Email deliverability is one of the most important factors for good inbox placement and to avoid unnecessary spam-related issues. To ensure your setup is properly configured for your emails send-outs, there are some important setup and preparations that must be done.
All the steps below should be considered mandatory to ensure the best possible email deliverability.
Step 1 - The course “Introduction to Email Deliverability”
This online training course will give you the basics of emails deliverability and is strongly recommended. It serves as a foundation for your warmup phase before launch and shows you how to keep in the loop after the launch, helping you monitor and act when needed.
Follow this guide to ensure that you have authenticated the sender domains you’ll be using to send out emails from Engage. As well as authenticating the sender domains, don’t forget to:
Have a DMARC-policy in place
Set up postmaster@ and abuse@ addresses for your sender domain
You’ve most likely been sending mails from your sender domain and sender address for some time now. This means that your sender domain has an established sender reputation. As you are switching to a new platform (Engage), you’ll need to warm up your sender reputation again. Follow the warmup processes outlined here to retain a good sender reputation.The warmup process can be done in different ways, and how you do it depends on your database volume and your sending pattern:
If you send less than one million emails per month, you will benefit from sending from Voyado’s Shared IP-Pool. You will be assigned to the IP-pool automatically.
If you send more than one million emails per month, you will be assigned a dedicated IP-address that only you will send from.
This is for when your monthly send-out volume is less than a million emails per month, and your contact database has less than 80 000 contacts with email marketing consent.In this case, the recommended new contact allowance per week are:Table 0: Max number of new contacts per week
Week
Max number of new contacts mailed from Engage
Week 1
15 000
Week 2
30 000
Week 3
Send to all
This table above shows the recommended maximum number of new contacts you can mail from Engage each week. For the recommended maximum send-out frequency per week, see the section “Suggestions for the warmup period” at the bottom of this article.
This case is for when your monthly send-out volume is more than a million emails per month, or your contact database has more than 80 000 contacts with email marketing consent.For this case, we suggest two different variants: “Activity based warmup” and “Randomized split warmup”. Read through both variants to decide which version suits your organization the best. If possible, and you have the relevant data, Voyado recommends “Activity based warmup”.
To ensure you have the highest possible engagement level, and that you send to the best possible addresses, it is recommended to divide up your send-out groups and send-out volumes per week according to the tables below:Table 1: Sendout groups
Sendout group
When contacts last opened an email
Warmup Group 1
0 - 7 days
Warmup Group 2
8 - 14 days
Warmup Group 3
15 - 30 days
Warmup Group 4
31 - 60 days
Warmup Group 5
61 - 90 days
Warmup Group 6
91 - 120 days
Warmup Group 7
121 - 150 days
Warmup Group 8
151 - 180 days
Warmup Group non-active
181 days and higher
Table 2: New contact allowance per week
Week
Max number of new contacts mailed
Week 1
25 000
Week 2
50 000
Week 3
75 000
Week 4
100 000
Week 5
125 000
Week 6
125 000
Week 7 and every week after
100 000
This table shows the recommended maximum number of new contacts you should mail per week from Engage during the warmup.
Voyado recommends that you work with the so-called “Primary Warmup” and “Secondary Warmup”. See the following sections for how these work.
Here you will focus on warmup groups 1-8.Start with warmup group 1 and add more and more volume as you get further into the warmup period.The weekly sending allowance is stated in the table “Recommended new contact allowance per week” below. Voyado strongly suggests that you follow this for optimal deliverability and proper warmup of your IP-address.Table 3: Sendout structure
Recipients who haven’t opened any email in the last six months are a potential risk for your email deliverability. It could even be argued that inactivity over the previous 90 days is enough to be a potential risk. This all depends on how often you send and how you segment your send-outs.For many businesses, however, even 180 days of inactivity may not be long enough to merit complete exclusion from future email send-outs. The recipients, for example, may be interacting in physical stores but might not be so active in the email channel. Or they may be “seasonal customers”. How then should this be handled?It’s all about balance and planning. Which takes us to the secondary warmup group.The idea behind this is to gradually move contacts in and continuously monitor the effect of each group. Some suggestions to optimize this are:
Before you start sending to this group, consider if you might benefit from a re-activation program for these contacts, such as giving some incitement for inactive contacts to re-engage in your email program. You could, for example, use an automation in Engage. If you choose to start sending to these contacts, our recommendation is that you add them in small groups (maximum of 5% new inactive contacts per week). This will give you good control in understanding how these contacts are performing.
Even after re-engagement activities, you’ll most likely still have some inactive recipients. Just as above, ff you choose to start sending to these contacts, the recommendation is that you add them in small groups (maximum 5% new inactive contacts per week).
Even after these steps, you might still have contacts that are not re-activated. If these contacts are still eligible for communication from you, try alternative channels. Maybe SMS, for example, might be a better communications channel for them.
Sendout groups and new contact allowance per week (randomized split)
If you don’t have access to “Last Opened Date” for each recipient, consider splitting the list up randomly and sending according to the recommended send-out volumes below. With this approach, you’ll send emails to both your active and inactive contacts from the beginning. It is therefore important to have a slower and more careful pace.Table 4: Recommended new contact allowance per week
Week
Max number of new contacts mailed from Engage
Week 1
10 000
Week 2
20 000
Week 3
40 000
Week 4
60 000
Week 5
80 000
Week 6
100 000
Week 7 and on
80 000
The table above shows the recommended maximum number of new contacts you should send to form Engage each week. For the recommended maximum sendout frequency per week, consult the section “Suggestions for the warmup period” at the bottom of this article.
Use your current platform in parallel with Engage to maintain your reach
As you only have a limited send-out volume in Engage during the warmup period, it’s likely you’ll want to reach out to the rest of the groups from your current platform. This is perfectly fine to do. This is how a split between the platforms can look:Table 5: Example 1 - Shared IP Pool (65 000 contacts)
Week
Platform
Contacts
Week 1
New contacts emailed from Engage
25 000
Week 1
Contacts emailed from your current platform
40 000
Week 2
New contacts emailed from Engage
40 000
Week 2
Contacts emailed from your current platform
0
Table 6_ Example 2 - Dedicated IP and Activity based warmup (300 000 contacts)
Week
Platform
Contacts
Week 1
Warmup group 1 from Engage
25 000
Week 1
Warmup Groups 2 - 8
275 000
Week 2
Warmup group 2 from Engage
75 000
Week 2
Contacts emailed from your current platform
225 000
Ensure that all unsubscribed contacts from your current platform also are unsubscribed in Engage before the first send-out of each warmup week.
Frequency of newsletters (which are defined as bulk sendouts to all or a large part of your total database) can be kept as normal during the warmup period, if that frequency is 3 sendouts per week or less. However, if the desired sendout frequency is higher, you should anyway keep it to a maximum of 3 newsletters per week from Engage during the following periods:
The first three weeks (if sending less than a million emails per month)
The first six weeks (if sending more than a million emails per month)
For mails sent during the warmup period, it is recommended that you split up your send-outs into batches (4 batches with an hour in between each batch) using Engage’s “Batchwise Delivery”.Even after the warmup period, you should continue using “Batchwise Delivery”, the recommendation now being to send in at least 4 batches with 30 mins between each batch.
Follow your open rate (and also your click rate trend) to understand potential effects of email filtering at the ISP:s. While this is extra important during the warmup period, it is also very important for your day-to-day business.Find out more here:
