In email communication, emails go from a sender’s email address to a recipient’s. Email service providers (ESPs) play an essential role in this process. They deliver emails to intended recipients’ inboxes after performing the necessary checks. This process helps them verify that an email is from a legitimate sender.
ESPs ensure the legitimacy of email senders by checking their IP addresses. This practice has a lot of significance for email marketers. It plays a decisive role in determining their reputation with ESPs, improving their chances of delivering their marketing emails. Given how strictly ESPs monitor bulk emails, email marketers rely on IP warming to build a positive reputation with them.
What does warming an IP address mean for an email marketer? How does it help enhance the outcomes of an email marketing campaign? Read on to get the answers to these questions.
How IP Warming Makes a Difference to an Email Marketing Campaign?
Generally, email marketers keep a long list of the email addresses of their recipients. Sending marketing emails to all of them one by one can take a long time. As most email marketing professionals work on a tight schedule, adopting this approach is practically impossible. Instead, they send bulk emails to meet their target of sending emails quickly.
But sending emails in bulk is also not above risk. ESPs monitor the email sending behavior of bulk email senders from time to time. They view a sender differently whenever they detect a huge chunk of emails from a new or unrecognized IP address.
Most email marketing professionals try to avoid getting into this situation as it can minimize their sender reputation and create issues with the deliverability of emails.
ESPs direct bulk emails from such IP addresses to spam folders instead of sending them the email inboxes of their recipients. It can hurt an email marketing campaign, due to which an email marketer may not get their intended result.
As one of the effective email marketing strategies, this is precisely where the strategy to warm up emails comes into play. Whether a business organization gets a new IP address or moves to a fresh email marketing service with it, IP warming comes in handy in both situations.
It enables an email marketer to get a positive sender reputation with email marketing services in the right way. The process involves sending emails moderately over a while and increasing it gradually. Instead of sending several emails at once and getting into the bad books of email service providers, it makes a lot of sense to go slow and increase the volume of sending emails if the situation becomes favorable.
Instead of making efforts to boost an IP address already in use, you would benefit more by making efforts to warm up a new IP address. However, drawing up a plan and implementing it will be imperative. Read on to know how you can go about it.
Steps to Warm up an IP Address
In the beginning, your idea should be to make your IP address look credible to your internet service provider. When you send a large volume of emails, it prompts them to view your activity with suspicion. You can prevent this situation by minimizing the volume of sending your emails early on and gradually increasing it.
Here’s how you can proceed with it systematically.
- First, identify the subscribers you interacted with in the last thirty days. Think about targeting such subscribers at least for a couple of weeks.
- Next, think about targeting those business prospects you have interacted with in sixty days. Consider doing it in the third week and carry it on until the sixth week.
- In the sixth week, send emails to those prospects you interacted with over 90 days.
- Proceed with these steps until you finish using all the emails on your email marketing list.
You also need to take more steps to get the best results. When getting a new IP address, ensure that it has a clean authentication record. This is a crucial step as your sender’s reputation will depend on it. Think about using a new IP address only if it is properly verified by your SPF (Sender Policy Framework).
You may run an email marketing campaign for an apparel business to reduce apparel returns. Or, you may do it for any other business. In both cases, these proven email warming techniques will help you establish a positive sender reputation with both your internet service provider (ISP) and email service provider (ESP).
Final Thoughts
Given the relevance of email marketing for businesses, reaching out to business prospects through emails is a profitable business strategy. Then again, you need to be careful about not having your IP address blacklisted or marked as spam by ESPs in pursuit of sending bulk emails. Implementing the above techniques for warming your IP address will help you stay clear of such situations.