How To Warm Up Email Domain?

For the Warming up domain, there are certain points you'll need to consider. To increase your opens, clicks & deliverability with detailed statistics, you need to warm up the domain. 

The Best Tactics to Follow in 2023.

Marketers change sending domains for a variety of reasons, including:

• A brand change
• A corporate restructuring
• A change in the location of a data center

Mailbox providers increasingly use domain reputation to identify spam, so ensuring they are introduced to a new domain properly is vital to reducing the likelihood of deliverability problems. Although the email industry has no specific guidelines for warming a domain, you should take a conservative approach and treat a domain warmup like an IP address warmup.

I'd appreciate it if you could take care of what to expect.

• You may encounter some deliverability problems, especially in the first week, while the new domain builds a sending reputation.
• Some mailbox providers may place some of your emails in the spam or junk folder to see if subscribers rescue it and label it as 'not spam.'
• Building a sending reputation on a new domain takes about 30 days. It may take shorter or longer depending on the following:
  • The volume of emails being sent
  • The quality of the subscriber list
  • How frequently do you send emails

Domains for daily senders generally warm up faster than those for weekly senders.

• If the warmup is timely, deliverability problems will likely occur.
• Yahoo, Microsoft, and Gmail will likely need a longer warmup period.

Warm up email domain manually

You can do it manually if you need more time to be ready to pay for an email warmup service. But you will need more resources and time, get ready!

What you need to warm up the email domain manually

• Ideally, a list of email addresses you own with a good reputation and aged domains on various providers (Gmail, Outlook, etc).
• If not, a group of friends ready to reply to your emails

The process of warming up the domain manually

When your domain is new, you want to show the world (the big email providers) that you're a good, interesting person with many friends and a great reputation.

To demonstrate this, the best way is to send emails to high-reputation addresses and get their engagement gradually.

By engagement, we mean getting your emails opened, replied to, marked as important, and removed from spam (if you landed in spam, which usually happens sometimes when your domain is new and "on probation").

A high-reputation email address can be :

• A professional email address on an aged domain (2 years+) that manually sends normal emails (no or very few campaigns) and gets a lot of replies.
• An aged personal email is used to send normal emails and get a lot of replies. Typically, your old Gmail or Hotmail addresses or those of your friends and family are good examples of high-reputation addresses.

To Warm Up Domain Concretely

You can start by sending manually around five emails to high-reputation addresses you own or owned by people you know and ask them to open the email, reply, mark it as important, and remove it from spam if needed.

The next day, send ten emails following the same process.

Add ten more emails per day in the following days until you reach 100 daily.

Depending on the daily volume you plan to send, add 30% more emails daily until you reach your goal.

So that you know, there's no exact number on this. The main goal to aim is to have a linear growth curve. Avoid peaks.

Pre-warmup checklist

Before warming up the domain:

• Could you create a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record for the new Return-Path domain (if applicable)? We will not use domains to send emails or create an empty SPF record (v=spf1 -all).
• If you are changing the DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) domain, create a new DKIM domain (d=) and sign up for that domain with the Yahoo! feedback loop.
• Update IP-based complaint feedback loop addresses if the old domain is deactivated and was used to receive feedback loop messages.
• Create a Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) record and set the policy to monitor (p=none). Set the policy to reject domains that will not be used to send email (p=reject).
• Could you update the WHOIS record for the domain with the correct information, and do not use a domain privacy service?
• Set up a mail exchange (MX) record for the new domain to allow incoming email.
• Create the abuse@ and postmaster@ role accounts and add them to abuse.net.
• Please ensure all complaint feedback loops work properly and that complainers are added to a suppression list.
• Please ensure the bounce-handling process works properly, especially if the Return-Path domain has changed.
• Could you please determine if you need to notify subscribers about the change? Some subscribers will have your old sending address in their address book, so it may be necessary to send an email notifying them of the change and encouraging them to add your new address to their address book.

Best Practices & Guidelines to Warm Up Email Domain 

• Start with a low sending volume (a maximum of 1,000 subscribers per mailbox provider, per new domain, per day). If you cannot target specific mailbox providers, start with a volume of 1,000 total subscribers.
• Target active subscribers initially since positive engagement helps build trust in the new domain.
• Double the sending volume every three to four days until you reach your maximum daily volume.
• Pause the warmup if the results do not meet expectations. Warming up a new domain is not an exact science, so monitoring performance, pausing the warmup, and troubleshooting if problems occur are important.
• Monitor performance using:
  • Internal performance tracking systems or those of your mailbox provider
  • Return Path Platform

The warmup process will go more smoothly if you use IP addresses with good sending reputations and sign up with Return Path's Certification program. Trust in the IP address helps establish trust in the new domain. If you already have a poor sending reputation and must follow email marketing best practices, deliverability problems will likely continue, regardless of the domain change.