Ramping Up Email Sending: Everything You Need To Know

Are you looking to launch a brand new newsletter or relaunch an existing newsletter? Maybe you want to create a new brand or change your content. Do you want to improve your email performance and deliverability?

A key component to all of these is your email sending domain. While you can send from a shared email domain (like mail.beehiiv.com), you can also send from your custom domain. This can help you create your brand and more closely align your newsletter with it. 

It is important to set up your custom domain correctly to ensure long-term success and strong deliverability for your newsletter. 

Keep reading for everything you need to know about how to warm up your custom domain!

How Can I Improve My Email Sending?

The best way to ensure strong deliverability is to start slowly on your email domain, and slowly increase the volume that you are sending on it.

This is known in the email marketing world as “warming up.” This essentially means starting with a small mailing list and gradually building up until you’re sending to a much larger subscriber list, allowing your domain to build up trust and credibility with other email servers.

This may seem boring — why start small when you could start big and email a lot of people straight away? Let’s go into more detail about the importance of warming up an email domain/campaign before going full steam ahead.

Why Is Warm Up Email Important?

There are several reasons why warming up an email is vital. Take a look at the points below to better understand why you need to warm up an email account before going full throttle.

Domain Protection

One of the key reasons why ramping up is so important is to protect your domain. When using your own domain to send out mass emails, you need to take care in ensuring that your subscribers are going to receive your emails and the bounce rate remains low.

If you get a high bounce rate or emails are consistently hitting your audience’s spam filters, your domain risks being blacklisted and blocked from email servers. This will make it even less likely that emails sent from your domain will be successfully delivered, potentially creating a big problem for your email marketing strategy. 

It’s better to test out a smaller segment of subscribers first and assess results over time to ensure that your domain is protected from the likelihood of blacklisting.

Something many marketers decide to do in the ramping-up process is purchase a new domain that is purely for email marketing. This protects an existing domain from being blacklisted when testing out a new mailing list. 

Reduce Complaints

Another reason that ramping up is important (which is also tied to domain protection) is complaints. If you start an email campaign firing on all cylinders by immediately sending emails out to thousands of people, you may receive compliance complaints as you haven’t done the legwork in knowing whether your audience is engaged with your content or not.

By ramping your emails up gradually, you reduce the risks of complaints while also ensuring that emails are being delivered successfully.

Email Deliverability

As previously mentioned, another benefit of ramping up is improved email deliverability. By sending emails out to a few segments of a mailing list at a time, you’re establishing which segments have the best deliverability rates and ultimately which addresses you’ll want to continue sending to.

This will ensure that your bounce rate remains low, and your emails will hit as few spam filters as possible. You’ll also establish trust with other email servers, ensuring that your deliverability rates are high for future email campaigns.

How Do I Warm Up My Email Server?

So what’s the best strategy for warming up your email server? 

This can be done in a number of ways, but the most important element of warming up an email server is ensuring that you break up your email lists into segments and send emails out regularly. Sending emails on a cadence of every other day should provide enough time to analyze results from the previous send and make any necessary tweaks before sending out the next batch.

It’s best to start with your most engaged users and then tackle less engaged users. It’s also good to remove any fully disengaged users from your mailing list (e.g., someone who hasn’t opened an email in 90 days) to keep your lists as fresh as possible.

In terms of the volume of email addresses/sends, this really depends on the full size of the list and the sort of business you’re in. As long as you aren’t sending to too many subscribers at one time and you’re staggering how often you send out campaigns, this should provide you with enough data to gradually warm up and ultimately end up sending campaigns to your full list without any issues.

You could also regularly ask your subscribers to engage with your campaigns. Audience interaction is a great way of warming up your email server and building trust with your subscriber base. 

Here are some more top tips on how to warm up your email domain.

Which Strategy Will Improve Email Deliverability?

The best strategy for improving email deliverability is the ramping-up strategy.

Not only does this strategy protect your domain and ensure that your subscribers are happy with the emails they’re receiving, but you’ll also achieve improved deliverability, as you’ll be able to narrow down email addresses that are receiving a high bounce rate and remove these from your lists. 

At the end of the ramping-up process, you should have a tailored list of subscribers with a high deliverability rate — who doesn’t want that?

For more best practices to maximize email deliverability, check out our blog.

Wrap-Up — How beehiiv Can Help

Now that you know what ramping up and warming up an email server means, we’re sure you’re eager to get started.

Why not sign up for a free trial with beehiiv? With our Grow and Scale plans, you can use a custom domain for your email campaigns and benefit from other features such as audience segmentation, unlimited sending, and even unlimited subscribers on some plans.

Sign up today and start scaling up your email marketing strategy!