Deliverability and the Warming Period
Email is really not that different from regular mail. You can put the mail in the mailbox, but there are a lot of factors that come into play before it gets to where you want it to go. You can make sure the letter has the right amount of postage, the sender and return addresses are correct, envelope sealed, etc. You have to rely on the postal system, the postal worker, even the mailbox of the person you’re sending to. Just don’t lick the email please.
This article provides an overview of deliverability, sender reputation, and what you need to consider during your warming period. We’re here to help guide you through this process, so if you have any questions don't hesitate to reach out.
Warming Period Overview
Anytime you begin sending from a new email platform, you will be sending using new to you IP address. Our partner platform ActiveCampaign has a pool of pre-warmed sending IPs that your emails will be sent from, but because your domain has not sent from them before you’ll still need to go through a warming period. If you are using a dedicated IP, there is an even longer warming period.
The goal of the warming period is to confirm and reassure email providers that you are you and that the people you are sending to want your content. If you have a high number of bounces, unsubscribes, or spam complaints, that works against you.
If you suddenly start sending emails from a different IP, especially to a large number of contacts or with poor list hygiene, the odds are very high that it will hurt your sender reputation and cause long term deliverability issues. You could get blacklisted or even kicked off the platform if not managed correctly. We've worked with organizations who made choices like that in the past and it's not easy to recover from.
You want to do everything you can to reduce the odds of contacts reporting your initial campaigns as SPAM, unsubscribing, bouncing, or taking no action at all during the warming period. This is always true, but more so during the warming period. Especially in the first half of your warming period you want to see a very high open and click through rate. These initial email campaigns should be the kind where the metrics are so good you print them out and hang them on your refrigerator.
Monitoring your contacts' engagement and taking steps to reduce non-engaged contacts should be something you are always doing, even outside of the warming period.
Warming Period Plan
Our general recommendation is to start slow, low, and going to your show. Not just because it rhymes, but because it’s the perfect content for a warming period. Pre-show or pre-visit reminders go to a relatively small group of patrons who are going to engage with the content. They just purchased tickets or committed their time, so they are going to engage with content related to that. Same goes for high level members, subscribers, or donors.
Your total list size, the number of contacts you send to each day, how quickly you’re sending, which email providers you’re sending to, the metrics for each send…should all be factored into your warming period. It might sound like a lot, but we’ve broken out our typical recommendation below. The exact numbers will vary depending on your total list size, so we will make sure you have a plan that fits your organization.
Day 1: Send to no more than 2,000 highly-engaged contacts
Day 2: Send to a new group of no more than 3,000 highly-engaged contacts
Day 3: Send to a new group of no more than 5,000 highly-engaged contacts
Day 4: Send to a new group of no more than 8,000 highly-engaged contacts
Day 5: Send to a new group of no more than 10,000 highly-engaged contacts
This is not the number of email campaigns you can send out, but the number of unique contacts you should be sending to. This can be broken up across multiple campaigns, just stick to the total unique email addresses sent to in a 24 hour period.
If all is going well, at about day 6 you can begin sending to engaged contacts. These should be contacts that have a relationship with your organization, but you’re not super close with like the highly-engaged folks from the first few days. Maybe they’ve purchased or donated in the last year, attended, or visited recently. Your orgnaization might go faster or slower depending on your unique situation, but an example of this would look like...
Day 6: Send to no more than 10,000 engaged contacts
Day 7: Send to a group of no more than 13,000 engaged contacts
Day 8: Send to a new group of no more than 15,000 engaged contacts
Day 9: Send to a new group of no more than 18,000 engaged contacts
Day 10: Send to a new group of no more than 20,000 engaged contacts
At this point, assuming you are seeing low bounce/unsubscribe/spam rates and good opens/clicks, you can start moving forward by beginning to slowly incorporate contacts who may have subscribed to one of your lists, but do not have any transaction history in Tessitura.
Monitoring your Metrics
When reviewing the reporting, these are the metrics to keep an eye on. No matter how good the opens and clicks are, if any of the three below are high, you’re likely to encounter issues.
Bounce: 0.5% - 1% is considered normal. Anything above 1% is cause for concern.
Unsubscribe: This should be lower than 2%. While not idea, unsubscribes are much better than spam complaints.
Complaints: The industry acceptable standard spam complaint rate is anything less than 0.1%, or 1 complaint for every 1,000 sent messages. Anything above this level is considered high.
If you do experience deliverability problems during your warming period, here's what you can do:
- Pause sending and go back to the previous send’s volume. This will allow spam filters to adjust to the new IP.
- Stop sending to mailbox providers that throttled your sends. Scale back sends to this provider until the issue is resolved.
- Ensure that you have not sent to a suppressed list, the full list, or a large amount of un-engaged contacts.
- If you have a high bounce rate, we highly recommend using a tool like Emailable or another verification tool to weed out invalid email addresses before you send.
- If you have a high unsubscribe or spam rate, make sure that the kind of content you are providing matches what the contacts signed up for, that you are providing patrons with the ability to adjust preferences over time, and that you are not sending either to frequently or too infrequently.
- Reach out to us at help@prospect2.com for guidance
Looking for more resources? Here are a few helpful articles form our partner platform ActiveCampaign!
Deliverability tips for content
Tools for monitoring deliverability