How to warm up a new domain for marketing email

Why the usual way fails

Inbox providers decide where your email goes partly on the sending history of your domain, and a new domain has none. The safe path is to start small and raise the volume day by day, but doing that by hand means splitting your list into slices and remembering to send the next slice every morning. Many email providers also cap how much you can send per day when your account is new, and going over that cap simply fails the rest of the batch. On top of that, a few bad addresses in an old user table can push bounce rates up just when the domain is most fragile.

How Rowsend helps

Rowsend has a warm-up setting built into its sending options. You can start a new domain at 50 emails a day and let it grow toward the daily limit you set for your provider, so you do not have to slice the list yourself. Sends go out in batches, and you can pause or cancel a send that is already running. If bounces or complaints start to climb, the campaign pauses itself so you can look at the audience before more damage is done. You can send from your Mac, your own server or Rowsend Cloud, and switch later without losing an unsubscribe.

Step by step

1. Connect your sending provider, such as Amazon SES, Postmark, Mailgun or SMTP, and set your from address on the new domain.
2. Enter the daily limit your provider allows for your account.
3. Turn on warm-up so the domain starts at 50 emails a day and grows toward that limit.
4. Send yourself a test first and check how the email looks in your own inbox.
5. Schedule the campaign to your most engaged users so the first days go to people who expect your email.
6. Watch deliveries, bounces and complaints after each batch, and pause the send if something looks off.

Tips

• Start with users who signed in recently. Rowsend builds segments from your own database, so a filter like active in the last 30 days gives the new domain its friendliest first audience.
• Let bounces clean the list for you. Addresses that bounce or report spam are left out of every later send, so each batch is a little healthier than the one before.
• Keep the first emails plain and useful, like a short product update, rather than a heavy promotion. Early replies and normal reading behavior help the domain more than a flashy design. Save the big announcement for the second or third week, once the domain has a few days of normal sending behind it.
• Make leaving easy. Every email carries an unsubscribe link and the one-click header that Gmail and Yahoo ask for, and people who leave quietly are better for your domain than people who hit the spam button.

Questions