How Email Warmup Improves Deliverability and Keeps You Out of Spam!

You’ve spent hours crafting the perfect email campaign—personalized subject lines, a compelling message, and a strong call to action. 

You hit send, excited for your leads to engage… but then nothing happens.

 No opens, no clicks, no replies 🫨

You start wondering: Where did it all go wrong?

The answer might not lie in your content —it could be that your emails are getting stuck in spam folders. 

Well, don’t get sad!

Here’s the good news: Email warm-up can help your emails reach inboxes instead of junk folders. 

In this post, we’ll explore 

• How warming up your email account helps you to improve email deliverability.
• Tried & Tested email warm-up strategies
• And finally, the best email warm-up tool that can help you to maximize email deliverability at scale

Let’s jump in!

What Is Email Warmup?

Email warmup is a strategic process of improving the email deliverability of new (or long-inactive) email accounts. 

The process includes sending, engaging, and gradually increasing the sending volume of emails to win the trust of the ESPs. 

You can read more about email warm-up in this Guide 

How Can Warm-Up Improve Email Deliverability?

Email warm-up is important for cold email outreach.

Only with the properly “warmed up” email accounts you can increase the odds of your messages getting delivered directly to your recipients’ inboxes. 

Here is how warm-up improves email deliverability →

1. Builds Trust with ESPs
2. Prevents Emails From Landing in the Spam Folder
3. Improves Engagement Metrics
4. Boosts Domain and IP Reputation
5. Increases Sending Limits Without Triggering Spam Filters

1. Builds Trust with ESPs

When it comes to email deliverability, the most critical aspect is winning the trust of your ESP. 

Think of the ESP as the person who delivers your post but with a different approach! The mailman is allowed to decide whether your post/email is important.

If this is the case, the #1 thing you should prioritize is winning the trust of your ESP, right?

And that’s exactly what email warmup does! 

By establishing regular email communication with email accounts that have a high sender reputation, email warmup tells the ESP that you’re sending relevant, engaging, and safe email communication to your recipients.

2. Prevents Emails From Landing in the Spam Folder

Another way email warm-up improves deliverability is that your emails will land in the inbox of your recipients rather than the spam box. 

When your ESP sees that recipients are taking your emails out of their spam folders, it will gradually learn that your emails might be relevant to the recipients!

The result? 

It will direct your emails to the inboxes of your recipients rather than directing them to a promotion or spam folder.

3. Improves Engagement Metrics

Warming up your email account can also help you to improve your deliverability. 

When you gradually increase your sending volume, email providers start trusting you, ensuring your emails land in the inbox, not the spam folder.

 This leads to an increase in your engagement rates because your emails are actually being seen. 

In short, a proper email warm-up means improved email deliverability and stronger engagement. 

4. Boosts Domain and IP Reputation

Email warmup doesn’t just improve your email sender’s reputation. 

In fact, it also helps you to build domain and IP reputation. 

Here’s how it works:

Think of your domain as a bank and your email accounts as individual accounts within it. Similarly, think of your domain reputation as the bank’s credit rating and the sender’s reputation as the credit rating of individual accounts.

Following this logic, if the credit rating of all your accounts increases, it will have a direct impact on the credit rating of the bank as a whole, right?

And that’s how it works with domain reputation as well! As and when you warm up individual email accounts, it will also improve your domain reputation…

Plus, if you’re using a dedicated IP address to send email communication, an improvement in the domain and sender reputation will also enhance the IP reputation!

5. Increases Sending Limits Without Triggering Spam Filters

When you warm up your email accounts to improve email deliverability, you’re slowly increasing your sending volume, which helps avoid looking suspicious to email providers.

Because if you send too many emails too quickly, they might flag you as spam. 

Therefore, gradually ramping up your sends builds trust with these providers, allowing you to increase your sending limits without triggering spam filters. 

7 Strategies for Successful Email Warm-Up

Email Warm-Up is Important to improve email deliverability. 

Agreed! 

But how do you get the most out of it? 

Well, below, you’ll find the 8 tried and tested email warmup strategies that will help you improve email deliverability:

1. Authenticate Your Emails With SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
2. Use a Dedicated IP Address
3. Gradually Increase the Email Volume
4. Avoid Using Spammy Words
5. Clean Your Email List
6. Personalize the Email Content
7. Track Key Deliverability Metrics

1. Authenticate Your Emails With SPF, DKIM, and DMARC

There’s one small step that you must complete before starting your email warmup campaign-  Set up email authentication protocols for your email account.

If you want to achieve high email deliverability, you might want to set up  these three important protocols:

• SPF ( Sender Policy Framework)
• DKIM (Domain-Keys Identified Messages)
• DMARC ( Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance)

How Do Authentication Protocols Improve Email Deliverability?

These authentication protocols help ESP to verify that the email is actually coming from a trusted sender and not a spammer or hacker.

2. Use a Dedicated IP Address

An IP address is your ticket to the internet. It’s how an ISP identifies you as an internet user.

Even if you’re not engaging in any harmful activity, your mere association with an IP address that has a poor reputation can reduce your email deliverability!

The solution? 

Switch to a dedicated IP address!

There are three simple ways to do so. You can:

• Approach your existing ISP
• Contact a hosting provider like Hostinger
• Subscribe to a VPN service like NordVPM

How Does a Dedicated IP Address Improve Email Deliverability?

A dedicated IP address can improve your email deliverability in two ways. 

• First, it ensures that you don’t face adverse consequences for the malicious activities of other users. 
• Second, and more importantly, it allows you to dictate how your IP address will be used. 

3. Gradually Increase the Email Volume

The secret to successful email warmup lies in gradually increasing the number of emails you’re sending.

Think about it: if you start sending hundreds of emails with a new email account, the ESP will suspect that you’re not using email communication ethically. 

And this will definitely put you on the ESP’s spam radar.

But there’s a simple workaround to this problem:

• Start by sending 10-20 emails/day every day for the first week.
• In the second week, increase the sending frequency to 20-40 emails/day.
• In the third and fourth weeks, you can increase it even further to around 50 emails.

This way, the ESP will understand that you’re gradually making personal connections with your recipients by sending relevant communications.

How Can Gradually Increasing Your Email Volume Increase Email Deliverability?

One way ESPs protect their users from harmful or irrelevant communication is by scanning unusual sending activities. 

And if the ESP notices a sudden spike in sending frequency from a new email account the spam filters will be highly alert to any emails you send.

Whereas if you gradually increase the frequency of emails you send it will keep you off from the radar of ESPs’s spam filters. 

4. Avoid Using Spammy Words

If you go to your spam folder, you’ll notice that a lot of the emails there are using a set of words like:

• Best Deal
• You’re a Winner
• Special Offer
• Buy/Book/Claim

These are spammy words! They trigger the spam filters of the ESPs. 

How Can Avoiding Spammy Words During Email Warmup Improve Email Deliverability?

Avoiding spammy words can help you improve email deliverability by not sending alarming signals to the ESPs. 

5. Clean Your Email List

I’ve often noticed that people buy email lists from unverified sources for email warmups. 

And I’m not at all surprised when such email warmups fail to achieve their primary purpose: a high sender reputation.

Trust me: if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that bounce rates will hurt your email deliverability like nothing else.

Now, there are two very simple solutions to this problem:

• Only purchase email lists from verified B2B data vendors
• Verify your existing email lists 

Both of these methods will help you minimize hard bounces during email warmups.

How can clean email lists improve email deliverability?

A clean email list will 

• Minimize bounce rate 
• Protect your sender’s reputation 

In short, it will ensure that all your other email warmup efforts are not being hurt by poor email list hygiene!

6. Personalize the Email Content

When it comes to achieving a high engagement rate during the email warmup phase, email personalization is your best bet!

Think about it this way: if you’re emailing your colleagues, friends, or family members, there’s a high chance they’ll revert back to you. 

However, the moment you try to reach industry professionals in your network, you’ll need to do something more. And that’s where personalization is important.

Imagine sending an email like this:

Now compare this with an alternative:

If you’re the recipient of both these emails, which one are you more likely to reply to? 

Second one! Right?

How Can Personalized Emails During Email Warmup Improve Email Deliverability?

There’s a very simple reason why personalization can improve email deliverability right from the warmup phase:

A warm, personalized email is much more likely to get a reply, whereas impersonal emails, on the other hand, will get ignored! 

7. Track Key Deliverability Metrics

Throughout this blog, one thing we’ve consistently highlighted is the importance of the sender’s reputation. 

But how can you measure your sender’s reputation? 

Here’s how:

In my experience, there are several tools that help you understand your sender reputation through key deliverability metrics such as:

• Spam rate
• Bounce rate
• Inbox placement rate
• Clickthrough rate
• Unsubscribe rate

Personally, I recommend using Google’s Postmaster Tools.

It’s a free-to-use platform that offers a visual understanding of key deliverability metrics and also provides an analysis of your sender’s reputation.

How Can Measuring Key Metrics During Email Warmup Improve Email Deliverability?

As we’ve seen, the single most important aim of email warmup is to improve your email account’s sender reputation.

So, if you don’t monitor your sender reputation throughout the email warmup campaign, you’ll not be able to understand whether your campaign is succeeding.

Manual Vs. Automated Email Warm-Up Techniques

Now that we’ve gone through a detailed list of the best strategies for email warmup, let’s take a look at how the process works. 

There are two ways of warming up email accounts:

1. Manual Email Warm-Up
2. Automated Email Warm-Up

1. Manual Email Warm-Up

You can manually warm up your email account by following all the strategies we’ve discussed in the previous section. To recount them briefly, you need to follow only five simple steps:

• Authenticate your email account by setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC protocols.
• Start your warmup by sending a small number of emails every day to accounts with a high sender reputation.
• Slowly increase the number of emails you’re sending to increase your sender reputation.
• Use engaging, personalized content to increase the reply rate.
• Keep tracking your deliverability metrics through Google’s Postmaster Tools.

And that’s it! 

You should start seeing the results of your warmup in 4-6 weeks.

Now, a manual email warmup might work out if you only have 1 email account. 

However, even then, sending 10-50 personalized and engaging emails every single day for 4 weeks?

That might get exhausting!

And if you have more email accounts…well, you get the idea!

Manual email warmup might be free, but it’ll cost in terms of time and effort.

2. Automated Email Warm-Up

With automated email warmup, you can use an email warmup tool that does all the heavy lifting for you. All you need to do is connect your email accounts with the tool, and it’ll take care of everything else. It will:

• Send a specified number of emails to accounts with a high sender reputation
• Open your emails from the recipient account, reply to them, and mark them as important
• Gradually ramp up the sender frequency to increase sending limits
• Use personalized copies and trusted email accounts in its email network

Sounds like a breeze compared to a manual warmup doesn’t it?

Well, that’s because it is! And if you’re wondering which email warmup tool you should use, I’ve got a great recommendation for you:

TrulyInbox

TrulyInbox is a simple and effective email warmup platform.

It helps you warm up your email accounts by establishing human-like email-sending patterns and conversational threads with highly reputed accounts in its network.

TrulyInbox puts you in charge of all the key details of your email warmup without having to do any of the work. So, you can specify:

• The number of emails you want to send
• The number of replies you want to receive
• The rate at which you want to increase the number of emails

It also works seamlessly with all top ESPs and even allows you to monitor key deliverability metrics through a personalized dashboard.

And the best part about TrulyInbox? 

You can connect an unlimited number of email accounts at no extra charge! All you need is a paid subscription, and you can warm up as many emails as you need.

And if you want to take it for a test drive, TrulyInbox also offers a forever-free plan…

Ready to Warm up Your Emails?

Through this blog, we’ve discussed how email warm-up improves deliverability and how you can maximize your efforts.

Hence, don’t skip the email warm-up, as it will help you achieve maximum inbox placement! 

Sign up on TrulyInbox and start warming up your email accounts. 

However, there’s one important thing to remember:

Email warm-up is not a one-time job! It’s an ongoing process. Even if you’ve warmed up your email accounts for 4-5 weeks, make sure to continue the warm-up process regularly.

FAQs: Improve Email Deliverability

1. How can you improve email deliverability?

Well, the best way to improve email deliverability is to use an email warmup tool for automated warmup.

It’ll help you track your sender reputation and improve your inbox placement rate within 4-6 weeks.

2. Which strategy will improve email deliverability?

To be honest the best strategy that will improve email deliverability is warming up your emails through an email warmup tool.

It’ll help you create human-like conversation threads with highly reputed email accounts and win the trust of ESPs.

3. How can you increase your email deliverability rate?

The best way to increase your email deliverability rate is to keep warming up your email account. This is especially important if you’re using cold email outreach extensively for lead generation because if your sender’s reputation decreases, your inbox placement will decrease. 

4. What factors hurt email deliverability?

These are the 5 main factors that can hurt email deliverability:

• Using unauthenticated email accounts to send emails
• Sending emails to unverified email accounts
• Using spammy content in your emails
• Violating the ESP’s sending limits
• Using a shared IP address