Let's imagine a situation. You decided to do email marketing, registered a new domain, prepared cool and useful newsletters and honestly collected a contact base. It seems that you have everything to send letters. But in fact, there is no need to rush with the mailing yet.
Once your domain is identified, mail services begin to closely monitor what you send. Mailers are always skeptical about new addresses and perceive them as a possible source of spam. If they find stop words and an incorrect ratio of visuals and text in the letters, or find out that there are complaints about the mailing, the domain can easily end up on the blacklist.
To prevent this from happening, you need to gain the trust of mail services and ensure that the reputation of the domain or IP does not raise any doubts.
How to improve domain and IP reputation?
This is what warming up is for. The point is to accustom the new domain to sending large volumes of emails and to ensure that the mailings do not end up in spam. Therefore, you need to gradually increase the number of mailings. But before you start warming up, you need to prepare.
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Setting up identification parameters and postmasters
To confirm that the domain belongs to you, you need to configure SPF and DKIM parameters. The DKIM key ensures that the letter was sent by you and was not replaced by scammers. SPF protects qatar business email list against sending letters with fake addresses from your domain. You also need to configure DMARC technology, which determines how the mail service should process incoming messages if the sender's address cannot be identified.
Postmasters are very useful tools for deep analytics of mailings. They will help you find out about the domain reputation, find delivery errors, complaints and other troubles.
Preparing a contact base for mailing
If you already have a database, but you haven't used it for a long time, it makes sense to clean it up - delete all invalid addresses and duplicate contacts. If there are few addresses, you can clean it up manually, for a larger database it is better to use special services.
Don't worry about the number of subscribers decreasing, quality is more important than quantity here. The main thing is that the database contains active, loyal clients who are interested in your mailing list and will not unsubscribe from it. If you have already sent letters before, segment the address base by activity and delete users who have not opened messages for more than two or three months.
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Create a quality letter
The main task is to make sure it doesn't look suspicious and doesn't end up in spam. Be sure to check that the letter has a working unsubscribe form. If a person wants to unsubscribe from the mailing list, it should be easy and convenient. The text of the message should not contain any spam words (buy, earn, giveaway, money) or intrusive caps lock. You also need to make sure that the ratio of text to visuals is optimal (25% text, 75% images). A beautifully designed letter with useful content will definitely not alert anyone.
We are developing a mailing plan
If you are confident in your contact base and have designed a great letter, you can start warming up. As we have already said, you need to get rid of the temptation to send it to everyone at once and not draw attention to yourself.
To start, you can send single letters. Transactional mailings about subscription or order confirmation are well suited for this. Then gradually increase the number of sendings by mass mailings. To make it convenient, you can make a detailed schedule, for example, in the first week only 5% of subscribers will receive letters, in the second 10%, and so on. It is important to understand that such warming up will take time, so you need to be patient.
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We follow the statistics
While you are warming up a domain or IP, do not forget to check the statistics after each mailing. The first important indicator is the number of undelivered letters. If it exceeds 10%, then there are suspicious addresses left in the contact base.
The second metric worth paying attention to is the number of spam complaints. Here, the critical value is 0.4-0.5%. To prevent subscribers from complaining about the mailing, review the content of the letter and get rid of everything that may look like spam. Postmaster statistics are also very important. Ideally, all your letters are delivered to the Inbox folder, and the domain reputation remains in the green zone.
Are all the indicators OK? Then you can safely increase the intensity of sending. If the domain reputation has started to deteriorate, slow down and work on the errors.
And now once again about the main thing
You cannot send mass mailings from a new domain or IP address.
To increase the reputation of a domain, you need to warm it up first.
Before sending a mailing, you need to set up postmasters, SPF and DKIM.
Put the contact database in order and clean it from invalid addresses.
Create a quality letter that won't raise suspicion
Develop a mailing plan and schedule.
Study statistics after each mailing.
Do you have any questions or need help with warming up? Then be sure to write to us — [email protected] Our company has a whole department that monitors the deliverability of letters and helps our clients avoid any possible problems with mailing.