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Cold emailing is a time-tested marketing strategy and can be very effective. In fact, it is 40% more effective than social media marketing campaigns – that is, if your emails actually reach the intended recipient!
Unfortunately, this is harder and harder to do with the increase in anti-spam technology being developed. As such, email warmup is more and more crucial for successful email marketing.
Due to these new filtering software programs, your email reputation is more important than ever before. And email warmup is significant factor in getting an excellent email reputation!
But what, exactly, is email warmup? Why is it so important? And how do you do it?
For this guide, we consulted the experts behind Woodpecker, a leading cold email software, so that we can give you everything you need to know about doing your email warmup right!
We cover what email warmup is, why it is so important, and how to manually warmup your email account.
If you’d rather use some smart automated tools to do it for you, we also have a review of the best email warmup tools to use!
Ready?
Let’s get right into it!
In the simplest terms, email warmup is the process of establishing a good email reputation for your new email account before you can use it for large-scale email outreach.
Establishing a good email reputation is essential because it determines your email deliverability, ensuring they land in the inbox and do not get diverted to spam by the receiving email service provider (ESP). It also serves to gradually increase your daily email limit, so that you can eventually send a large volume of emails without being flagged as spam.
Email warmup is the process of gradually establishing your email account as legitimate and credible, by taking actions that build a good email reputation score before you start using that email account for mass email outreach.
Email reputation is a dynamic score that ESPs use to determine if a sender is legitimate or undesired spam. Reputation scores fluctuate based on how the email account behaves, in terms of the volume, frequency, and quality of the emails it sends.
It is also influenced by how recipients handle the emails they receive – if they’re marking them as spam, not opening and immediately deleting or if they just have very low engagement and click through rates, it will count against the sender’s email reputation.
A bad email reputation means that your emails will be much more likely to go to spam or not be delivered at all. And when it comes to email marketing – everything hinges on those emails reaching the recipients!
In terms of daily send limits, each ESP has a limit for sending emails and for a new account, this limit is quite low. The way to combat this is to use email warmup strategies to build a good email reputation, so that you can gradually increase the number of outgoing emails to the required volume for your campaigns. As an estimate, you should expect the process of scaling your email outreach to take around three months.
However, it’s important to remember that recipient engagement levels are essential when email service providers determine your email reputation. So, depending on the number of people who take action on your emails, the speed at which your limit increases will fluctuate accordingly.
Summary: What is Email Warmup?
Email warmup is the process of gradually establishing a good email reputation for a new email account, which determines deliverability and the daily sending limit for the email account. Done properly, email warmup will ensure that your account is seen as a legitimate, non-spam, sender and will ensure that your outgoing emails reach their destination inboxes.
A cold marketing campaign requires a significant investment of time, money, and other resources, right? From cold emailing copywriting to obtaining lists of email addresses, there’s a ton of work that goes into it. And if your emails aren’t actually getting to the recipients, all those resources are being wasted!
And when it comes to email marketing campaigns, particularly the ones launched with a new email address, it is tricky to gain a high “deliverability” rate. Newer email addresses have a much higher chance of their emails being sent to spam folders or for the address itself to be blacklisted.
What’s more, once you’re email address or domain has been marked as spam, it’s incredibly difficult to regain a good email reputation. An indication of a bad sending reputation is if your open rate is consistently less than 20%, which is the lowest industry standard.
Email warmup is a critical part of the email marketing process. It ensures that you get off on the right foot, and can make the most of your campaigns with good deliverability rates!
So, put those resources to good use, and warm up your email addresses before hitting the ground running. That way, you can make better use of cold marketing strategies and make them worthwhile for your business.
Check out this video by Woodpecker.co for an in-depth explanation of the ‘why’ behind email warmup:
Summary: The Importance of Email Warmup
In a nutshell, email warmup is critical because it establishes a good email reputation for the email account you will use for email outreach and marketing. A lot of time, money, and resources go into a cold marketing campaign, but none of that matters if people aren’t getting your emails. Warming up your email address helps to ensure that your deliverability rates are high, making email and cold email marketing worthwhile.
When verifying or authenticating your email account, you help to show email service providers that you are a legitimate sender and that you’re not spamming anybody.
There are four main ways in which you can authenticate your email account:
The sender policy framework (SPF) authentication method adds a record to your DNS that lists every server that has been given permission to send emails on behalf of a domain.
What this means is that the sender’s domain is given a clean bill of health when the recipient’s ESP sees that the sender’s ESP is using SPF Authentication.
Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) authenticates your email and gives your domain a digital signature. This stops email spoofing (people pretending to be you) and ensures that your email gets to the right person.
The SPF and DKIM records you maintain for your domain are checked by DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance). This is done to assure the ESP that your emails are safe to open.
Emails with a custom domain add credibility to the sent links and attachments. Both the sender and the ESP can rest easy knowing that the attached files and links originate from a reliable source.
A massive part of warming up your email address is scaling the number of emails you send in a day. But you’re going to have to start somewhere, and that somewhere should be around 10-20 emails daily.
Moreover, you should ensure that most or all of those emails have a lot of engagement. This indicates to your ESP that you are not spamming people and that what you are sending is valuable.
Further, in these preliminary stages, you should send emails to addresses from all the top email service providers like iCloud, Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, and Yandex. That way, you’re taking out multiple birds with one stone.
And as time passes, you can gradually increase the number of daily emails you’re sending out.
We all want to achieve the highest possible “deliverability” rate. And to do that, you need to interact with people through email – as if you weren’t running a cold marketing campaign.
Email accounts are intended to both send and receive emails. So, that is a critical factor you need to incorporate when warming up your email address.
An easy way to do this is to set up other email addresses (old or new) that you contact and interact with on a regular basis. This helps prove to your ESP that your interactions are normal and you’re not spamming people.
Plus, it helps to increase your email sending quota as time passes.
Now, the number of emails coming into your inbox is just as important as those going out. You want to simulate regular email activity in order to increase that daily sending limit. It also has the added benefit of helping to validate your email address to your and other ESPs.
And newsletters can be the perfect way to increase the number of incoming emails to your account. Therefore, you should subscribe to 15+ weekly or daily newsletters for the best results.
Each email service provider has a different algorithm to sort and filter spam. And you really don’t want them to think you’re a bot.
So, a general rule of thumb should be to send only single emails at a time (not sending to broadcast lists) and to leave at least 30 seconds between emails.
That way, you can once again simulate regular email activity while warming your email account up.
After your 12-week warmup phase, you’re ready to start cold emailing. However, you still need to take it slow and get as much engagement as possible.
Firstly, a perfect way to do that is to send out twenty to thirty highly personalized cold emails a day.
As personalized emails are more likely to get responses, this is great for not only warming up your email address but for starting to actually make sales.
Secondly, you should avoid spam-like content at all costs!
This means lots of emojis, words like “FREE” and “50% OFF”, or lots of links should be removed. A clean, straightforward style is more likely to bypass spam filters and get you into inboxes.
If you follow the steps above, you’ll be well on your way to warming up your email account. However, here are some bonus pro tips and best practices for warming up your email successfully:
Summary: 7 Steps to Warmup Your Email Account Manually
Woodpecker is a comprehensive email marketing software that can handle every aspect of your cold email marketing, lead management and on-going email engagement. When used by B2B companies, Woodpecker’s intuitive cold email and email warmup features help them reach out to and maintain relationships with potential customers and business partners.
Woodpecker acts as a virtual assistant, handling the time-consuming and often nerve-wracking task of making initial contact and developing B2B relationships. Salespeople, lead generators, and recruiters can spend more time interacting with candidates and clients with Woodpecker’s help.
In terms of email warmup, Woodpecker is one of the best tools available. It does everything you need to establish a great email reputation with intuitive automations designed by experts who have worked in thousands of email campaigns. It is a really simple tool to use and the expertise behind the development and on-going updates to give it the edge in terms of customer support. Woodpecker warmup is also free for all users, as an addition to the standard account, for no additional charge.
Pros
Cons
G2: 4.4/5 from 37 reviews
Capterra: 4.6/5 from 30 reviews
Website: woodpecker.co
Email warmup by GMass is a plug-in for Google’s email and productivity suite, Gsuite, that can be used for email marketing.
They offer a free email warmup tool, the only free option out of its eight products. The one drawback is that you can only use it with Google products like Gmail and Gsuite. So, you’ll have to look around if you need a warmup tool for a different domain.
Moreover, a paid subscription is required if you want access to all of their features.
Pros
Cons
G2: 4.7/5 from 837 reviews
Capterra: 4.8/5 from 882 reviews
Website: gmas.co
Another independent inbox warming tool, WarmUp Inbox, saturates your inbox with “good” emails. With the help of this tool, every email is sent with fresh, dynamic content.
In order to give users the most authentic experience, they use a network of over 15,000 inboxes that communicate with one another. Furthermore, WarmUp Inbox reviews are very positive overall.
Pros
Cons
Capterra: 4.2/5 from 6 reviews
Website: WarmUp Inbox
QuickMail has an email warm-up tool called “Auto Warmer” that works in tandem with their main platform for cold email automation. Once your email account is linked to your domain, it will begin sending and receiving emails to and from other users using the . Quickmail auto-warmer tool.
One of the things that sets this tool apart from the competition is that it is completely free to use. There are, however, some limitations to how many emails you can send per day and how many inboxes you can connect.
Pros
Cons
G2: 4.7/5 from 65 reviews
Capterra: 4.8/5 from 25 reviews
Website: quickmail.io/auto-warmer
Saleshandy is a great tool for warming up your inbox before starting to send cold emails. Using Saleshandy, it’s quick and easy to get multiple emails ready at once.
Moreover, Saleshandy’s Email Warm-Up uses a complex algorithm to help you build up your domain’s reputation over time, making it more likely that your emails will be delivered.
Plus, this tool sends more and more emails to its subscribers every day to boost your domain authority.
Pros
Cons
G2: 4.5/5 from 178 reviews
Capterra: 4.5/5 from 117 reviews
Website: saleshandy.com
Lemwarm was developed as a spinoff of Lemlist for the sole function of warming up inboxes. Lemwarm’s use of a “best in class” algorithm that employs actual people improves both domain authority and click-through rates.
However, costing around $29 per month, Lemwarm alone is a bit expensive if you’re just using it to warm up your inbox without access to any of their other features. Moreover, the email warm-up is only available as a paid plan and is not included in the free trial version.
Pros
Cons
G2: 4.1/5 from 103 reviews
Capterra: 4.6/5 from 335 reviews
Website: lemlist.com/lemwarm
Summary: The 6 Best Email Warm-up Tools to Use Are
There you go!
You now know everything there is to know about warming up your new cold marketing email addresses. We’ve covered everything from why it’s essential to how you can get a toasty warm account, keeping you out of those pesky spam folders.
And if you don’t want to go through all that effort, you can use any of the top email warmup tools we’ve listed above, like Woodpecker.
What are you waiting for?
Get to warming!
Email warm-up is how you establish your email reputation for a new email account. Email reputation is dynamic and determined by the behavior of an email account and its recipients. Email Service Providers (ESPs) use email reputation scores to decide which emails to deliver to the inbox and which ones to divert to spam. All new email accounts are seen as 'neutral/suspicious', and only when there has been sufficient activity on the account can a better (or worse) reputation score be established. Email warm-up involves various activities, like sending and receiving varying numbers of emails at different frequencies, to establish a good email reputation, which is critical for deliverability. Read the complete guide to learn more about email warm-up, how to do it, and the best tools you can use to automate the warm-up process. Email warm-up helps you build (or repair) your sender reputation. The goal is to establish a good reputation, which improves deliverability. To ensure their users have the best possible experience, ESPs such as Gmail and Outlook will check a sender's reputation before allowing their email through. A poor email reputation increases the likelihood of an ESP diverting your emails to spam or not delivering them. All new email accounts are considered 'neutral/suspicious' by ESPs until their behavior provides enough data for their reputation score to be known. Email warm-up is how you gain a good email reputation and ensure high deliverability for your outgoing emails. Read the full guide to learn how to do email warm-up and the best tools to do it. Email warm-up tools allow you to automate the email warm-up process. Over several weeks, they automatically carry out the actions needed to establish your email reputation and demonstrate to ESPs that you're a legitimate sender, not a spammer. Establishing a good email reputation is essential for email deliverability and credibility - the cornerstones of all successful email marketing campaigns. Read the full guide to learn more about email warm-up tools and how they can help you establish (or re-establish) a good email reputation. Send no more than 200 cold emails per day if you want to keep your email account open; and even less if the account is newer or has little inbound email traffic. Read the complete guide to learn more about ensuring deliverability for your email marketing. The top warm-up tools to use in 2024 are:
Frequently Asked Questions
What is email warm-up?
Why do I need to warm-up email?
What are email warm-up tools?
How many cold emails should you send per day?
What are the best email warm-up tools?
- Woodpecker
- GMass
- WarmUp Inbox
- QuickMail Auto Warmer
- Saleshandy
- Lemwarm
Read the full guide for our detailed review of each email warm-up tool, including key features, pros and cons, review site scores and pricing.
Campaign Monitor: How to Repair a Bad Email Sending Reputation
Woodpecker: How to Safely Scale up Your Cold Email Outreach
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