Email warm-up is an essential component behind the success of your cold emails. It represents a method of preparing an email address for future campaigns, helping it avoid the spam folder.
A good IP warming strategy is truly important, particularly for bigger sales and marketing teams who use cold emailing extensively.
Email warm-up (also known as IP warming) is a process that involves a gradual increase in your email sending volume. To build a good reputation, your email address needs to be warmed up. A warmed-up address has been sending and receiving messages regularly.
An email address can be at a different stage depending on how you've been using your account and how old your domain is.
What does the email warm-up process look like? What's the best warm-up schedule? How can you know when an email address has been properly warmed up? What to do if you have a new domain?
You're about to find out.
There are two ways in which you can warm up an email domain. You can do it automatically and manually.
In this article, we'll talk about both strategies.
This is probably the best IP warming strategy. Why?
After a few weeks of leveraging it, you'll see open rates of 50%.
Then, once you switch to a long-term lemwarm strategy, you'll start hitting 80% open rates.
You'll discover how to make that happen for your email domain in a minute. First, lemme tell you one short but cool story.
The lemwarm idea started thanks to our users. One day in the lemlist family community, Vaibhav opened a really important topic.
This is how lemwarm was born. We stopped what we were doing at the time, joined the conversation, and decided to build one of the most important products for our community.
Btw, lemwarm is a warm-up and deliverability booster that allows you to send and receive emails from other users.
It's all done on autopilot, without you lifting a finger.
We send emails to other lemwarm users using your account with unique content. Each message and subject line is generated via our smart content algorithm. This is important because email providers will check and evaluate it.
On top of that, lemwarm will also create conversations by replying to those messages with more unique content and keeping them under the same thread.
The beauty about these conversations is that you'll be joining a mailbox network that consists of 10K+ people from 100+ countries.
Unlike some other tools that offer warm up service, lemwarm doesn't allow fake email addresses to join as they ruin our email domains. Instead, you'll be exchanging emails with real people, including those from companies like Zendesk, Meero, Malt, Adeco, SAP, Uber, and more.
This is what makes lemwarm probably the world's coolest email warm up software.
1. Configure your account
Without the technical skills needed, you can set up your deliverability booster within a few-minute process.
Once you log into your lemwarm account, you’ll see the dashboard with 4 simple steps that will get you started:
So, let’s see how each of them can help you reach your target audience.
Step 1: Choose your plan
Depending on your business needs, choose between two lemwarm plans - Essential and Smart:
What’s the main difference between these two plans?
Before purchasing, you want to make sure you used the correct address and billing data in the Billing & Invoices tab.
Once you choose the most suitable plan for your business, you’ll be ready to connect your email provider.
Step 2: Connect your email provider
There are two ways to connect your email address to lemwarm:
Keep in mind that if you choose to connect your Gmail account, you’ll have an additional step as a new way to avoid any potential disconnection.
To set up your Gmail account smoothly, follow the How to connect your Google account with lemwarm guide we’ve prepared for you.
Step 3: Verify your email address
By clicking on the “Verify your email” button, you’ll receive a verification email (in the inbox of the email you used to log in on lemwarm):
To verify your account email, simply click the link in your email. And voilà! You’re ready to start warming up your account.
Step 4: Start lemwarm
By clicking on step 4 “Start lemwarm” button, you’re authorizing lemwarm to send and reply to warm-up emails for you:
From now on, you can track your DNS check which will tell you if there’s something you should do to improve your setup:
Now, you’re ready to customize your settings even further to maximize the deliverability according to your domain age and business details.
2. Customize your settings
Whether you have an old or brand new email address, these smart settings will help you keep your email warm for the long run:
Set up smart ramp-up & warm-up
Based on your email domain’s age, you’ll need the right strategy to increase the number of emails sent until the perfect delivery is achieved.
To set up your ramp-up and warm-up settings, go to the Cockpit:
From here, you can indicate:
1. The number of warm-up emails lemwarm will send per day after ramp-up
This value will be the limit of total emails that can be reached per day with lemwarm. Once this limit is reached, the increment stops.
2. The ramp-up increment value per day
You want to gradually send warm-up emails over the days to progressively reach the maximum number you set.
The initial warm-up will last one month. Once completed, you should see your open rates hit 50%+ levels.
During the initial warm-up phase, try not to send outreach campaigns at all. But, in case you really need to, we strongly suggest you keep your volumes lower:
After the initial warm-up phase, you can start sending campaigns, but beware - if you want to hit 80% open rates and never go to spam, keep your lemwarm ON.
Activate the smart cluster
This feature will allow you to send automated and ultra-personalized emails from your inbox based on your audience and email goals. Each message and subject line will be generated based on the info you put into the smart cluster questionary.
Why is that important? Because email providers will check out the content you’re sending and evaluate it. That’s why email exchange relevant to your business increases your sending reputation and helps you achieve better deliverability results.
So, to boost your deliverability score, tailor the content according to your business requirements as shown below:
P.S. Emails that your account sends and receives for the warm-up process are automatically labeled in your inbox so that you can filter them out and keep them out of your primary inbox.
Here’s how:
To keep your lemwarm emails away from your Outlook’s primary inbox, check out this video.
3. Monitor deliverability score
At any time, you can check the deliverability reports, monitor your inbox reputation, and apply lemwarm’s exclusive tips that help you keep a high deliverability score.
Within your Dashboard interface, you’ll have access to your deliverability score and tips on how to improve it:
If your deliverability score is:
You can also pick a time frame and get a detailed report containing:
All these reports will keep you aware if your messages are reaching out to your audience and what are the steps to improve your deliverability.
Is the lemwarm email warm up tool reliable?
It's the most reliable email warm-up tool you'll find on the market. Just type "lemwarm reviews" on Google and see for yourself.
Here's why that's the case:
When you combine all these factors, they define lemwarm's reliability. This is why big brands like Zendesk and Malt trust our ip warming service.
We'd be thrilled to have you join our amazing mailbox network.
The manual IP warm up strategy usually comes down to sending emails to your friends and acquaintances on your own, one by one.
That being said, you should also ask them to reply back. As previously stated, it's imperative for conversations to take place because email providers will be evaluating this kind of behavior.
Although warming up an ip address for email manually might take time, if you processize things, you'll be able to build a strong email address that's ready for cold email campaigns.
Let's address all the important questions you might have at this stage.
It's 2022 and email providers became even smarter throughout the last few years, so they will be keeping an eye on the quality of your emails.
If you decide to exchange one-word warm up emails, let's just say that you will be warming up your domain similar to an athlete who decides to warm up just their knees, and not ankles.
You don't have to come up with super smart content either. Some emails can be longer, others shorter. But make sure it's meaningful and looks like something people would actually exchange in their inboxes.
Our advice is also to prepare templates for your friends and acquaintances so that they can just copy/paste and reply fast. Remember, you are fighting friction and should make people's lives easier.
I never really understood why people create fake accounts. If you're not a spammer or a fraud, it doesn't make sense.
As a Serbian whose first name is not easy to pronounce, I understand if you have doubts about going for an international market feeling handicapped. But I look at that handicap as fuel. It's like an underdog team beating reigning champions.
The brand behind your company name plays a strong role and can help you down the road. Having just Vuk is one thing, but Vuk from lemlist has more firepower.
The same applies to personal brands. Vuk who posts incredible LinkedIn content about growth marketing is totally different than just Vuk.
To cut the long story short, don't jeopardize your email account with fake or incomplete info. Email providers won't like it and it will impact your email reputation in the long term.
Let's take Gmail as an example. You've created your address and you need to fill in the blanks.
Make sure to enter all the necessary information so it looks as complete as the example below. 👇
Now you know when G's birthday is, so you can send him a cool gift when his day comes. 😇
Finally, let's see how your email warm up schedule could look if you decide to do it manually.
The numbers may vary depending on who you're emailing and what does your complaint rate look like.
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Weeks 3 and 4 can be tricky to execute manually.
When it comes to replies and the amount you should receive, the answer is the more, the better.
At a minimum, you should aim to achieve a 25% reply rate ratio. Meaning, if you send 200 emails, you should get at least 50 replies.
Sending 500 emails and getting no replies is a problem.
Email domains can be bought and sold, just like in any marketplace. No problem with that. Unless you purchase one that comes with a bad reputation attached to it.
Let me tell you one story here. 🤯
One user of ours bought a new domain and started warming it up. In a few days, lemwarm showed that more than half of emails were going to spam.
The entire setup (e.g. DNS) was done correctly and the user didn't start to send outbound campaigns at that moment.
Confused by the situation, the user decided to come to our support to figure out what the hell is going on.
After chatting together, our team discovered that the user purchased that domain recently. But here's the catch.
That email domain has been bought and sold 27 times since 2011 and was used by spammers in the past. #ShitHappens 💩
It's like buying a used car. You have to be really careful, otherwise, you might end up with a car that will stop in the middle of nowhere.
How to know domain history prior to making the decision to buy?
Easy! Use this tool.
Always keep in mind the following:
.png)
.png)
