💡 Goals:
Understand the importance of a good list hygiene
Implement best practices to be compliant with Batch's guidelines, sender's guidelines and local legislation.
Review and improve the quality of your recipients base
Identify the recipients categories you should exclude from the warm-up phase and most of your campaigns/automations.
📌 Deliverables: Base review table (see here)
Why subscribers qualification matters?
Once you have evaluated your current email performance, you can start qualifying users that will be addressed first during the email warm-up phase.
As mentioned in our article on senders reputation, the goal of the warm-up phase is to establish trust with inbox providers by:
Increasing email volume progressively: Gradually increase the number of emails sent to demonstrate your ability to handle larger volumes.
Showing good list hygiene: Prove that you are sending emails only to valid recipients who expect and engage with your content.
Proving non-annoying behavior: Avoid being perceived as a source of annoyance by following best practices and maintaining a healthy email list.
The second and third steps are as important as the first one. A progressive warm-up can be ruined by targeting invalid email addresses and prioritizing the wrong part of your audience. Fixing the reputation of your new subdomains then turns to be harder.
The whole warm-up process assumes that senders need to qualify their recipients base to determine which part is more likely to react positively by:
Opening the emails
Responding / forwarding the emails
Clicking content in the email
And perform other positive actions (e.g. revisit the email, put them in specific folders, etc).
The subscribers qualification can be done in three steps:
List hygiene policy: Be sure you are already following the best practices to have as little bounces as possible.
Subscribers categorization: Group recipients per subscription source, to ensure you are sending the right message to the right audience and reduce the chance of getting negative feedback.
Engagement-based qualification: Qualify recipients based on their last engagement.
Note: If you have already worked on the first step of Batch warm-up process, then you should know your current bounce rate and which campaigns/automations are currently causing issues.
Review your list hygiene policy
The first thing to do consists in reviewing your current list hygiene policy. Migrating from one email solution to another is a great opportunity to start fresh and clean your list.
This is an important task to be sure your practices match today's inbox guidelines, legal requirements and Batch guidelines. Please take some time to review your list hygiene policy and apply changes when needed:
Qualify segments of subscribers for the warm-up
Recipients categorization
Leads, signed up users and newsletter subscribers should not be treated the same way and receive the same message. In the context of a warm-up, this can result in unexpected high level of unsubscribes, bounces and spam complaints you need to avoid.
Make sure you can clearly identify the subscription source of each one of your recipients, to address them with the right message:
Engagement-based qualification
Also, focus on quality over quantity and dedicate your first emails to the most engaged of your users. Then, increase gradually the volumes of sent emails and extend your messages to other segments of users when the risks are lower for your newly created reputation.
During a warm-up phase, and even after, inactive recipients should not be part of your "normal" audience if you send newsletters. Dedicate them a special reengagement program and let them go if needed.
Note: Less engaged segments should be added to the batches of recipients in chunks of 15% of your existing volume. This is important to avoid tipping your reputation from good to bad.
Run your first diagnostic
Once you've evaluated your list hygiene policy, applied required changes & identified segments for targeting, use this table to visualize your recipient base and determine a "healthy" subscriber count.
This table should help you identify the segments you should exclude from the warm-up and from most of your usual campaigns/automations.
📌 Recipients base review table
| Leads | Newsletter subscribers | Service users | ALL SEGMENTS |
New |
|
|
|
|
Opt-in |
|
|
|
|
Opt-in + opt-out |
|
|
|
|
Engaged |
|
|
|
|
Opt-in |
|
|
|
|
Opt-in + opt-out |
|
|
|
|
Less engaged (Last open <3 months) |
|
|
|
|
Opt-in |
|
|
|
|
Opt-in + opt-out |
|
|
|
|
Inactive (Last open > 3 months) |
|
|
|
|
Opt-in |
|
|
|
|
Opt-in + opt-out |
|
|
|
|
TOTAL |
|
|
|
|
Opt-in |
|
|
|
|
Opt-in + opt-out |
|
|
|
|
Next step
Now you have reviewed your list hygiene rules and qualified your recipients base, let's take time to define a warm-up goal per subdomain: