Let’s get right to it: the spam folder is the bane of cold outreach senders and marketers. Email marketers pour time, energy, and resources into crafting the perfect email only to find out later on that their campaigns are all landing in the spam folder.
The fix isn’t better subject lines or optimizing segments or choosing a different sending schedule. The fix is email warmup, a process that builds and establishes sender reputation gradually.
When senders have a good reputation with Email Service Providers (ESPs), providers are able to verify their legitimacy and trustworthiness. The result? Email campaigns have a much better chance of bypassing spam filters and landing in inboxes.
Why spam folders kill your campaigns
Spam filters from Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo are getting more and more advanced. Additionally, these ESPs have also become stricter when it comes to guidelines for high-volume senders.
When it comes down to it, providers just want to protect their users from potential spammers or suspicious senders.
So when new domains or previously inactive ones suddenly send thousands of messages, ESPs treat this as suspicious behavior. For example, this report on the science behind warming up new domains emphasizes that without proper email warmup, even great content can fail.
Email warmup flips the script. By slowly increasing your sending volume while maintaining good engagement rates (opens, clicks, responses), you’re letting mailbox providers know you. It’s all about building trust. When you launch your sales or marketing campaigns to your bigger lists, your inbox placement rates are almost guaranteed.
The email warm up playbook: A step by step guide to preparing your domain for large-scale campaigns
Here’s your no-fluff roadmap to guide you through how to conduct a proper warm up email strategy.
- Audit your setup and infrastructure. Check domain authentication, especially your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. An email health audit can give you a look into the status of these records right away.
- Create a segment of engaged contacts. This segment should be composed of your most active recipients or contacts whom you can count on to open your emails, read them, and possibly even reply. Some marketers choose to create these segments via their email marketing platform (ex. recently opened email in the last 30-60 days). Others choose to manually create lists composed of colleagues or partners in the industry.
- Start slow. Unfortunately, proper warmup has no shortcut. Start by sending around 10-15 emails per few days while keeping an eye on your open rates.
- Gradually ramp up sending volume. Increase your sending volume per day while monitoring inbox placement and open rates. If your open rates dip suddenly or bounce rates increase, go back to sending fewer emails until your engagement metrics stabilize.
- Track and tweak accordingly. Dashboards show opens, clicks, spam scores. Hit 22%+ open rates? Scale. Still slipping? Pause and diagnose.
How AI-powered email warmup tools are revolutionizing the process
It’s true that email warmup cannot be skipped. It has no shortcut either. However, thanks to AI, email warm up tools like Warmy can take over the manual work involved in this process.
Here are just some examples of how these tools can help:
- Automatically sends warmup emails to a network of trusted and genuine email addresses which simulate interactions like opening emails, reading emails, removing emails from spam and marking them as important. Consistent engagement signals like these send positive feedback to mailbox providers.
- Adjusts sending volume automatically depending on real-time data. For example, if engagement lowers or spam rate rises, the email warm up tool scales back to protect sender reputation without needing manual intervention.
- Provides easy access to data and analytics like domain health, DNS records’ status, inbox placement across different service providers, and spam rates.
- Monitors presence of domain on blacklists, so senders can begin the delisting process right away before any long-term deliverability damage. Consulting a Barracuda BRBL guide is often the first step in understanding how these enterprise-level filters operate and how to stay off them..
- More advanced tools like Warmy even provide customization options for the warmup emails, such as topic, engagement pattern (B2B vs B2C), language, and even percentage of warmup emails that go out to each provider.
Prioritize email warmup and say goodbye to the spam folder
When you prioritize email warmup, you’re not just building a great sender reputation. You’re also moving towards higher inbox placement, higher open rates, higher reply rates, and ultimately—more leads.
For modern marketers, including AI-powered warmup tools like Warmy in their tech stack is now a best practice and go-to strategy for securing high email deliverability rates.
Don’t let spam folders steal your leads. Take the first step by trying Warmy’s email deliverability test to see if your domain is ready for your next big campaign.