When your organization starts using a new IP address for sending emails, recipient email servers need time to recognize and trust you as a sender. This period, known as IP warming, involves gradually increasing your email-sending volume over the first four to six weeks. This approach signals to internet service providers (ISPs) that your new IP address is a reliable source, ensuring your emails are delivered safely to recipients’ inboxes.
IP warming is a critical step for ensuring optimal deliverability in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It’s particularly important if you’ve purchased a dedicated IP address through the Sender Authentication Package (SAP), which provides your org with its own IP address. However, dedicated IPs can also be purchased separately from SAP, making IP warming an essential best practice for any org adopting a new dedicated IP. In this article, we will cover some key tips that will help you run a successful IP warmup campaign.
IP Warming: A Quick Overview
When ISPs receive emails from a new IP address, they need time to validate your org’s reputation before providing full access to their inboxes. The ISP will assess your reputation based on:
- The volume of emails sent (gradual or steady increase)
- Authentication and authentication records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc.)
- Overall engagement with your emails
- Number of complaints
- Number of bounce rates
If you have purchased the dedicated IP address with or without the SAP, IP warming is essential for both the short and long-term health of your sender reputation.
Starting the IP Warmup
The maximum email volume during IP warming is not determined by your expected average emails but is instead set by individual ISPs. Each ISP has its own daily sending limits, which gradually increase over time – if your daily email volume is below the maximum threshold, you can maintain a steady level without exceeding it.
Consistency is also crucial – it is important to avoid irregular patterns, such as sending 500 emails on the first day and then sending 1,000 a week later. Aim for a consistent daily volume that is near the allowed maximum for at least 30 days to effectively “warm up” your IP and build trust with ISPs.
As a rule of thumb, start by sending a low volume of emails, starting with a smaller more active subscriber count, and then increase the volume over the next four to six weeks.
IP Warming Campaign Planning
It’s important to note that IP warming should not be treated as a separate marketing campaign solely for the purpose of warming the new IP. Instead, it should involve modifying your existing campaigns to spread out and segment email sends in a way that aligns with the IP warming process.
Creating a new campaign just for warming the IP could lead to issues with engagement, as the content will likely be considered irrelevant or undesirable.
However, doing this still requires meticulous planning and communication. Here are some key pointers to consider before adjusting existing campaigns for IP warmings.
1. Coordinate IP Warmings with Existing Email Campaigns
If the marketing team is sending emails through other automation platforms, the IP warming team should carefully coordinate a communication plan to avoid any conflict. While IP warming emails need to be sent consistently every day for approximately 30 days without skipping, this doesn’t mean they should conflict with existing campaigns.
One effective strategy is to segment the audience from the existing campaigns and remove the subscribers targeted for the IP warmup. These subscribers should then receive the same message at the same time, but through a new IP – ensuring the warming process progresses smoothly.
Additionally, this process assumes a brand-new instance and does not account for any additional IPs added to an existing Marketing Cloud account.
2. Accounting for Holiday Seasons and Weekends
Make sure that new IP warming campaigns are not executed during busy holiday seasons, such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or the lead-up to Christmas.
There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, IP warmups can often coincide with busy seasons due to competition for inbox placement in high-demand periods. This means that ISPs often have to deal with a lot more requests around these periods, making it more difficult for them to spend time establishing trust with new IPs. To avoid potentially ending up in a large queue – or even in a SPAM folder – avoid busy periods.
Also, market communications during the holiday season often include time-sensitive campaigns, such as coupon codes or limited-time offers. As these campaigns require immediate delivery, they are not ideal for use in IP warming.
Alongside this, it’s best practice to avoid deploying IP warming campaigns on weekends – you are more likely to receive higher engagement during weekdays.
3. Avoid Overloading Subscribers
During the IP warmup process, it’s vital to avoid sending multiple emails for the new IP to the same subscriber within a short period.
While it’s common for subscribers to receive multiple emails from different campaigns in busy periods – such as Black Friday – sending too many emails from the new IP can negatively impact engagement; a critical component for building reputation.
Monitoring the IP Warming Process
As previously mentioned, IP warming takes between four to six weeks to send staggered emails to your engaged customers. This requires active monitoring to ensure any anomalies are handled immediately and that everything is going to plan.
An efficient approach to this is to segment your audience and send the same email in small batches over a few days. This allows you to gradually build sending volume while extending the use of each email. Once the initial segments are sent, existing campaigns can be adjusted to ramp up volume until the IP is fully warmed.
Also, multiple email metrics need to be monitored in the IP warming exercise, such as:
- Emails sends
- Email opens
- Email deliverability
- Email clicks
- Email spam complaints
- Email unsubscribes
- Email bounce rates
- Sender reputation
Now that we know all the metrics, we will explore a comprehensive list of built-in reports that you can use to monitor these metrics.
Emails Send Overview Report
This report serves as an overview that provides customers with high-level data points of the key metrics associated with your account (which are all listed above).
It provides a macro-level insight into the daily activities of your IP warmings campaign sends. As a best practice, regularly monitor for unexpected changes or anomalies in key metrics as these can signal potential issues in your campaign. With this high-level insight, you can dive deeper into specific reports – such as opens, unsubscribes, or bounces – to identify and address the root cause of any problems effectively.
The report can be run from the Analytics builder at the location: Analytics builder → Report → ‘Account Send Summary’.
You can schedule this report to be sent to you daily during your IP warming campaign. While this is useful if you want a quick 360-view of your data, there are certain ways you can gain a more in-depth understanding of your key metrics…
Sender Reputation Score Reports
The sender reputation score can be interpreted as a credit score that ISPs give your IP. This is vital to email deliverability and could ultimately decide whether your warming emails land in a spam folder, an inbox, or blocked as a server altogether.
As you are trying to build your reputation as an IP, this is a metric you should definitely prioritize. Websites such as Sender Score are the best way to retrieve this information and discover your reputation score quickly.
Email Send Detailed Report
This report provides granular insights into specific emails sent on each day of the IP warming exercise, making it especially useful for identifying issues with individual subscribers or analyzing engagement at a deeper level.
Unlike the Overview report – which focuses on high-level metrics – this report allows you to pinpoint patterns that are tied to specific emails or recipients.
To create this report, you can query the _sent data view using SQL in Automation Studio. The SQL query should join the day-wise IP warming data extension with sent data view, with the focus on subscribers included in the IP warming. This process provides records of opens and other key metrics for these subscribers.
Alternatively, for users without access to SQL, consider using Intelligence Reports. These tools provide detailed reporting capabilities without the need for SQL development, which offers a more user-friendly way to monitor the performance of your IP warming campaigns.
Email Open Report
Email open reports are a crucial metric during the IP warming process, as these emails are sent to highly engaged subscribers and should achieve higher open rates.
The desired open rate should align with the client’s historical performance, industry benchmarks, and the quality of email content. Sudden increases or decreases in open rates could signal potential issues within your campaign, so it’s essential to monitor this metric closely.
For most users, open-rate data can be easily accessed via the Tracking Tab in Salesforce Marketing Cloud or through Intelligence Reporting. Both provide user-friendly and detailed insights without the need for technical expertise.
For more advanced analysis, SQL queries can be used to extract this data from the __open data view in Automation Studio. The SQL query should join the IP warming day-wise data extension with the _open data view to isolate records for IP warming subscribers – allowing for precise tracking of engagement metrics during the warmup period.
If this method is chosen, the open rate automation should be scheduled daily for the whole IP warmup period.
Email Deliverability Report
It’s important to note that email delivery rate and email deliverability are two completely different metrics that serve different purposes.
On one hand, email delivery rates are emails that have been accepted by the ISP. On the other hand, email deliverability means the campaign has been sent to the IS – not yet accepted or rejected.
For marketers, email deliverability is the more critical metric; especially during the IP warming process. Since a new IP is being used, it’s essential to build trust with ISPs to ensure emails are placed in inboxes. Poor deliverability – where emails are flagged as spam – can undermine the warming process and hurt the reputation of the new IP.
Email deliverability is influenced by a variety of metrics that can be analyzed using different reports in Marketing Cloud. Some of these valuable insights include:
- Email Performance by Domain: This report provides detailed data on open rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribe rates for each domain, such as Yahoo, Gmail, and Outlook. Comparing these metrics across domains will help address issues that are specific to each ISP.
- Subscriber Engagement: This report highlights subscriber-level engagement. It offers insights into how individual recipients are interacting with your emails.
- Spam Complaints Over Time: This report identifies the top domains receiving spam complaints from your email sends.
Unsubscribes Report
Unsubscribes occur when recipients opt out of receiving your emails. While this is part and parcel of email marketing, a high unsubscribe rate can negatively affect your IP’s reputation.
ISPs are likely to interpret frequent unsubscribes as a signal that your domain may not be sending valuable or relevant content. This, in turn, can harm deliverability by reducing trust in your IP. To mitigate this, monitor your unsubscribe rates closely and address any spikes to protect your campaign performance.
Similarly to the email open report, if you want more detailed tracking, you have two options – an easy-to-use interface such as Tracking Tab or Intelligence Reporting in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, or the more complex SQL-based approach.
For SQL, you can query the _unsubscribe data view in the Automation Studio. The SQL query should join the IP warming day-wise data extension with the _unsubscribe data view to isolate unsubscribe records for warming subscribers. Just like an email open report, these should be scheduled daily during your campaign.
Bounce Reports
Bounce reports are a critical component of monitoring during the IP warming process, providing insights into emails rejected by ISPs due to bounce issues – impacting IP reputation.
There are a number of different types of bounces, such as hard bounces, soft bounces, technical bounces, and block bounces. Among these, hard bounces are particularly harmful, as they signal permanent delivery failure and taint your campaign.
As we’ve discussed earlier, extracting this data can be done using user-friendly tools like Tracking Tab or Intelligence Reporting, or with a more hands-on approach, using SQL. For SQL enthusiasts, you can query the _bounce data view by joining it with the IP warming day-wise data extension to isolate bounce records, and – you guessed it – should be scheduled daily!
With these detailed reports and insights in hand, you can monitor your IP warming progress closely and effectively – but what happens when issues like spam complaints or deliverability challenges arise? Let’s look at how to manage and mitigate these problems for specific domains, such as Yahoo, Google, and Outlook, during a campaign.
Managing Issues With Domains During IP Warming
Let’s assume that your IP warming is currently in week two, and your team is monitoring the situation daily with the help of the above-mentioned reports or extract options.
If, by this point, you encounter spam complaints that are hampering your deliverability for a specific domain, then here are the steps that you should take to mitigate these problems and salvage your IP reputation. Since each domain has its own policies and expectations, the steps to resolve spam-related problems will vary depending on the ISP.
Spam complaints occur when recipients manually mark your emails as spam after they have been delivered to their primary inbox. High rates of spam complaints can damage IP reputation, and signal that your emails are unwanted.
It’s unlikely that an ISP will give you comprehensive feedback as to why your emails have been bounced, blocked, or moved to spam, so it’s important to follow the best practices of deliverability to mitigate the situation.
Gmail Domain
Unfortunately, Google does not offer a direct mechanism for resolving spam complaint issues with representatives. But, there are steps you can take to improve resolution chances:
- Halting IP Warming for Gmail: If spam complaints are particularly high for Gmail users, consider pausing the IP warmup process for this domain for approximately 20 days to avoid further damage to your reputation.
- Resolving Spam Folder Placement: If emails are being flagged as spam, you can submit a request for reconsideration by filling out Google’s Bulk Sender Contact Form. For additional details, refer to the official Email Sender Guidelines.
Note: While Google may review your request, there’s no guarantee they will update their spam filter policies. Adhering to Google’s best practices – such as proper authentication, maintaining a clean email list, and ensuring your content is relevant – is essential to reduce spam complaints and improve deliverability over time.
Yahoo Domain
Yahoo is another key domain to monitor during your IP warming process. If you notice a spike in spam complaints from Yahoo users, take the following steps to address the issue:
- Raise a Support Ticket with Yahoo: If spam complaints continue, consider raising a support ticket on the Yahoo support page. Be as detailed as possible in your request – including specifics about your email practices and the steps you’ve taken to resolve them.
- Follow Yahoo’s Best Practices: Similar to Google, Yahoo will have their own email deliverability best practices. This will be crucial to minimizing spam complaints and improving sender reputation. Check their guidelines here.
- Check for Blacklist Inclusion: Although this is more relevant for block bounces, Yahoo often uses Spamhaus to blacklist certain IPs. These complaints don’t directly result in blacklisting by Spamhaus, but can indirectly contribute if they lead ISPs to report your IP or domain to Spamhaus for suspected spamming activity.
Outlook or Hotmail Domain
Microsoft consumer emails include hotmail.com, outlook.com, and live.com. Managing spam complaints for these can be especially challenging compared to other ISPs. To improve deliverability and reduce spam complaints:
- Enroll in the Junk Mail Reporting Program (JMRP): Register your IPs with the JMRP to receive feedback on spam complaints directly from Microsoft users. The information should help you identify problems in your campaigns to help reduce complaints. You can find more details about JMRP here.
- Submit a Support Request: If spam complaints persist, fill out a support request form from Microsoft that includes your email practices and relevant steps taken to address complaints.
- Follow Microsoft’s Best Practices: Once again, understanding the best practices of your domains is the best way forward, and should hopefully help you avoid these issues altogether. Visit their official guidelines here.
Summary
IP warmings are a mandatory step towards successful email campaigns. Marketers need to make sure that this exercise is conducted with effective monitoring and mitigating risks arising due to email deliverability issues.
By following the above reports, marketers can detect any anomaly across their email sends and then take necessary actions to mitigate the issue. Hopefully, you now know how to resolve domain-specific deliverability issues and use some key practices to go with it!
A big thank you to Gregory Gifford, whose expertise in IP Warmings helped bring this article together.