How to Warm up Your IP Address for Emailing with Tencent Cloud’s Simple Email Service

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We’ve previously explored how to optimize the open rate of your marketing email last time. Let’s examine IP warm-up – a key step for email marketing today.
1. Why is IP warm-up necessary
Warm-up is often talked about in the email industry. It is the warming-up of the sender's IP and domain name, a common practice of starting with a small number of emails before starting bulk emailing. The aim is to introduce your sending practices to ISPs (such as Gmail, Hotmail, and QQ Mail) so that they will recognize your sending quality, which helps you build a positive reputation for your domain name and IP.

If your domain name and IP are not warmed up or have never or barely been used to send emails, sending bulk emails through them will be considered abnormal by the ISP; more often than not, your emails will end up in spam. Therefore, make sure that your IP is warmed up. As long as your IP is trusted by the ISP, you can maintain your reputation even if the number of sent messages greatly fluctuates.

2. How to warm up your IP
Step 1. Set up your identity verification
Before the warm-up, make sure that you have performed SPF, DKIM, MX, and DMARC validation. For more information, visit https://www.tencentcloud.com/document/product/1084/40180. The ISP will have your emails delivered only after the validation.

Step 2. Select your recipients during the warm-up
Warming up an IP is to email a few addresses through the IP and slowly increase the number of emails. It is important that you select the right recipients. Keep a clean list of recipients; that is, avoid emailing invalid addresses. Also, keep the list active, so as to get a good open rate and click rate.

Step 3. Send proper content
Be formal in your content and do not muddle through your warm-up with just an image or a few sentences. The whole warm-up process should be real or real-world-like. For triggered domain names, use content such as [welcome], [notification], and [e-commerce transaction] to guide user interactions (such as clicking links and replying to the email). For bulk emailing domain names, formulate a delicate marketing template, so that the content is less likely to be identified as spam.

Step 4. Determine the send volume and frequency
The warm-up usually takes about a month. Generally speaking, you can start with 1,000–2,000 emails per IP per day and slowly increase the volume. Make sure that the numbers of emails from different ISPs are even as much as possible. Pay attention to the email feedback. The better the feedback, the looser the requirements of ISPs, and the higher the number of emails that can be sent.
During the warm-up, keep a close eye on the delivery, bounce, and spam folder. Stop sending emails as soon as they are found to be blocked and continue the sending of a smaller number of emails the next day.

Stay tuned for our next topic with best practice sharing on marketing email design!