Warming up your domain and contacts

When you are starting to send newsletters or switching newsletter services, it is important to do some preparation to ensure your emails reach the recipients. One of the most important steps is warming up your domain. This increases the likelihood that your newsletters do not end up in the spam folder.

Let us go through how you can do this easily. We assume that technical aspects such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are in place. If not, you should first read more about email security.

Warming up the domain

Warming up the domain is about showing email providers like Microsoft, Gmail, and Online that you send emails that your recipients want. Let us say you have an email list of 30,000 contacts and want to send an offer. If you start by sending content that recipients do not like, you risk your emails being deleted or marked as spam. When many of your contacts do this, you get flagged as a poor sender, and fewer of your contacts will receive the email in their inbox. This is particularly risky when you have not yet established a good reputation.

Understanding the email provider filters

Email providers are highly sophisticated. They monitor how your recipients interact with your newsletters – whether they open them, click links, unsubscribe, delete, save them for later, or reply to them. This information is used to rate you as a sender. Do you send relevant and engaging content, or do you send content that does not engage?

Cleaning up your email list

After sending 10 to 20 newsletters, go through your email list and remove contacts who never open your emails. This is important because email providers monitor whether you send emails to inactive addresses or to people who never read them. This can negatively impact your deliverability.

Cleaning up should be done at least four times a year to maintain a healthy email list and ensure that your emails reach those who actually want them.

By following these steps, you can ensure that your domain is well-received by email providers and that your newsletters reach your recipients.