💡 Goals:
Challenge your campaigns categorization (transactional vs marketing messages).
Sort your campaigns and automations per engagement and volume.
📌 Deliverables: One migration schedule per subdomain (automations / newsletters)
Migrate your campaigns & automations based on engagement and volume
Most inbox providers consider recipient engagement a key factor in determining sender reputation. This includes both positive and negative interactions from recipients (see more here for details).
The warm-up phase is crucial for building a positive sender reputation. Here is a recommended approach:
First 2 weeks: Send emails only to new subscribers and your most engaged recipients (e.g. those who opened or clicked on an email in the last 30 days).
Until the 4th week: Expand your email sends to include recipients who have opened or clicked on an email in the last 60 days.
By the 6th week: Gradually begin sending emails to users who haven't engaged in 90 days, starting with small batches of emails to mitigate any potential negative impact on your domain reputation.
Challenge your marketing/transactional categorization
Some automations and campaigns, such as welcome emails and inactivity reminders, might not be ideal for initial sends during a warm-up phase, and shouldn't be considered as "transactional" emails:
Welcome emails: Including these emails in your initial sends might not resonate well with unengaged users.
Inactivity reminders: These users already do not open your emails, and you are likely not legally required to send them.
To maximize positive interactions during the warm-up, prioritize migrating automations that yield the highest engagement and reassess emails that may be incorrectly categorized as transactional messages.
Automations - Migration method
The biggest challenge lies in aligning your average daily email volume per automation with the gradual increase required during the warm-up timeline (see more here for details).
Volume criteria
Automations don't usually have predictable volumes of daily sent emails.
The volume of sent emails is dependent from the activity in your app or your website (e.g. card abandonment emails, account creation emails, etc).
As a consequence, finding the right automation to respect the email volume limit set at every stage of the warm-up is a complex task.
Here are some tips to navigate this:
Flexibility: The warm-up timeline can be adaptable. Minor variations (e.g. 600 vs 500 emails) are acceptable, but significant deviations should be avoided.
Prioritize high-performing automations: Focus on migrating automations with the highest engagement first.
Refine targeting: If daily email volume limits are difficult to meet with specific automations, consider using additional targeting conditions in Batch (e.g. exclude specific countries or languages) to limit recipient pools.
Engagement criteria
Prioritize migrating high-engagement automations targeting new or engaged users during the warm-up phase.
Examples of ideal emails for initial sends:
Account-related alerts (e.g. account creation confirmation, password reset). Ensure the targeted email addresses are valid to prevent hard bounces that could harm your new subdomain's reputation
Order-related (e.g. order confirmation, delivery date). These emails typically have high engagement and minimize the risk of facing issues during the warm-up.
Leave win-back automations and abandoned cart reminders for later stages.
These emails often have lower engagement and could negatively impact your sender reputation.
Prepare your migration schedule
Now, you can take advantage of all the work you have done in the previous steps of our methodology. You will need to use:
Campaigns & automations performance review table (see step 1): Lists automations with average daily sent emails and performance metrics.
The warm-up goal table (see step 2): Defines the daily email sending quota for your transactional and marketing automation subdomains.
Combine these tables to create your migration schedule, a crucial tool for tracking progress. Here is an example including columns for tracking performance after migration.
📌 Example of migration schedule
Transactional subdomain: service.domain.com
Warm-up goal: 1400 emails/day
Estimated migration time: 3 days
| Emails sent/day | Bounce rate | Open rate | Click rate | Unsub. rate |
Stage 1 | 200 | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Password reset | 100 | -% | -% | -% | -% |
New login | 50 | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Invite sent | 50 | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Stage 2 | 400 | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Validated order | 400 | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Stage 3 | 800 | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Delivery in progress | 600 | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Registration confirmation | 200 | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Cumulated total | 1400 |
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Email campaigns - Migration method
Challenge your current targeting
Leverage the recipient review table you prepared earlier (see more here) to identify subscribers to exclude from newsletters.
A migration is an ideal opportunity to refresh your audience and remove those who are unlikely to engage, potentially harming your reputation and campaign performance.
Prepare your migration schedule
Email campaigns are easier to migrate to Batch.
This is due to the fact that:
Predictable volumes of sent emails: Newsletter subscribers can be counted easily, as opposed to volume of emails sent automatically everyday from your automations, based on website/app interactions.
Predictable schedule: Newsletters are usually sent on specific days of the week, as opposed to automations that are sent in real-time. This gives you more flexibility to migrate your email campaigns.
Migrating email campaigns to Batch is simplified by:
Predictable email volume: Unlike automations triggered by user activity, newsletter subscriber lists have a clear size, making it easier to plan the migration.
Predictable schedule: Newsletters typically follow a set sending schedule (e.g. weekly), offering more flexibility for migration compared to real-time automations.
Preparing subscribers batches
The objective of a newsletters warm-up is to gradually increase daily newsletter sends to reach your warm-up goal while maintaining a positive sender reputation.
Batch recommends the following strategic approach:
Segment by engagement: Organize your subscriber list with the most engaged subscribers at the beginning. This could involve sorting by recent opens, clicks, or other engagement metrics.
Create a content calendar: Plan a series of thematically linked newsletters with varying content to maintain subscriber interest throughout the warm-up.
Schedule sends: Distribute your newsletter series across the warm-up timeline, sending to segmented batches based on engagement and increasing the volume gradually.
This approach offers several benefits:
Improved engagement: Sending fresh content over the warm-up fosters interest and encourages continued engagement.
Reduced risk of fatigue: Repetitive content can lead to unsubscribes. A varied series keeps users interested.
Let's explore how to create a migration schedule for your newsletter warm-up using this strategic approach.
📌 Example of migration schedule
Newsletters subdomain: news.domain.com
Warm-up goal: 650K emails/campaign
Number of newsletters to be sent in batches, before being able to address all your users with a single campaign: 4 campaigns
| Emails sent/day | Bounce rate | Open rate | Click rate | Unsub. rate |
First newsletter |
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Campaign 1 - Group 1 | 200 | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Campaign 1 - Group 2 | 500 | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Campaign 1 - Group 3 | 1K | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Campaign 1 - Group 4 | 2K | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Campaign 1 - Group 5 | 5K | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Campaign 1 - Group 6 | 10K | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Campaign 1 - Group 7 | 20K | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Campaign 1 - Group 8 | 40K | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Campaign 1 - Group 9 | 50K | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Campaign 1 - Group 10 | 75K | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Campaign 1 - Group 11 | 100K | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Campaign 1 - Group 12 | 150K | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Campaign 1 - Group 13 | 200K | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Cumulated total | 650K |
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Second newsletter |
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Campaign 2 - Group 1 | 250K | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Campaign 2 - Group 2 | 325K | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Campaign 2 - Group 3 | 75K | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Cumulated total | 650K |
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Second newsletter |
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Campaign 3 - Group 1 | 400K | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Campaign 3 - Group 2 | 250K | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Cumulated total | 650K |
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Third newsletter |
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Campaign 4 - Group 1 | 500K | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Campaign 4 - Group 2 | 150K | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Cumulated total | 650K |
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Fourth newsletter - End of warmup |
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Campaign 5 | 650K | -% | -% | -% | -% |
Cumulated total | 650K |
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Preparing subscribers batches
To gradually increase daily newsletter sends while maintaining engagement, segment your subscriber list by engagement level:
Export subscribers: Extract your subscriber data from your current email service provider.
Sort by Engagement: Order the list with the most engaged subscribers (recent opens, clicks, etc.) at the beginning.
Create Warm-up Segments: Divide your list into batches based on the number of emails planned for each warm-up stage (see warm-up timeline example).
Save Segments in Batch: Choose one of these methods
Audiences (recommended): Create separate audiences for each warm-up stage by uploading CSV files through Batch settings or using the Audience API. Using audiences is the preferred approach for its simplicity and ease of implementation.
Attributes: Alternatively, you can attach a value to certain profiles (e.g. a value "stage 2" in an attribute called "newsletters_warmup") using the Profile API. You will be able to target all the profiles matching the value "stage 2" in the "newsletters_warmup" attribute.
Note: Using Audiences is a better option and is easier to implement, as opposed to profiles attributes that are persistant and require to call an API.
Next step
You are almost ready to go, the last preparation steps consists in reviewing your email templates: