Email Warming: The Key to Make People Receive Your Emails

 

The first step to building a relationship with your customers is to earn their trust by sending them valuable information about what you have to offer. Your message should sound like a trusted friend instead of a marketing agent selling a product. But with a majority of people not checking their inboxes daily, you need to be creative and have an effective tactic to get your marketing emails read. This is where warmed emails come into play. This strategy works well for businesses and can be the first step to getting noticed by your target audience.

Email warming is a new way of convincing your subscribers to open or click your message once it lands in their primary inbox. While having the expertise to write outstanding emails is important, it is not enough to win customers if it does not feel warm. But what exactly is this and how to effectively do it?

Find out in this article.

What is Email Warming? 

The idea behind it is to send a series of emails to prospects or customers in order to slowly talk with them. It is not considered spamming. Rather, it is a way of reaching out to new prospects and encouraging them to respond. By sending subsequent emails, you are able to introduce your product or service to them and attract their interest. You can also gain their trust over time and convince them that your business can help solve their problem.

This marketing strategy is especially effective in letting people be aware of your business. Because these are warmed, the message becomes more relevant and valuable to the recipient. When done properly, it can create a significant impact on your response rate, open email rate, click-through rate, and most importantly it can increase your sales.

Why Should You Warm Up Your Emails?

Warming up your emails is not really a must-do. But it can help you with a few extra advantages. So why would you want to put more time and energy into a task that is not necessary? Here’s why.

To Build Business Reputation

You need to work on your reputation and trustworthiness if you want to build a successful business. You need to get people to know who you are and what kind of business you have. But doing it might be a little challenging especially if you are just starting out.

Thankfully, email marketing provides you with that kind of opportunity. You can easily and directly tell a larger audience about your company and include your achievements. You can also highlight your strengths, for example having quality products, excellent customer service, fast shipping of items, and more. In the long run, warm emails allow you to create a better brand identity, build a stronger community of supporters, and expand your business.

To Improve Outbound Sales Emails

Email outbound is primarily used in a B2B (business-to-business) approach. But these can help you connect with your potential community with the goal of selling products or services. But sending these out to them without warming up can give you a low success rate.  Email warming allows you to improve your outbound sales emails simply because you can showcase the value you can bring to your customers before selling your products or services. When your email is warmed up, you are able to present your business as a solution rather than just a business trying to make a profit out of them.

To Increase Deliverability Rate

The delivery rate is essential to have a successful email marketing campaign. To be considered good, you should have a delivery rate of at least  95%. Warm emails help you solve your deliverability issues by improving the trustworthiness of your email. By using a unique subject line, when your message goes through filters, they would not see it as spam. It becomes effective because it is more personalized and contains an image that the recipient wants to see. Plus, these are easier to read and respond to.

When Do You Need Email Warming? 

There are many different situations where you might need to warm up your emails. Usually, you use this strategy as a way of testing out the subject line for your next campaign and seeing if it will bring you success. But beyond that, you need it for the following reasons:

Prevent Email from being Blocked by Spam Filters

Filters are essential in order to protect the privacy and data of the users. These are designed to check if the message contains malicious code or fraudulent links. These distinguish quality emails from spam emails. However, you might find these annoying especially if they keep on blocking what you send. This may be a problem also if you are sending out thousands each day. On top of that, it can badly affect your campaign because you might end up having a high email bounce rate. 

This usually happens when emailing government agencies and medium to large companies due to low sending reputation. To prevent this, you need to do email warming to build your email sender reputation. An email sender reputation is a significant factor that an Internet Service Provider (ISP) takes into consideration when delivering emails to the recipient’s inbox. The higher your score is, the higher the deliverability rate you can get.

Cold Email Outreach

Email warming is especially useful during cold outreach. It allows you to create a relationship with your prospects that is less threatening than the typical direct email. It also gives you the opportunity to self-promotion. You can ask questions that can lead to rapport. You can send follow-up emails with a call-to-action. In warming up your cold emails, you can use personal pronouns like “I” and “you” so that the reader would feel more comfortable reading your message. It is also good to give some context about your business to make these more relevant to them. In this way, you can increase your chances of getting responses.

Anytime You’re Doing Any Form of Email Marketing

Lastly, you can send warmed emails anytime you are doing any form of email marketing. When you are connecting with someone, it is best to be friendly, welcoming, and make it less salesy. People, whether they are new or loyal customers, would likely reply when they receive a message as if it comes from their friend.

Warming up your emails is also an effective way of testing out the subject line and seeing how it works. Through this, you can ensure that the subject line you will use in your next campaign is relevant to the content of your emails.

How to Warm Up Your Emails?

In a nutshell, here is how you can get your emails warmed up. First, you can start with a friendly greeting. You have to make these personal and sincere, so pay attention to the tone and language you use. Remember that you are not writing dry sales letters or transactional emails. Second, you can tell them about your business and how you can help them solve their problems. You can use quotes and statistics to evoke emotions and to present facts. Then, send them a newsletter on a daily basis to keep them updated. Lastly, include links that would direct them to the products you are promoting. Include call-to-action as well to encourage them to respond.

However, while doing the actual “email warming”, you also need to do the following methods in order to increase your sender reputation and make email service providers recognize your emails and domain.

Authenticate Your Email and Domain

Authenticating your email and domain is the first step that you must take so email providers will not block or mark your email as spam. Email service providers use email authentication to ensure that their users only receive safe and secure emails. When authenticated, they will consider your company email and domain as trusted and real. You can use the following methods for authentication. 

Sender Policy Framework (SPF)

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is a widely-used email authentication mechanism. It allows the sending side to determine whether the email it sends is valid. SPF is akin to a virtual signature. It is used to determine whether to accept the email. Webmail services like Gmail and Yahoo as well as other server applications have SPF. It works by comparing the dedicated IP address of the sender to a list of IPs that are allowed to send an email on behalf of the sending domain.

It is best practice to have your SMTP servers listed in your SPF records. It verifies the accuracy of your SPF records. It checks if the recipient’s mail server is configured to accept incoming emails from a new IP address. If they aren’t, there will be a delay in the delivery of emails sent from those servers.

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is an email authentication standard that is designed to prevent email spoofing. It allows email senders to certify the integrity of their email by indicating the key that signed their email. The DKIM signature provides another layer of security as it prevents tampering with the message while it is in transit. It is then validated by all receiving email servers to determine if the email originated from the sender. 

Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC)

Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) is a security technique.  It is used to verify as well as audit email and domain-based email accounts. It is used by many email services to help prevent unsolicited email, phishing, and other security attacks. It is also used as another security policy to ensure that the emails received are legitimate, not compromised, or forged. Without this mechanism, it is difficult to know whether the messages are altered or not. 

Custom Domain

Custom Domain is a subdomain of your main domain that you create and register with the registrar. It allows you to brand your website as well as your product or service because it appears like a store instead of just a “website”. Moreover, it is a good way to protect your brand from being stolen by others. If you have a business that has been around for many years and wishes to create a new company name, then creating a custom domain will be the best option as it gives you the flexibility to continue with your business name even if you decide to sell it in the future. 

Send Out Manual Emails Ongoingly

Another way to warm up is by sending out manual emails ongoingly. This enables email servers to identify that the sender is a human and not a bot. To do this, you can use the following techniques:

Send Customer Support Enquiries to Different Companies

You can send enquiries to customer support to build a good sender and IP reputation. It is effective because they usually reply.  You can be proactive in emailing top email services and various companies. For example, your first email could be asking them about the products or services they offer. In the subsequent emails, you can ask for other things such as package inclusion and pricing. 

Send to Various Email Services

Sending to various email services is also a good strategy not just in warming up emails but also in IP warming. This technique allows you to know whether your email is reaching the inbox for Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Outlook mail. It could be in the primary inbox in Yahoo but it could also go into Promotion or Spam in Gmail. This is helpful especially if you have been swamped with spam complaints from users of these email services. However, you need to ensure that you are sending just the right amount and following email practices so you will not be banned by the spam trap. Or you can use Warmy to do this for you. 

Maintain and Reply to the Email Conversation

You can maintain and reply to the email conversation with enough frequency and volume. This is an effective method to warm your emails. It is also effective in keeping the relationship between you and your subscriber. People who feel connected with you always read your emails, reply to your message, and purchase products simply because they feel valued. If you do not reply to them, they will eventually feel that your business is irrelevant to their life. 

Recommended Tools

There are many tools that you can use to help warm up your emails. Tools allow you to boost your and your team’s productivity. If you are not using one yet, I suggest using any of the following. These are the best ones in the market nowadays offering a wide range of features to make your email marketing successful. 

Warmy.io

Warmy.io is a tool that offers full automation for email and domain warming. It is simple to use yet effective to stay connected with warm leads. It monitors the progress of the email and updates the progress bar that shows how close the email is to being sent. It also tracks the date, time, and senders of every message received.

In addition, Warmy.io helps you increase your sender reputation. It works well with major email providers such as Gmail, Google Workspace, Yahoo, Outlook, STMP, Microsoft 365, Zoho, and more. To check if this tool is the one you are looking for in your business, you can get a 7-day trial here.

Sales.Rocks

Sales.Rocks is a tool that helps warm up your emails for higher deliverability and tracks email activity. It helps businesses to effectively grow through automating the whole sales process and reaching out to new customers. Aside from these, it integrates the talents of sales and marketing people into one place. Thus, your business ideas can turn into actionable strategies. It is effective in customer profiling and outreach too!

Sales.Rocks is best suited for the Sales and Marketing teams as well as for Enterprise. If you belong to these categories, you can start warming your emails through its 7-day trial. 

Gmass

Gmass is also an excellent tool both for cold and warm emails. This platform allows you to send personalized emails and mail merge with Google Sheets in Gmail. It also lets you AB test your campaigns to compare which one would perform better. When the campaign is done, it provides analytics such as open emails, click emails, and bounce emails so you would have an idea whether it is a success or not. Another notable feature of Gmass is its email list builder that you can use to quickly find email addresses. It has a built-in verifier as well that helps you validate your contact list to boost email deliverability. 

Currently, they offer two paid plans: Standard ($12.95/month) and Premium ($19.95/month). Prices may vary anytime. You can also check their other products here.

Lemlist

Lemlist is a sales marketing automation and cold emailing software. It helps you increase email open rates by spreading your email campaigns to multiple channels with a single click. It has 100+ email templates you can use in personalizing your campaign and engaging with leads. In addition, it allows you to automate follow-ups so you can get more replies from your target audience. It has strong integrations with big email providers such as Gmail, STMP, and Outlook. You can start using this tool for free.

Mailwarm

Mailwarm is another email warm-up tool. It prevents emails from landing in the spam folder so you can get a higher deliverability rate. It is easy to set up and navigate. It has dashboard monitoring wherein you can track and get insights about your daily email activities. Moreover, it allows you to read any email in your inbox without having to leave the app you are already working in. It works well with Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and iCloud. 

Mailwarm offers three plans with the current pricing: Starter ($69/month), Growth ($159/month), and Scale ($479/month). To check each plan’s package inclusion, just visit their website.

Final Thought

It is no surprise that more businesses are doing email warming as emails serve many purposes in digital marketing. Though it warming your emails is not really a must for effective email marketing, it can definitely help you get your messages in front of the right people at the right time. It is a good practice in getting your subscribers to actually open and ready your emails. In doing so, you can prove that you are a person and not a robot so your emails will be accepted by email service providers. On top of that, it can improve your email engagement and conversion. 

But to make it more effective, you need to include a few simple elements to warm up your emails. You can use a relevant subject line, friendly tone, and personalized content. These will help you connect with your audience and get more clicks on your emails.