How to Warm Up Email Domains + Best Practices

Picture this: you’ve got a new email domain and a great sales campaign, but your carefully crafted emails are all landing in recipients’ spam boxes!

As someone who’s been in the cold email industry for 10+ years, I’m very familiar with this issue.

In fact, I’ve experienced this problem myself…

And there’s a very easy way you can fix it: with a carefully planned email domain warm up campaign!

In this blog, I’m going to share with you how you can warm up email domains for a high sender reputation and email deliverability.

Let’s dive in and see how it’s done!

What Is Email Domain Warm Up?

Domain warm up is a process to help you improve the credibility of your new domains.

Credibility = Sender Reputation

To warm up your domains, you’ll have to send emails gradually, increasing the sending volume over a set period.

I’ve covered more about this down further, so keep reading.

Why Is It Important to Warm Up Your Domains?

Email Service Providers (ESPs) are generally skeptical about emails coming from new domains.

So, if you’re going to use your newly bought domains to send outreach emails or marketing emails, you’re sure to get flagged for spam!

Which is why you warm up your domains.

Win the trust of your Email Service Provider and establish yourself as someone genuine and not out to spam people.

How Is Domain Warm Up Different From Email Warm Up?

There are two kinds of warm ups: email warm up and domain warm up.

The difference?

Actually, not much!

To warm up your domains, you’ll have to send emails (gradually) from your email accounts associated with your new domain.

And to warm up your emails… you have to send emails from your new email accounts.

So, by warming up your emails, you’ll also warm up your domains.

Okay, next, I’ll show you how you can warm up your domains.

How to Warm Up Your Email Domains?

There are two ways to approach this: the easy way or the hard way.

I’ll show you both, and based on your needs, you can choose the best…

1. The Easy Way: Automated Email Domain Warm Up
2. The Laborious Way: Manual Email Domain Warm Up

1. Automated Email Domain Warm Up

The easiest way to warm up your email domain is to use an email warm up tool. 

A warm up tool will automate the entire process of sending emails to other verified emails that have a high sender reputation.

Here’s what a domain warmup tool does:

• It automates sending emails and replies from your email accounts to other emails and vice versa.
• It automates reply sending to create a conversation thread.
• It marks emails that have landed in the spam folder as “not spam”.
• Moreover, it “Stars” and marks them as “Important” to further improve reputation.
• Gradually increases the number of emails sent and received every day.

This is just the basic stuff, there are warmup platforms that are more sophisticated and can do a lot more to improve your sender reputation and maximize inbox placement.

But that’s for another blog. Let’s get back, and I’ll show you another way to warm up your domain.

2. Manual Email Domain Warm Up

In manual email domain warm up, you have to send emails from your domain’s email accounts manually.

There are quite a few more steps you have to follow here compared to the automated process, so bear with me!

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Set Up Your Email Authentication Records
2. Start Sending Emails to a Few Inboxes
3. Create Conversation Threads
4. Manually Ramp Up the Volume
5. Monitor Your Domain Health

1. Set Up Your Email Authentication Records

The first step is to set up your authentication credentials for your domain.

When ESPs see this, they will recognize your domain as legitimate and trustworthy.

There are three major authentication protocols you need to set up for your emails:

• Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
• DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)
• Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC)

Sender Policy Framework (SPF)

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an authentication protocol that lists IP addresses that are authorized to send emails from your domains.

Simply put, it’s a list of emails approved to send emails from your domain.

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) acts as an identity card that verifies your credentials as an email sender. It is a digital signature attached to every email you send.

Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC)

DMARC is the third layer of authentication and encryption that protects email addresses from spoofing and phishing attacks.

It also helps you identify the email addresses from which emails are being sent within your domain.

If you find this a bit confusing, here are some videos you can watch for a simple 101 on how to set them up: SPF, DMARC, and DKIM.

2. Start Sending Emails to a Few Inboxes

Once you’ve set up your email domain and the necessary security protocols, you’ve already done the hard part.

Now, it’s time to start sending emails to existing accounts with an established domain and senders reputation.

This is important because sending emails to new email addresses won’t help you achieve a good domain or senders reputation.

Rather, it’s about winning the trust of existing email addresses and their users in the eyes of Email Service Providers.

3. Create Conversation Threads

I urge you to remember that email warm-ups aren’t just about sending emails; they’re about establishing credibility.

The best way to do that is to establish conversation threads.

So, don’t just focus on sending emails; ensure that you receive meaningful and contextual replies as well.

4. Manually Ramp Up the Volume

Once you have a few conversation threads on your email address, it’s time to ramp up the volume of emails you send and receive.

If you’ve started by sending 10-20 emails, you can then scale them up to 50, then 100, and so on.

Ideally, you should keep increasing the volume until you reach the number of emails that you plan on sending during your outreach or marketing campaigns.

If you’re planning to use your email addresses for cold emailing, you might have to send thousands of emails every day to build a good domain reputation!

5. Monitor Your Domain Health

The last step in email domain warm up is to continuously monitor your domain health.

If your domain is new and your warm up is going well, you will see a boost in the senders reputation almost every day.

If you’re manually warming up your domain, you can monitor its health using a tool like Google Postmaster.

As you might think, manual warm-up sounds like a needlessly time-consuming task. 

Thankfully, as we’ve discussed, you can easily bypass this tedious process with the help of automated email warm-up tools.

Let’s check some of them out…

What Are the Tools You Can Use to Warm Up Your Domains?

Here’s a list of the three tools I’ve personally tried and tested:

1. TrulyInbox
2. Warmup Inbox
3. Warmy.io

1. TrulyInbox

TrulyInbox is an easy-to-use email warm up tool.

You can easily connect your email accounts and start the warmup process in just minutes!

TrulyInbox allows you to control the number of emails you want to send and receive every day and how you want to increase the sending volume.

What’s unique about TrulyInbox is that you can connect unlimited email accounts, making it the ideal solution for businesses of all sizes that want scalability and functionality at cost-effective pricing!

2. Warmup Inbox

Warmup Inbox gives you all the basic warm up functionality and also includes special features like language-specific warm up.

It uses the inboxes of real users to deliver a high senders reputation for emails within your domain.

While it charges you per inbox, it also provides premium services like monitoring blacklists for emails belonging to your domain.

If you’re looking for a tool like Warmup Inbox, here alternatives to Warmup Inbox you can explore.

3. Warmy.io

Warmy.io offers topic-specific email warm up for your domain. It also sets up a special filter so your inboxes aren’t clogged with emails dedicated to warm up.

One thing that stands out to me is that Warmy uses AI to optimize your domain warm up process.

Plus, it allows you to warm up your domains in 30+ languages, so it’s perfect if you’re planning to use your email IDs for international outreach!

But Warmy isn’t the only tool of its kind on the market; here’s a list of Warmy.io alternatives you can check out to see which one fits your needs…

Best Practices for Email Domain Warm Up

Ultimately, whether you choose an automated or manual email domain warm-up, you will always be in control of key decisions regarding the warm-up campaign. 

As I promised you, I’ve made a list of the best practices that have always served me well whenever I’ve had to warm up a new email domain:

1. Have a Solid Authentication Protocol in Place
2. Don’t Exceed the Recommended Sending Limits
3. Use a Dedicated IP Address Instead of Shared IP
4. Clean Your Email List
5. Avoid Using Spam Words
6. Send Only Quality Content
7. Always Have Conversations in Your Threads
8. Work with Secondary Domains
9. Use an Email Warm Up Tool

1. Have a Solid Authentication Protocol in Place

Authentication serves two purposes. First, it protects your email IDs from cyber-attacks from malicious entities.

Second, it tells the Email Service Provider that you are a trusted email domain that will not harm those with whom you’ll interact.

So, make sure that your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC protocols are securely in place.

2. Don’t Exceed the Recommended Sending Limits

Every ESP has sending limits to ensure that no email account sends too many emails to other users in a given period of time.

Here’s a comprehensive list of different ESPs:

Very Important Note: These limits are for sending emails within your domain or to domains you have already reached out to.

If you’re into cold emailing, where you’d be sending emails to different B2B email addresses, these limits won’t apply!

In that case, it’s recommended that you send no more than 50 emails a day from a single email account to avoid triggering spam filters.

You can read this blog to know more: How Many Cold Emails to Send Per Day for the Best Response Rates?

3. Use a Dedicated IP Address Instead of Shared IP

An Internet Protocol address identifies the network you’re using to connect to the Internet. 

When we use the internet in our day-to-day lives, we share the IP address with other users around us. 

However, there can be many malicious actors among these other users, who might by using the internet for fraudulent purposes.

Sharing an IP Address with them might also harm your domain reputation.

I recommend you get a dedicated IP Address for your domain. This will give you full control over your domain reputation.

4. Clean Your Email List

Your domain reputation can also drop after warming them up!

This happens when you send emails to invalid email addresses that don’t exist. It’s pretty common if you’re into a cold email outreach.

When you send emails to such accounts, your emails bounce, and this sends a bad signal to ESPs.

Eventually, ESPs will consider you as a spammer and send you emails to spam folders or worse, completely blacklist you!

My recommendation: clean your email list to only include verified email addresses that you can count on to receive and respond to your emails.

5. Avoid Using Spam Words

How many times have you received an email telling you that you’ve won a boatload of money or that you can get a job that pays you thousands of dollars every day for practically no work?

And how many times have you opened these emails? Probably never, I bet…

Similarly, if your emails contain spammy words like “best deal,” “double your income,” “discount,” and others, the ESP will also mark them as spam!

So, I suggest you avoid using spam words altogether, especially during the domain warm up process.

6. Send Only Quality Content

With time, ESP algorithms have evolved to understand the context of email conversations. They can understand whether an email exchange is meaningful or just initiated to establish a conversation.

So, emails containing gibberish content will likely not help you warm up your email domains.

Instead, I recommend that you send emails with quality content of an optimal length. For instance, a sales email would be short, whereas a newsletter would be fairly detailed.

One good way to go about warm up is to use actual templates of emails you’re planning to send during your sales campaigns!

7. Always Have Conversations in Your Threads

Conversations are important because they signal that your email account isn’t just sending emails but also receiving replies.

It tells the ESP that you’re transmitting useful information that is engaging others in a conversation.

Having conversations during your warm up will play an important role in boosting your domain authority

8. Work with Secondary Domains

A domain network consists of two types of domains: primary and secondary. Here’s an example of what this could look like:

Primary: <company.com>

Secondary for Cold Outreach: <getcompany.com> or <trycompany.com>

The main reason we use secondary domains is to protect the authority of the primary domain over all others.

This procedure is commonly followed for sending cold emails and marketing emails.

9. Use an Email Warm Up Tool

The last, and probably the most useful, tip I can give you is to use a professional email warm-up tool to ease your burden and ensure improvement in your domain authority.

As we’ve seen, a good platform takes care of all aspects of email warm up for you. From spammy words to verified email addresses and contextual content to sending limits, it offers you end-to-end email warm up functionality. 

Ready, Set, Warm Up!

Through our discussion, we’ve explored the A-Z of email domain warm up.

Starting with what it is and ending with how to warm up your domain like a pro, we’ve carefully broken down every step in the journey to a healthy email domain.

Now, all that’s left for you to do is try it and experience a high deliverability rate…trust me, it’s as easy as it sounds!

One thing that can make domain warm up even easier is using the right tool! 

While, as we’ve seen, there are many such tools out there, I recommend TrulyInbox: with simple onboarding, support for unlimited email IDs, and customizable warm up options, it might be the only option you need to try!

Good luck!

Warm Up an Email Domain: FAQs

1. What are the benefits of warming up an email domain?

Warming up an email domain tells the Email Service Provider you’re using that your emails are to be trusted and not sent to the spam folder. They help you greatly improve your email deliverability and reduce bounce rates. Domain warm up is essential if you want to use your email addresses for cold emailing.

2. How long does it take to warm up an email domain?

Typically, it takes 4 weeks or 1 month to warm up an email domain. During this time, I suggest gradually increasing the volume of emails you send every day.

3. How long should I keep warming up my domains?

The ideal time to keep warming your domains is 4 weeks or 1 month. If you’re planning to start cold email campaigns, I suggest you keep warming your domain during the length of your campaign. Lastly, whenever you notice a dip in your domain authority or sender reputation, you should immediately restart the warm-up process.

4. Why should you use an email warm-up tool?

An email or domain warm up tool helps you save the time and energy required for manual warm up. It helps you automate the process of domain warm up. It offers you several features, such as:

• Sending, receiving, opening, and starring emails from several addresses
• Eliminating spammy words
• Using only verified email addresses
• Sending emails with contextual content

5. What is the easiest way to warm up an email domain?

The easiest way to warm up an email domain is to use an automated tool like TrulyInbox. It drastically reduces the resources required for domain warm up while guaranteeing precise results.