It’s essential to warm your email sending reputation up any time you make updates to your DNS records, such as after connecting a business email address from your own domain.
The goal of warming your sender reputation up is to ramp up your sending volume to your anticipated ‘normal’ levels. By doing this, email inbox providers will recognize you as a ‘good’ email sender and this will improve your sender reputation.
Gradually Increase Your Sending Volume
As a new sender, Internet Service Providers (ISP) like Gmail or Outlook have strict limits on how many emails you can send per day. If you start off sending a huge volume of emails per day to an ISP, this will negatively impact your sender reputation.
If your email contact list is smaller than 50,000 contacts, only send emails to your most engaged contacts for the first 2 weeks. Once the 2 weeks have passed, you can begin sending emails to everyone on your contact list.
If your contact list exceeds 50,000 contacts, you’ll need to be much more cautious, especially if your list includes several email addresses that belong to an ISP like Gmail. Limit sending emails for the first week to no more than 25,000 emails per day. You can double your daily sending volume after this first week and continue to increase this volume weekly. After 4 weeks, you can remove sending volume restrictions and begin sending emails to everyone on your contact list.
Be sure to increase your sending volume gradually over time as explained above. A sudden increase in sending volume can be seen as spam-like behavior and will also negatively impact your sender reputation.
Send Emails to Engaged Contacts
The most important thing you can do to build your sender reputation up is to focus on sending emails to highly engaged contacts only.
A good way to do this is to segment your contact list by those who have opened your emails or have interacted with your business recently (like making a purchase), for the past 30/60/90 days. This is important to establish a long-term reputation.
By sending emails only to your most engaged contacts first, your open rates will be much higher and email providers will see that your emails are wanted by your contacts. This also ensures that you’re not sending emails to cold or inactive email addresses, which will hurt your reputation.