Warming Sending Infrastructure for Hot Sender Scores and Open Rates
So you just set up your brand new Email Sending Provider (ESP) and you’re excited to start sending out your beautiful emails and interacting with your audiences. But rushing and sending out mass emails without taking into consideration your open rate or audience engagement will end up doing more harm than good.
Warming your sending infrastructure is essential for maintaining a good sender score and keeping you out of the spam folder. Warming your sending infrastructure consists of emailing only the most highly engaged portion of your audience and then gradually slowly expanding to your broader audience. If you have not set up your custom sending domain (by updating your DNS record), you’re likely to be sending emails from a shared IP. This is normally the case if you’re using default settings in Mailchimp or Klaviyo. These ESPs will associate your account with a shared IP of senders who perform similarly. ESPs monitor sending behavior to look out for any suspicious behavior. These ESPS (like Mailchimp and Klaviyo) will group your sending account on a lower level if they deem your emailing behavior too “spammy,” your mail might not get delivered and your CRM costs can increase.
You want to make sure that you establish healthy sending habits and establish trust with ISPs. It’s important to never email someone who doesn’t want to hear from you, so this is what you can do to make sure it doesn’t happen. And keep in mind, it’s much easier to gradually build up a good sending reputation than to try to repair a poor reputation.
Start Slow & Go For Your Most Engaged
Slow and steady really does win the race when it comes to warming your sender account .You want to start by sending small volumes through your new ESP to people who actively engaged within the past 30 days. This will help keep you keep a decent open rate. You want to try to keep your open rate around 20% before you start expanding your reach to your broader audience. Once you are significantly above 20% for your open rate, you can expand your timeframe of when a customer was last engaged to 60 or 90 days. Remember that one of the best ways to improve your sender score is to keep your audience engaged.
Focus on Automation Flows
Another way to increase the likelihood that your audience will engage with your email is to focus on automation flows, which provide hyper-relevant and personalized content. For example, thank you emails are the most opened out of any automated flow. People love being thanked! We’ve seen some of our clients get amazing results through their thank you emails. After building out a “Thank You” flow recently for a client, they received several personalized notes from their customers thanking them in return for their products and sharing their story.
We’ve also seen a lot of success on abandoned cart flows. By adding dynamic blocks featuring the items in their carts and personalized elements like name tags, we’ve achieved impressive open rates. Our partners at Klaviyo have some easy-to-follow guides on how to add dynamic blocks and personalizations to emails.
You should also focus on expanding your list of recipients who join your newsletter and build flows to welcome these new customers. This guide from Justuno shows you the nest practices to create popups on your site to incentivize people to sign up for your newsletter.
Clean Your Lists
Another way to protect your sender score is by looking at the health of your lists. Bots can often infiltrate your lists, bringing down your score because they bring down engagement. Also, you want to stop emailing the people who are not interacting with emails whatsoever. Why risk bringing down your sending score by emailing people who are not interested? On a weekly basis, we clean lists for our clients by suppressing potential bots and unengaged users to keep their sending score high. The best way to identify these people is to create segments of people who, for example, have received 10 or more emails in the past six or so months, but have not opened any emails and have not been active on your site. You can try to send this audience one last email to try to win them back, but if they don’t open this final email, it is best to suppress or delete these people. Klaviyo has an easy guide for accomplishing this.
So remember, when you're warming up a new ESP account, it’s important to keep your audience close. Start by sending small volumes to your most engaged audience (people who have been active and interacting with your site and marketing for the past 30 days). Once you get your open rate up, and your scoring well, you can take greater risks and expand your audience. Also, keep in mind that personalized content and automated flows are a great way to increase your engagement - therefore positively impacting your sender score. On the other hand, customers (and bots) who don’t interact with your emails negatively impact your score and can drive your CRM costs up. It’s important to monitor your lists and suppress or delete people who are unequivocally unengaged. We hope this guide helps you get your sending infrastructure piping hot! Happy sending!
