Warming up an email address/associated domain essentially means building a credit score/reputation as a sender of emails. It is this credit score, assigned somewhere in the ether by the gods of the email world - inaccessible to you (if it were accessible, you would be able to try and artificially manipulate it), which forms the basis of your ability to send emails to people. If you abuse the use of email - for example sending unwanted mail or spam mail or malicious content etc... - you will be blocked and your ability to send emails going forward can, in the worst cases, become impossible from the email accounts and associated domains in question.
The words 'email warm-up' have 2 meanings:
Organically increasing your send volumes overtime is valid. What this means is you are gradually building a pattern of sending behavior - and therefore a reputation as a sender of emails from your chosen email account/associated email domain. Email service providers and mailbox providers are looking out for patterns of activity, and based on those patterns and activity, you develop a credit score essentially - known as your email sender reputation. Mailbox providers and email service providers (ESP's) look out for unusual patterns of behavior - especially from new email accounts. They know pretty much every trick in the book that is designed to deceive their systems and have solutions to almost all, if not all, of them. To operate under the belief that you can trick and deceive their systems is a short term road to no-where interesting. However if you are a legitimate sender sending wanted email, you will build up a reputation overtime, organically, based on how people you are sending emails to interact with your emails.
Which brings us to the use of artificial warmup services; of which there are an abundance to choose from. As a business owner, sales rep, marketer, growth/digital expert etc... we think mostly about the customer interaction side of our activities e.g. how they interpret our messages, do they find our content engaging, are the people relevant to our offer/have we targeted them correctly etc... When it comes to technology tools, we simply want them (and expect them) to "work". We don't want to get caught up in the technicalities of how they work if we can avoid it; we have our objective of reaching and engaging people and the tools we use to do that should take care of the technical stuff behind the scenes for us! We also work on a propositions level - e.g. what a tool or product offers as a proposition - and whether the proposition makes sense to us. At a conceptual level, once you understand the concept of needing to 'warmup' an email account/sending domain, you can easily buy into the proposition of a service that promises to automate the warmup process and achieve for us a fantastic email sender reputation. What we don't consider - because there is so much to know about the email space and most of us haven't spent years investigating and learning it - is what the ultimate powers that be may think of such activities and what resources they will put in place to prevent it. When you use artificial email warm up services, you are essentially attempting to trick and deceive the systems of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and other email inbox/service providers into assigning your email account and associated domain with an artificially derived sender reputation score; with the promise that doing so will enable you to then use the highly reputable email account to send cold emails to people and have your emails land in prospects email inbox folders every time. Email warmup services work by taking control of your email address (the one you want to increase the reputation of), adding it into a pool/network with other email addresses, and then sending communication between those email addresses to one another. So if you and I had our emails in a artificial email warmup service, they would automatically write messages to each other, mark those messages as 'important', pull any messages that land in the spam folder out of the spam folder and put them in the inbox folder etc... etc... Essentially these artificial email reputation warm up services are mimicking trust and creating the illusion to the systems of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo etc... that a human user is taking those actions and therefore the sending party must be legitimate and be sending valuable emails to the receiving party because otherwise the receiving party would not be responding, taking messages out of the spam folder etc... etc... The problem with this is that Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and other email inbox/service providers are all aware of this activity and have huge resources to throw at being able to detect this deceptive and deceitful behavior. Not only can they detect it, but they then track and penalise those who are part of those services; severely impacting their ability to send and receive email from the affected email account and potentially the associated domain (which means no email from that domain will be able to send or receive email while affected).
Like we have said though, as marketers, sales people, business owners/operators, this level of technicality is generally beyond what we want to engage in; we want systems and propositions that 'just work', regardless of how they achieve the goal - so long as they do in fact achieve the goal. As sales people, marketers and business founders/owners/operators using or hoping to use email outreach to engage our markets, we quickly become aware of the need to warmup our email accounts to ensure our messages reach our prospects - and the proposition of a tool that automates warm up for us makes a lot of logical sense. The problem however is that email warmup providers are fundamentally working against the email system and this is ultimately a road to nowhere because they will not win and those who use their services will be the ones affected and who will face email deliverability issues going forward.
So to conclude, we DO NOT recommend the use of email warm up services that add your email account to artificial networks with the hopes of building and establishing a (temporary at best) reputation for your email accounts. Instead you should invest time and effort into really understanding your ideal customer profile and other audiences, target them effectively with valuable, genuine and relevant content that they will consider 'wanted mail' and build up your sending reputation organically based on real interactions. Be a valuable sender of email - that is the key. If your mail is 'wanted' / well received by your recipients, you will organically build a solid email sending reputation that will see your emails land in the email inbox of the people you are wanting to reach and engage with. Hypadrive.ai has been designed to manage organic sending on your behalf which takes into account your domain, how much sending history you have with the associated email accounts and more to safely and appropriately build up your email sending capacity over a period of time.
IMPORTANT NOTE: if you send 5 emails today and they all get marked as spam, then no matter how you try and warmup your email account, your ability to send emails and reach a prospects inbox will be severely impacted. If people fundamentally don't find value in your emails, your ability to send emails and reach a contacts inbox will get increasingly harder overtime.
KEY TAKEWAY: The only sustainable solution is to be a genuine and valuable sender who sends targeted email that recipients consider valuable and ultimately engage positively with. Focus on this and your emails will have the best chance of reaching their intended recipients.
