Email Warmup Schedule (How To Set Up)

New domain? Congrats!

You’re all set to fire off your engaging email campaigns and start building up a loyal following.

Or are you?

Before you begin sending out your newsletter, there are some rules you must become aquainted with to ensure your emails don’t end up in the recievers spam folder.

You don’t want to end up in “email jail,” do you?

Didn’t think so. That’s why it is essential you prioritize warming up your IP.

Warming up your IP before starting your “real” campaigns is essential. When you acquire a new domain, its IP is considered “cold” because it has no reputation with the internet service provider. You can build this reputation by warming up your IP — or in other words, sending emails in pre-planned increases.

This guide will cover how you can develop a good reputation easily by setting up an email warmup schedule to guarantee maximum email deliverability.

Warm Up Email Domain (Key Steps)

An email domain is simply the web address that comes after the @ symbol in your email address.

The most common email domains are gmail.com and yahoo.com. These types of email domains are primarily used for personal email accounts.

However, if you have a newsletter, you likely have a custom email domain. My newsletter’s email address is [email protected].

Making my email domain: “mateomelgar.com.”

Get it?

Email domains typically correspond with a business or newsletter’s website, allowing email recipients to identify who an email is coming from. The email domain must match the requirements of the hosting provider, which means it typically requires using only letters, hyphens, digits, and dots.

When you start your email marketing program, it’s important to first establish trust and credibility with internet service providers (ISPs) like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook.

As a side note, an ISP is any company that provides you with an email address. Some other names for ISPs are “email providers” and “mailbox providers.”

Think about email domain warmup like a credit score. You can have a low credit score when establishing email credit simply because you haven’t made any transactions yet. Every time you send an email, it’s like a transaction.

If you try to make too many transactions too quickly, email providers like Gmail and Hotmail will flag your account.These have machine-learning algorithms that work 24/7 to detect and block spam. They don’t want to tarnish their reputation by allowing junk mail to flood inboxes, so they set up these parameters to keep inboxes clean.

While the warming-up process may seem slow and mundane, avoiding the dreaded spam folder is essential. If you fail to follow best practices of deliverability, your newsletter might not reach your subscribers. This means all the hours you’ve spent devoted to building a successful newsletter could be meaningless.

Instead, take the time to warm up your email domain. The simplest way to do this is by sending only a few emails at a time from your email domain and gradually increasing your send volume over time. This practice will help you improve your “email credit score,” so the newsletters you pour your heart and soul into will land in your readers’ inboxes.

Before we jump into the email warmup schedule, you must note that you can simultaneously follow other good practices to go from cold to warm.

Follow Your ISP Instructions

Dale Carnegie said, “If you want to gather honey, don't kick over the beehive.” The ISP is your beehive. Understand their rules and limitations, so you can follow them properly. If you get feedback or instructions from them, act promptly and cooperate.

Following this advice is key to getting good email deliverability because the ISP is the one who will use your reputation to determine if your emails get to your subscribers or if they hit their spam folders.

Only Send Good Content

Be relevant. Only send content that your subscribers will like and engage with. Avoid sending too many emails too quickly; because if you annoy your new subscribers, they may just flag you as spam, and that’s not good in this initial stage.

Send your best content first. Consider setting up a templated email sequence or a similar automated campaign to ensure it has been tested or is more controlled because the reaction from your list to your first emails is determinant.

In the meantime, success with email marketing is almost 100% tied to sending valuable emails to your target audience. Remember that!

You should be good to go if you follow the content guidelines above and avoid spam-trigger words or what may look like questionable content.

Improve the Quality of Your Email List

If someone buys an email list, they can be flagged or have their IP blocked.

Your list should only include subscribers who signed up following a legitimate opt-in process.

Clean your list periodically by removing users who have never opened your emails or engaged with them.

Some people think the bigger their list, the better -- but that’s not true.

From the deliverability side of things, having a “cleaner” list will increase your reputation and, thus, improve your deliverability rates. That will impact your other email marketing metrics for good.

From the sponsorship or ad placement perspective, a big list with bad metrics only appeals to newbies or low-quality sponsors. The best sponsors look at your ratios and analytics first because a 60,000-subscriber newsletter with a meager open rate is worth less than one with 10,000 emails but an above-average or high open rate.

I can back that up with a recent, real-life example: one of my clients removed 50,000 real (but inactive) emails from their list to increase their quality.

Increase Your Volume Smartly

We will cover this in the next section. For now, it’s enough to say that consistency and a gradual increase in volume are the basic principles required to warm up an email domain.

Consider these tips as you prepare to set up your email warmup schedule:

• Be ready to start with a very low volume, but focus on consistency.

• Avoid sending “email blasts” at this point. A sudden 30,000 email send can be fatal if you are just starting.

• Building a reputation with patience is easier and better than trying to fix a damaged reputation.

• Don’t rotate IPs. A single IP can send millions of emails per day if properly warmed up, but the ISP will block all your IPs if you rotate your sending.

• Avoid doing a lot of promotion at this point. Focus on “giving” to your audience, so you can “receive” soon.

• You can use ReturnPath’s SenderScore at this point and in the future to check your reputation.

Email Warmup Schedule (How To Set Up)

Now that we understand the basics and best practices, it’s time to get to work.

This is our suggested email warmup schedule. It shows the days and the emails to be sent on those days.

All you have to do is commit to this schedule and follow it until you reach your desired number of emails sent per day.

Please note that even with a daily target, you should not send all of your daily quota of emails at once.

For example, if you plan to send 100 emails on day 2, these should be spread out through many hours of the day and not be sent in one go.

Email Warmup Schedule (Closing Thoughts)

Monitoring your reputation consistently and following the best practices covered in this article (like creating damn-good content) is a life-long commitment if you want to be a newsletter marketing expert.

Mastering the skill of warming up your domains is a non-negotiable if you want to succeed as an email marketer because there are no shortcuts. You must prepare and warm up all of your email domains following what I taught you in this guide if you expect to have the best performance possible.

It’s also important to understand that if you stop sending emails for more than 30 days, your IP and domain will be considered cold, and you must go through the warm-up schedule again.

Yes, this is true even if you have done it before.

You may be passionate about the content you will put out, but remember the value can only be extracted if your audience sees it. Follow these steps to avoid being sent to ‘email jail’ and reap the benefits of an email warmup.

Kick off your email warmup schedule today with beehiiv, the newsletter platform built for growth.

Why Trust Us

Mateo Melgar is a family-first freelancer & digital entrepreneur from Mexico. He started monetizing the internet in 2016 (before “remote work” was cool) and never looked back. Mateo has reached hundreds of thousands of readers through his content marketing and newsletter initiatives with companies like Testimonial, NotionForms, Freelancer Fire, and beehiiv.