What is List Warming?
List warming is a term that is often used interchangeably with IP warming in the email marketing space.
List warming is the practice of strategically sending your emails for two purposes:
- gradually re-engage your email list
- to build a positive sending reputation with your email service provider
Re-Engaging Your Subscribers with List Warming
There are a number of reasons why you may need to re-engage your email list.
Perhaps email marketing isn’t a big part of your marketing strategy, or maybe your business is seasonal and you have no reason to send marketing emails in your off-season.
Regardless of the reason, you will need to re-engage your email list by slowly re-warming your list.
Sender Reputation: Why You Should Care About List Warming
Your sending reputation directly effects your email deliverability.
If you have a poor sending reputation, more of your emails will go straight to spam folders, which means fewer people will open your emails, which wastes your time and effort with email marketing.
There are several reasons to build your sending reputation, even if you don’t have a bad one:
- you recently moved your email server to a new IP address
- you have switched to a new domain name
- you have switched to a new email service provider
In all of the above scenarios, you will need to go through a period of list warming.
How to Warm Your List: General List Warming Procedure
There are 4 main steps in list warming:
- Preparation: ensure your list is cleaned, and that you have proper procedures for user consent and list hygiene. Prepare your basic email automations, which will passively help with list warming for new subscribers. Also set up your basic segments, and monitor all emails during your list warming period.
- Divide and conquer: this is where you broadcast emails to small portions of your list
- Expand: gradually increasing the volume of emails you send until you’ve reached your entire list size (or your engaged segment) in a single broadcast
List Warming Step 1: Preparation
This is easily the longest — yet most important — part of list warming.
Before you start sending warming broadcasts, you should ensure that your main email automations are set up and running. These will passively send emails over time, and is a fantastic vehicle for list warming.
You should also ensure that you have your basic segments set up, most important of all is your engaged segment, which is the cornerstone of list warming. The list warming process is complete when you’re able to email your entire engaged segment without any issues.
Learn more about building an engaged segment.
Besides your engaged segment, you should also build four exclusion segments:
- anyone who has bounced your emails 3 or more times
- anyone who has ever failed to receive your emails
- anyone who has ever spam filtered your emails
- anyone who has ever unsubscribed from your emails (assuming your ESP doesn’t exclude or suppress them automatically)
Learn more about these deliverability segments.
Lastly, ensure that you are constantly monitoring your email metrics during the list warming process, especially for deliverability metrics.
Anytime you notice a spike in spam reports, failed deliveries or unsubscribes, be sure to lower your email sending volume and exclude these email addresses from future broadcasts.
List Warming Step 2: Divide & Conquer
Divide your entire list into smaller sublists, each containing 10-25% of your total list size.
During this step of the list warming process, your goal is to broadcast emails to no more than one of these sublists everyday, with your best quality content.
Do NOT email your entire list right away, as large spikes in email volume is often flagged as spammy behaviour, and will ruin your sending reputation.
List Warming Step 3: Expand
As you continue to send your email broadcasts, you may gradually increase your sending volume. For example, if you’ve divided your email list into 10% sublists, you can expand to 20% sublists per broadcast.
Just be sure to monitor your deliverability — if you’re noticing an unusal amount of deliverability issues, you’ve expanded too much (e.g. reduce from 20% per broadcast to 15% sublists).
As you’re expanding your sending volume, take note of your engaged segment size. You’ll have completed your list warming when you’re able to email your entire engaged segment without any abnormal failed deliveries and spam reports.
Concluding Notes
List warming in email marketing also refers to IP warming, which is the process of emailing small portions of your list to build your sending reputation, as you expand your email volume until you can safely email your engaged segment.
If you experience any abnormalities during your list warming period, such as:
- list warming taking too long
- abnormal deliverability issues
- any other problems
feel free to reach out to us for a free consultation!