In an ideal world, you would set up a new email address, start sending emails immediately and send as many of them as you want. How cool would that be? But let’s be realistic, that is not going to happen. At least not soon enough. 

Before you start using a newly set up email address for serious outbound campaigns, it’s crucial to warm it up a bit. At Autoklose, we often see that totally new email addresses used for outbound without any warm-up get blocked soon after an outbound campaign is started. 

Here’s more about why that happens and how to avoid it. 

Once your email is set up, you can start warming it up – for starters, by hand. Collect a list of addresses you know for sure are existing. Think about your friends and business partners and treat these email messages as an opportunity to reconnect with them. You won’t send them sales emails, of course. You will reach out to them personally. And you shouldn’t use any automation at this initial point. It’s always a good idea to start slow and simple.

A little pro tip here: in a perfect scenario, you want to collect a list of addresses set up on domains of various hosts. Also, I know you can’t be sure which hosts your friends and business partners are using but try to reach out to their business addresses, if possible. That’s how your new domain and email address will gain credibility in the eyes of various hosts.

Pay attention to the content of your emails. It does matter what you send, so try not to send just anything to those addresses. Make them real messages, not just random pieces of text. If you don’t know what to write about, you can even try to find some jokes or funny stories on the web and send them to your friends. Also, ask some questions in the emails, because you want your recipients to reply to your warm-up emails.

A regular mailbox is not just used for sending messages, but also for receiving them. Having that in mind, you want your new mailbox to get some replies. You can send some emails from your other addresses to that new one. And reply to them, too.

If your friends reply to you from their addresses hosted by various email service providers, that’s even better. Reply back to their replies - this is not mandatory but should be. In a nutshell, the key is to just run some regular conversations via email using the newly set up email address before you start using it for automated cold email campaigns.

Take a few weeks to carry out the manual warm-up before you start using any kind of email sending automation. Time really matters. If you rush things out, you may ruin your reputation as a sender.

Once you’ve done with the manual warm-up, you can set up a first automated test campaign in Autoklose. You won’t need more than 10-20 trusted email addresses to make this happen. Similar to manual sending, make sure the addresses are valid – ideally, they should be some addresses of your friends and colleagues so that you can ask them to reply to you.

And one more thing: don’t get impatient once you hit ‘Start a campaign’ in Autoklose. The emails need time to get sent because they are not sent all at once. Autoklose runs on the feature called Smart Send- it calculates a lot of different variables to make the sending as natural as possible. Sending emails in a bulk would negatively affect your deliverability rates in the long run. If you try to pack too many messages into one window - which is almost always the case with sending in bulk, your mailbox activity will be considered as highly suspicious. It’s like you don’t send anything, and suddenly you want to send too many messages.

And don’t go from 20 emails/day straight to 500 emails/day. Email providers use filters that allow them to assess the volume of email going out from your mailbox. A radical increase in the sending volume is something that alarms their anti-spam filters.

In fact, your campaigns should never include thousands of prospects. Keep them smaller but more targeted, customized, and personalized. Also, your follow-ups are  sent from the same email address, so keep that in mind in your sequence creation process. 

If your mailbox tries to push numerous messages at certain times and is totally inactive at other times, this may be treated as an anomaly by your email service provider. Such anomalies may be the reason for your provider to block your mailbox from sending anything.

Only after a well-performed warm-up, your email address will be ready to send cold email campaigns fluently without any disturbances. Of course, the quality of your messages and your prospect base, the delivery time settings, and the volume of your campaigns are the factors that you’ll need to take care of continually and keep an eye on all the time – not just during the warm-up period.
You must be wondering why this is so.
The reason is that the activity of your mailbox is constantly monitored by your email service provider. If you try to rush things or take some shortcuts, you may be punished with a poor sender reputation and subsequently poor deliverability.

So, take your time to warm up your email address and create a personalized campaign that you will be able to send smoothly with confidence that it will get into your prospects’ inboxes.

Also, if your email domain is new too, read this article on how to warm it up and build a good reputation. 

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If you have any questions do not hesitate to initiate a live chat.
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Your autoklose.com team!

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