze inbox placement data on third-party tools. Make corrections based on your findings.
• Monitor your performance metrics and sender reputation closely for the first 10 days. Once your reputation is stable, move to the ramp-up phase.

Ramp-Up

Email ramp-up is a deliverability best practice that involves increasing your daily email sending volume over time. It starts by sending emails to a small segment of your most engaged users and then gradually increases the volume with each subsequent send.

Difference Between Warm-Up and Ramp-Up

Warm-up and ramp-up serve different purposes. The following table highlights the differences:

Importance of Ramp-Up

After you build a good sender reputation through warm-up, you need to increase your sending volume until you reach your daily average. The pace of this ramp-up should depend on your campaigns' performance and your domain's or IP address's reputation during the warm-up phase.

• If your performance and reputation are excellent, you can ramp up faster and take calculated risks.
• If your performance and reputation are average, ramp up at a moderate pace and proceed cautiously.
• If either your performance or reputation is poor, address and fix these issues first before continuing to ramp up.

Benefits of ramp-up include:

• Prevents sending too much too fast, which can trigger spam filters.
• Helps build and maintain a positive sender reputation over time.
• Avoids sudden volume spikes that can lead to blocks or blacklisting.
• Simplifies the process of pacing your email sending.
• Helps safely scale your outreach to a larger audience.

Guidelines for Ramp-Up

Increase your daily sending volume by 30% to 50% each day. During this phase, continuously monitor your performance to ensure that deliverability does not drop and that your domain and IP address reputation remain consistent.

Your target daily, weekly, or monthly volume defines the volume you should ramp up to. For example:

You can control the volume during ramp-up in multiple ways within MoEngage:

• Create smaller segments based on your daily prescribed volume.
• Use control groups when creating your campaigns.
• When applicable, MoEngage enables back-end sending limits to support your ramp-up plan.

Scale-Up

While email ramp-up primarily occurs during the initial onboarding phase, email scale-up addresses the seasonality that most businesses experience in their sales cycles. Marketing efforts often need to align with these cycles, which means your email sending volumes can be higher than usual during peak seasons. To meet these increased demands, you need to gradually increase your email volume to those higher levels. This process is known as a scale-up and is typically done in the weeks leading up to a peak season.

A larger user base during peak times often includes less engaged users. Therefore, a critical part of the scale-up process is segmenting inactive users based on factors such as their last activity, inactivity period, sign-up date, or sign-up source. This strategic segmentation helps prevent any negative impact of the increased sending volume on your domain's or IP address's sender reputation.

By effectively segmenting and gradually scaling up, you can maintain strong deliverability even during periods of significantly higher email volume, ensuring your messages reach the right audience at the right time.