6 Reasons You Should Do IP Warming Before Emailing Customers
Building good business relationships is essential to ensure that your customers will continue to interact with your brand. One way to do that is to maintain an online presence while updating them on what’s new in your business through email campaigns.
But sending emails to customers, especially in massive volumes from the get-go isn’t always good. You’re only asking to be blacklisted which is costly and could damage your business’s online reputation. That is why you need to establish a sender’s reputation first through IP warming. What is IP warming? Are there specific reasons to do it? How should you do it right? Read on to find out.
IP Warming Explained
Years before, internet and email service providers (ISPs and ESPs) didn’t put too much effort into keeping their customers’ experiences safe. That all changed when email spoofing, malware, phishing, and hijacking became rampant on the web. As a result, email marketers needed to do IP warming before sending massive volumes of campaigns.
IP warming is the process of establishing a trusted sender’s reputation by gradually increasing the campaign sending volume on a predetermined schedule through a dedicated IP address. This prevents cybercriminals from sending massive volumes of malicious emails to users while using different IP addresses.
Reasons To Do IP Warming
The main reason to do IP warming is for increasing the deliverability of your campaigns. This means making your messages land in your customers’ inboxes and preventing them from being blocked, rejected, bounced, flagged, ignored, or sent to the spam box. Here are more reasons why you should do an IP warm-up first.
1. Build your reputation as the sender
As you do IP warming, ISPs and ESPs will monitor your sending patterns, received email engagements, and the content of your campaigns. If you follow your predetermined sending schedule properly, write good email content, and receive good engagement rates, these service providers will mark you as a legitimate email sender.
2. Send a high volume of email messages successfully
Another benefit of being marked as a legitimate email sender is that ESPs and ISPs allow more of your campaigns to reach their intended recipients’ inboxes. This means that your campaigns are less likely to face any delivery and deliverability issues such as blocked, rejected, bounced, ignored, flagged, or spammed emails.
3. Ensure seamless communication with your customers
Billions of emails are being sent and received every day. It’s no surprise that some users receive delayed campaigns because of the traffic. This is even common among email marketers with a poor sender’s reputation.
But since your sender’s reputation is good due to IP warming, internet communication services will prioritize your campaigns making sure that your messages arrive on your customers’ inboxes according to schedule. They’ll also prioritize the emails sent from your customers to you. Both benefits are true definitions of seamless customer transactions.
4. Continuous engagement and conversions
Because your campaigns arrive on time based on your customers’ behaviours, demographics, interests, and preferences, you can rest easy knowing that your emails are likely to be opened. More importantly, they act on your email CTAs.
5. Investments pay off
Sending email campaigns may be an affordable way to market your business, but you’ll still need a lot of time and effort to do it properly. You wouldn’t want all your hard work to go to waste because your messages didn’t reach your customers.
By doing IP warming along with writing good campaign content, you’ll never worry about losses because you know that your emails are read due to having a good sender’s reputation.
6. Your business grows
Customers appreciate punctuality when it comes to receiving emails. An email that never fails to arrive on time at the right place truly builds good relationships. As a result, customers will think that you value their experience. This makes them highly confident to continue doing business with you and support your brand into achieving success.
How to Do IP warming
To do IP warming, start with a low maximum campaign delivery number on day one. Multiply the previous maximum sending quota with a 1 digit number for tomorrow. Then, repeat the process until you achieve your maximum daily sending quota – this should reflect the number of customers in your mailing list or how many emails you want each user to receive from you daily.
There are also different warming patterns for you to choose from. For example, you can follow the 2-1-2 pattern where you double your campaign sending quota every other day. The result would be sending 50 emails today, sending 100 tomorrow, sending another 100 the next day, and sending 200 emails after that. Another tip: You can either choose to gradually increase your sending volume manually or set your email marketing platform to do it automatically so you can save time.
Conclusion
Doing IP warming first is a must for successful email campaigns. It protects the experience of customers by following internet safety protocols, helps businesses send massive volumes of campaigns successfully, and establishes a good business reputation. All of these are necessary for long-term brand growth.
