In this blog we’ll give you a walkthrough to make sure you know how to warm up your email address before you begin a cold outreach email campaign. The objective, is to give your outreach emails the best chance of getting seen by your customers.

I’ve often wondered about those marketers that subscribe to my newsletter only to unsubscribe before the first issue arrives. It was a way for them to get my email address and send me a direct email without getting stuck in my spam folder – bingo! 💡

Statistics out there tell us that 20% of the 290 billion emails sent every day never land in the recipient’s inbox. 😥

To make sure that your marketing campaign email doesn’t end up in the proverbial email graveyard (your prospect’s spam folder), let’s get to work and help you warm-up your new email account.

So, before you download your leads from Prelo, let’s get your email account warmed up.

What is email warm up ?

Email warm up is a process that builds the credibility of an email account. It improves the deliverability of outbound email campaigns, and its main objective is to maximize the results of an email campaign.

The easiest way to start the process is to begin with a new email account, and gradually increase the number of emails you send out daily. Keep doing this until you hit the maximum number of emails stipulated by your email service provider. 

In the old days, this was all you needed to warm up your email account. 

These days however, email deliverability requires a little more effort. Demonstrating that your email receives a high engagement rate is the only way to ensure that the email service providers allow you to get anywhere near your recipient’s inbox.

Let’s take Google as an example, they give you a maximum email volume of 2000 emails per day, but in order to get your new email account to exploit those high limits, you will need to go through an email warm up process.

From our experience, this process can take between 1 to 3 months! However, to speed this up, you may want to send hyper-personalized messages to your first early recipients. This will get them to engage with you and get your engagement KPIs up. 

How to warm up an email account and send outbound emails

There are typically 2 ways to warm up an email account. You can perform a manual email warm up exercise by enlisting the help of your friends and family. If you’re in a rush, you can use an email warm tool.

With the right email warm up tool, all you need to do is connect your email to the tool and allow it to engage in meaningful conversations with higher reputation accounts. That’s it.

Some Advantages Of Using An Email Warm Up

1. It’s completely automated and there’s not much for you to do

2. The process can be employed while you’re running a campaign

3. Using a tool ensures that you are able to stay on top of your deliverability

4. With a light touch, you can use the right email tool to engage seamlessly with high authority mailboxes and improve the reputation of your new email account.

We’ll share some free email warm up tools at the end of this blog. 

Just remember, warming up your email account before sending out cold emails will help you stay away from their spam filter. This improves the chances of your prospect opening your email 

Step 1 – Authenticate your email account

There are four major ways of doing this, I remembered when we were setting up our email campaigns with Sendpulse, I had to go and read up on these authentication options.

Please check out the list below for more details around some of the acronyms you’ll need to be conversant with so that you can quickly authenticate your email account. 

SPF 
This is a Sender Policy Framework that creates a record in your DNS and ensures

DKIM 
Domain Key Identified Mail adds a digital key with your domain and prevents email spoofing

DMARC 
Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance uses your SPF and DKIM records to ensure there are no illicit activities taking place under your email account.

Custom Domain  
This is perhaps one of the easiest things you could do. Simply add a custom domain with your emails.. If you write documents, include your link in those documents to improve authenticity.

Step 2 – Send Emails To Friends & Family

This may sound obvious but one of the oldest ways to warm up your email account, is to just email your friends and family 
Start by creating a personalized subject line in your email. We have tons of subject lines on Prelo to help you build a personalized email subject line. 

Start your emails with about 10 – 20 personal emails to friends and family, make sure that they have email service providers across the length and breadth of that domain. Some examples for you – Gmail, Yahoo, Zoho, Godaddy, Outlook and iCloud are just a few 

Keep the engagement consistent to build the trust with your email provider, allowing them to increase your email limits

Step 3 – Start Email Conversations

This is something that we found out the hard way with our first few registered domains. Constant conversations between your new email account and one of your older email accounts is the best way to drive the authenticity of your new email account. 

If you don’t mind the deluge of emails that will come into your inbox, adding your new email address to your website allows your customers and/or prospects to send an email to the new account. This obviously gives you a chance to engage in conversations that will drive up your conversation rate. 

Step 4 – Subscribe to newsletters

I used to think, why did marketers subscribe to my newsletter only to unsubscribe 2 seconds later, and then send me an email asking me to buy their product! 

I found out the answer when I started investigating the techniques used by marketers and sales professionals to get their emails past my spam filter and into my inbox. 

The process is actually simpler than you think. First you subscribe to 10 – 20+ newsletters, second you receive confirmation emails, and third you respond to them because this ultimately validates your account. 

Once your account has been validated, you’ll increase your chances of landing in your prospect’s inbox. 

Step 5 – Humanize your email interactions

Be cognizant of the number of emails you send out in one go. Your job is to make sure that the activities your email account engages in, are normal human centric activities. 

Mail service providers have algorithms to verify how emails are sent and received. As a result, it’s important to create email interactions that adhere to those rules. 

Don’t get flagged by a bot for performing a perfectly human activity .

To summarize this section, simply follow these 2 simple rules.

1. Keep significant time intervals between 2 emails
2. Don’t send large numbers of email at once

You are ready to start your first outbound marketing campaign !

Step 6 – Setup your first personalized campaign

How to setup your first personalized email warm up campaign

Now that you’ve finished your manual email warmup, you are ready to run your first campaign. 

We used Sendpulse to run our very first campaign. Mailshake and Mailchimp are other reputable tools that do the same job 

To start you will require a few trusted emails, whatever tool you use (Sendpulse in our case) will automatically review your email. Removing trigger words such as “FREE” or “OFFER” during your review will optimize the deliverability of your email.

Once you’ve set this up the next step is to run the campaign with your newly warmed up account. The objective is to reach out to the recipients to ensure that they received your email in their inboxes.

Don’t stop there, to close the loop on this exercise you’ll need to request that your recipients respond to your emails. You just can’t personalize your email message enough.
This is why we’ve created over 80 email templates for every business occasion. 

The simple rule is this, the more personalized your emails are, the more likely it is to get a response.
As promised here Check out this blog for 10 free email warm up tools !

Closing Statements

Customers often ask me – “will my email address get banned?” the answer is “No”.

No, if you do all the things we’ve listed above to ensure that you warm up your email and create personalized messages.

The objective is to operate your new email accounts so that email service providers understand that there is legitimate intent for sending your emails.

When you decide to embark on an outbound email campaign, try using a brand new domain. Once you’ve setup your new domain there are 5 simple steps

1. Authenticate your email account
2. Start small, perhaps 15 – 20 emails per day
3. Send personalized emails to your friends and family
4. Leave sufficient intervals between emails
5. Work your way to achieving the maximum daily limits

Setup is Complete!

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On twitter : 🐤 @oluadedj
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We’ll catch up again soon and we’ve got many blogs coming up.

Olu
Founder, Prelo
I tweet about helping founders win!