A Guide To Warming Up Your IP Addresses For B2C Email Marketing

If you’ve invested in a dedicated IP address and conducting B2B email marketing to major ISPs, warming that IP address is critical. If you begin sending emails from a new or “cold” IP address, steep increases in email marketing to major ISPs can damage your new mailing IP’s reputation and defeat the purpose of that investment.

To protect your investment in a dedicated IP address for B2C email marketing to major ISPs, you need to warm your IP address gradually over time to establish your new IP address as a legitimate email sender among the major Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Properly warming up your IP address is a crucial step in building your email sending reputation and improving delivery performance.

The following guide provides the steps involved to warm up your IP address and establish a positive reputation to conduct B2C email marketing to major ISPs. Note that you cannot hurry the process! It will take a minimum of 4 weeks to build towards your targeted volume.

If your database is lower than 10,000 prospects you do not need to warm your IP address. And if you are conducting B2B email marketing the warming is less of an issue because your emails are distributed over multiple ISPs but is still advised.

Process To Warm Up Your IP Address For B2B Email Marketing To Major ISPs:

• Step 1: Two Things You Need To Do Before Warming Up Your IP Address
• Step 2: Warming Up Your IP Address
• Step 3: Begin Increasing Your Email Volume

2 Things You Need To Do Before  Warming Your IP:

• Make sure that your SPF record is appropriately verified.
• Segment out your best and most active contacts. Don’t start your IP warming with old (older than 12 months) targets! Having high delivery rates with your initial campaigns will help build your IP’s reputation. Watch this video to see how to identify your top performing segments.

Warming Up Your IP Address:

The key to warming your IP address is to spread out your initial sends over multiple days. For example, if you plan on sending 50,000 emails a week, we recommend that you split your lists into at least five groups of no more than 10,000 recipients in each list. Email only one group per day over the first five days.

A rule of thumb for larger volume B2C email marketing ramp-ups is to start your sending at 10,000 prospects per day. If your bounce rate stays below 10% and your spam complaint rate stays below 0.1% on those sends, you can safely double your send volume per day over the next few weeks until your target sending volume is reached.

For example, if you want to send 1,000,000 emails a week, you should ramp up like this:

*We recommend keeping your sending schedule at 250k/4 days to avoid having your emails bounced by recipient ISPs due to spikes. Consistent daily send volume is better than having a large volume spike on one day of the week and no email sent on remaining days of the week.

Throughout the process monitor the bounce rates of your lists and stop mailing if the bounce rates of your first one or two targets exceeds 10%. This is a sure sign that your list needs maintenance! Clean up the list, and then resume sending to the remainder of the targets.

Doubling Established Monthly B2B Email Marketing Volume:

Say you’ve already established your sending volume at 100,000 messages per week. What if you want to send to 200,000 a week now?

We recommend that you increase your sending gradually over a month. See the below table for how to ramp email sending over a month from 100,000 emails per week to 200,000 emails per week.

If Established Mail Volume is already at 100,000 messages/week:

Note:

• It is not recommended attempting to more than double your mail volume in a month on an active IP.
• If your mailing patterns are infrequent — for example, only one mail campaign per month — avoid sending more than 100,000 messages per day.