Before considering you are ready to start your email warm-up process, be sure you know how the emails you are currently sending are performing.
💡 Goal: Understand how your campaigns and automations are currently performing and evaluate the reputation of your existing sending domains.
📌 Deliverables:
Check your current sending domains reputation
The fastest way to evaluate how you are performing as a sender is to take a look at your reputation. This can be done by checking the reports of different tools available online. While they only offer a partial vision of your current reputation, they prove to be useful to detect negative or positive trends.
Use these tools to note:
Your spam rate
Each one of your domains / IP reputation
Identify campaigns that may cause issues
If you notice significant decrease of your domain reputation, try to find a correlation between sent campaigns and the reputation issue (e.g. high spam rate, high unsubscribe rate).
There are several tools you can use:
Google Postmaster Tools (GPT)
Google Postmaster Tools is a free service provided by Google to help domain owners and email senders improve their email deliverability to Gmail users.
It offers insights and data on the performance of your email messages, allowing you to monitor and troubleshoot any issues that may affect your email delivery to Gmail inboxes.
By using Google Postmaster Tools, email senders can identify and address potential issues, optimize their email sending practices, and ultimately enhance their chances of reaching Gmail users' inboxes. Access to Google Postmaster Tools requires domain verification, and it's primarily designed for domain owners and email administrators.
Know more on the reports available in GPT
Know more on the reports available in GPT
Some of the features provided by Google Postmaster Tools include:
Spam rate:
Details on the percentage of your emails that were marked as spam by Gmail users.
IP reputation:
Data on the reputation of your sending IP addresses, which can affect email deliverability.
Domain reputation:
Check how the reputation of your sending domain is evolving over time.
Feedback loop:
Identify campaigns or automations that are responsible for most of your spam complaints.
Authentication:
Insights into your email authentication practices, including DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) and SPF (Sender Policy Framework).
Encryption:
Information about the usage of TLS (Transport Layer Security) encryption for your emails.
Delivery errors:
Information about emails that couldn't be delivered to the recipient's inbox.
Compliance report
Google also released a new version of GPT allowing senders to see at a glance if they comply with Google's senders guidelines:
Note: Postmaster tools may not show data if too few emails are being sent. This doesn’t mean the configuration has been done incorrectly. See here for the full documentation.
Microsoft Smart Network Data Services (SNDS)
SNDS enables senders to monitor the perception by Microsoft of all sent emails from your IPs. Unlike GPT, SNDS doesn't show data for subdomains.
This is still an interesting option to monitor your email activity:
Sending performance: To know which one of your IPs is performing better and guess why.
Campaigns performance: Understand which campaigns are causing most of the spam complaints and which campaigns are not qualified positively by Microsoft.
Spam complaints: Determine the kind of user profiles irritated by your emails, to improve your targeting.
Performance monitoring: Understand how your global performance evolves over time.
Spam traps: Identify the days when you have hit a spam trap.
Third-party tools
Additionally, you can use other tools like Talos Intelligence, Sender Score, and more.
Just like other options, they give you a synthetic view on your email activity that needs to be combined with other information to have a value:
Check if your IPs/domains are listed on a blocklist
A blocklist, also known as a Real-Time Black Hole List (RBL), is a database that identifies IP addresses/domains associated with spam and criminal activities.
Among all existing blocklists, some carry more weight than others in the decision made by inbox providers regarding whether or not to accept an incoming email:
Spamhaus.org
SORBS.io
DNSWL.net
Barracuda.com
Before starting a warm-up, always check if your sending IPs or domains are not listed on an important blocklist. Some tools exist to perform these checks automatically: MXToolBox or MultiRBL.valli.org.
Review your current email performances
Getting a clear view of your current campaigns/automations performance is key to identify possible issues during the warm-up process. Before starting a warm-up process, we recommend our customers review the performances of their emails over the last 3 months.
Comparing your performances to other senders
Here are the reference indices for interpreting your results, based on industry best practices and specific sender guidelines:
Accepted rate: >98%
Bounce rate: <2%
Soft bounces: ~0.60%
Hard bounces: ~0.40%
Open rate: from 17% to 28% (machine opens included)
Click rate: from 2% to 5%
Unsubscribe rate: ~0.25% (stay bellow 0.5%)
Spam rate: <0.1% (stay below 0.3%)
Dissatisfaction rate*: <20%
💡 Accepted rate: Percentage of sent emails that didn't bounce and were accepted by the inbox providers.
💡 Dissatisfaction rate: Percentage or proportion of people who are dissatisfied or irritated when receiving a specific type of emails. Obtained by using the following formula: Amount of unsubscribed users / amount of clicks * 100.
Global performance review
Note in a document all the KPIs related to your list hygiene & campaigns/automations performance.
That analysis will give you a global overview of your current email delivery capacity and campaigns/automations performance. Stats are broken token per purpose, with details per inbox provider.
We are adding by default global inbox providers, but feel free to add other inbox providers that are well represented in your userbase. Here are some local providers based on the countries you are targeting:
Belgium: Proximus, Scarlet, Telenet, etc.
France: Bouygues Telecom, Free, La Poste, Orange, SFR, etc.
Germany: Freenet, T-Online, United Internet (GMX, Web.de, etc), etc.
Italy: Libero, Telecom Italia (Virgilio, Alice, Tim), Tiscali, etc.
Netherlands: KPN, Telfort, Ziggo, etc.
Spain: Euskatel, Orange, Telefónica, Vodafone, etc.
Switzerland: Sunrise, Swisscom, etc.
United Kingdom: British Telecom, Virgin Media, Vodafone, etc.
...
You can use tables as the example below:
📌 Global email performance review
Period analysed: From xx/xxxx to xx/xxxx
| Open rate | Click rate | Unsubscribe rate | Spam rate | Dissatisfaction rate |
Transactional automations | -% | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Gmail |
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Hotmail/Outlook |
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Yahoo/AOL |
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Apple |
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Marketing automations | -% | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Gmail |
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Hotmail/Outlook |
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Yahoo/AOL |
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Apple |
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Email campaigns | -% | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Gmail |
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Hotmail/Outlook |
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Yahoo/AOL |
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Apple |
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📌 Delivery performance analysis
Emails sent from: [previous email provider's name]
Period analysed: From xx/xxxx to xx/xxxx
| Bounce rate | Delay rate | Global bounce rate | Soft bounces rate | Hard bounces rate |
Transactional automations | -% | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Gmail |
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Hotmail/Outlook |
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Yahoo/AOL |
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Apple |
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Marketing automations | -% | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Gmail |
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Hotmail/Outlook |
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Yahoo/AOL |
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Apple |
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Email campaigns | -% | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Gmail |
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Hotmail/Outlook |
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Yahoo/AOL |
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Apple |
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Campaigns & automations performance review
Then, run a similar analysis for each of your automations and recent newsletters to determine which ones should be migrated last due to higher unsubscribe/spam rates and poor overall performance (low open rate, low click rate).
This table will contain several important pieces of information to plan your email warm-up:
Emails sent per day: This is the average number of emails sent per day.
Top categories (transactional automations, etc.): These categories help you identify your warm-up goal. This is the volume of emails you will need to reach by the last day of the warm-up process for the domain responsible for the specific email category.
For newsletters: You need to consider the frequency of your newsletter sends. For example, if you send a newsletter targeting 200K recipients every Wednesday, and every Saturday you send two newsletters targeting 400K and 600K recipients respectively, your warm-up goal for the domain handling newsletters will be the maximum number of emails you send in a single day. In this case: 400K emails + 600K emails = 1M emails/day.
Engagement metrics: These metrics are useful for determining which campaigns or automations should be prioritized during the warm-up process.
📌 Campaigns & automations performance review
Period analysed: From xx/xxxx to xx/xxxx
| Emails /day | Bounce rate | Open rate | Click rate | Unsub rate | Spam rate | Dissatisfaction rate |
Transactional automations | 22K | 0.5% | 46% | 5% | - | 0% | - |
Order confirmation | 20K | 0.1% | 54% | 7% | - | 0% | - |
Password reset | 2K | 0.2% | 92% | 70% | - | 0% | - |
Marketing automations | 95K | 0.6% | 42% | 5% | 3.2% | 0.2% | 34% |
Welcome email | 12K | 3% | 63% | 12% | 2% | 0.1% | 28% |
Abandoned cart | 83K | 2% | 18% | 3% | 5% | 0.3% | 52% |
Email campaigns | 1.02M | 1.7% | 26% | 3.3% | 2.8% | 0.1% | 18% |
Weekly newsletter Monday | 820K | 2.1% | 37% | 5.2% | 3% | 0.1% | 12% |
Weekly newsletter Friday | 820K | 1.8% | 25% | 3% | 2% | 0 | 8% |
New trends Monday | 200K | 1.2% | 23% | 2.9% | 1% | 0.1% | 21% |
Note: This time, breaking down the statistics per inbox provider should not be necessary.
Next step
Now you have assessed your current email performances, you can start the technical setup: