Articles on: Deliverability

How to Warm up your Sending

Warming up your sending infrastructure is critical whenever you make changes to your DNS records, such as after setting up a dedicated sending domain or switching to a new email service provider. This teaches inbox providers that you are a "good" sender and improves your sender reputation.

The fundamental procedure is as follows:

Step 1. Start using high engagement email workflows



Three types of flows that typically receive a lot of attention are:

Abandoned cart workflow
Welcome email series
Abandoned product reminder

I recommend you start with these workflows the day you begin using a dedicated sending domain and running them about 3 -7 days before sending a new campaign, depending on your account's sending volume.

Turn off any win back or re-engagement flows you normally send during the first few weeks of warm-up. Also, avoid sending campaigns with more than 10,000 recipients in the first week. Maintaining high engagement is critical, and you do not want lower-performing workflows or campaigns to harm your sender reputation.

You may begin campaign sending after your first week of high engagement with these flows. Maintain high engagement with engaged segments and sending schedules while monitoring deliverability.

Step 2. Migrate previous engagement data



If you're warming up your infrastructure by switching from another email service provider (ESP) to AVADA Marketing Automation, it's critical to consider previous engagement data so that you can accurately build engaged segments.

AVADA has a migration guide for Mailchimp users to help with the import of contact data , please see the guide below.

How to sync contacts from Mailchimp to AVADA?


Step 3. Begin sending campaigns to engaged segments



After a week of having your high engagement flows live and ensuring that you have accurate engagement data in your account, you can begin sending campaigns to engaged segments on a regular basis.

Remember that your new sending domain is a blank slate, so your first sends will have a significant impact on your reputation. Sending to engaged segments on a regular basis helps avoid one-time email sends that perform poorly and can harm your deliverability.

If you're just getting started with AVADA Marketing Automation, you can create these engaged segments using historical engagement data from previous platforms. Use your AVADA engagement data if you've been using the app for a while but have just migrated to a dedicated sending infrastructure.

After your first send, aim for open rates of 20% or higher, unsubscribe rates of less than 0.2 percent, and spam complaint rates less than 0.08 percent. Keep in mind that these specific numbers differ depending on the sender.

For the first campaign, I recommend you to keep the number of recipients not over 20,000. This number will grow dynamically as you have more subscribers or recipients over time.

To help, we have some preset segments on engaged audience for you to use. You can find these presets by clicking on Audiences -> Presets.

Preset engaged segments





Most engaged subscribers


This preset contains of email subscribers whose last activity occurred in the last 30 days. For your first campaign with this segment, aim for an open rat of over 30%.

Consider the following if your 30-day engagement segment yields a big number of result:

Make your segment's criteria tighter
For example, reducing a 30-day engaged segment to a 14-day engaged segment will result in a smaller number of recipients.

Use smart sending time
This lets you send X number of emails in Y number of hours. For example, if you have 10,000 recipients in this segment and want to send 1000 emails each hour, send to 10% of them instead of all at once, and spread out your sending across time.

Take a sample of the engaged segment at random.
Regardless of the size of your segment, using a random sample will allow you to send the necessary number of campaigns.

You can build a similar segment for subsequent messages and reduce the engagement threshold to 60 or 90 days as long as you receive open rates above 20%.

Active email subscribers


This preset contains of email subscribers whose last activity occurred in the last 90 days. If you feel like you can broaden your list of engaged audience, this is a segment to try out.

Again, make sure to have an open rate of 20% or higher. If you fail to achieve this number, you can tighten your timeline to find the ideal segment.

To monitor your performance during warming up your sending infrastructure, remember to review analytics and monitor campaigns regularly to find workflows that can inspire more actions from subscribers.

Updated on: 06/08/2021

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