In the digital age, instant communication with clients has been a game changer. A solid website is essential, but branded email accounts can really add humanity to your business. The only problem is there’s a dark side to every force, and email outreach is no exception. Bad characters have used services like email to scam unknowing users since its inception (who hasn’t gotten a plea from a “Prince” in Wakanda?)
To distinguish your business email from the riffraff and prevent spam filters from booting your messages, warm up your new email account by sending test emails. Let’s go over what warming up an email account is and why it’s important.
What Is Warming Up An Email Account?
Warming up a new email account is the process of gradually increasing the volume of sent mail from a new email address, which helps to establish a credible reputation with Internet Service Providers (ISPs), mail recipients, and email clients like Gmail, Outlook, and IOS Mail. While you might think you’re excluded from this chore since your recipients have subscribed to your emails, you should plan in advance to warm up your email if you’re planning on emailing multiple clients regularly.
Basically, more of your company emails will reach your customers’ main inbox and not go directly to a spam folder if you gradually increase the communication. This helps tell email clients that you’re building a relationship and not mass spamming.
The Importance of Warming Up Your Business Email
Certain safeguards have been put in place by most email clients to prevent junk email from reaching your inbox, spam filters being the most common. An abundance of caution, however, can backfire and prevent legitimate businesses from reaching consenting customers. By immediately sending multiple emails to a list of inboxes without warming up your email, you run the risk of following the same patterns that a scammer might. This can quickly lead to your email account being burned.
Once an email account has been burned, that account has essentially been flagged as bad guys trying to steal information, coerce recipients for financial gain, or commit any other number of fraudulent acts, and your emails won’t make it to the intended inbox. Taking your time to prepare an email for business helps avoid this misplaced inbox wrath.
The Process of Warming Up Your Business Email
Now that you’ve learned the whys, let’s take a look at the how. Warming up a new email account has a few steps to it that are tried and true.
Set up Authentication
First things first, make sure you’ve configured the three main authentication protocols associated with your email account: SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Don’t let those abbreviations scare you away, here’s what they mean:
- SPF (Sender Policy Framework) – specifies which servers (powerful computers that store, processes, and send information) can send emails on your behalf
- DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) – adds a digital signature to verify the sender’s identity
- DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) – DMARC sets rules for handling emails that fail SPF or DKIM checks.
These settings help control your email flow and verify the servers that you communicate with. These records are housed with whoever your email host, or the company that provides your email service, is, and they can guide you on how to update these settings. Updating these records, will let servers, ISPs, and email providers know who you are and that your business email is trustworthy. Even setting up a branded signature for you emails right from the start can go a long way towards proving your humanity.
Our Business Identity service gives our clients a business website, domain, and email with support representatives that are pros when it comes to the warming up process, and can help clear up any confusion you run into when using our email hosting service.
Start small, and increase gradually
Start by sending a total of 10-20 emails per day to trusted contacts, this can be people you know or inboxes you manage. The important thing here is that the recipients will open your messages, click any attached links and ideally send a quick reply to you. From there, every few days, double the amount of mail you’re sending until you’ve reached the amount you expect to send regularly.
Send High-Quality Content
During this warm-up phase (and well beyond it), ensure you’re sending high-quality emails that are free of spammy language and provide value to those you’re emailing. Keep your contact with clients and customers relevant, and don’t become the monster that spam filters have it out for. Buzz words like “free”, “act now”, or “limited time offer”can all put you on the fast-track to the junk folder.
Monitor Engagement and Maintain List Hygiene
Keep track of the key metrics of your email: open rates, click-through rates, and bounce rates. These days there’s plenty of free online tools to help monitor this information, and you should utilize them to adjust your email strategy when needed. Perform regular hygiene on your send list, too. Remove any invalid or inactive addresses that bring down your open and click-through rates. The more engagement ISPs and mail clients see on your outgoing mail, the more likely they are to view what you’re sending as valuable content.
Be Consistent
Lastly, you’ll want to keep an eye on one more important aspect of your outreach: your consistency. If you’re intending on sending emails to a growing list of subscribers regularly, ensure these are being sent in regular intervals. Doing so helps to build a reliable sender reputation and a predictable cadence that your recipients will come to expect.
Start Baking That Inbox Souffle
Just like melting butter for a roux, you need your pan warm enough to get things moving, but not so hot that it burns the good stuff (it’s called brown butter, not “black with chunky bits” butter). By following these steps to warm up a new email account for your business, you’re helping to secure your reputation and ensuring your emails end up whereyou want them to. Start small, monitor your metrics, and be consistent in your outreach to optimize your business email account’s performance. Happy emailing!