Email warm-up strategy explained + tools and best practices

If you’re new to email outreach, we’ll let you in on a little “secret.”

You can’t just start sending hundreds of emails out of the blue!

Instead, you need to warm-up your email first.

Email warm-up allows you to establish a sender reputation with Internet Service Providers so that fewer of your emails will land in spam.

In other words:

A good warm-up strategy is critical to your outreach success.

Email warm-up explained 👨‍🏫

Email warm-up involves gradually increasing sending volume and frequency.

We consider an email warmed-up when it has been sending and receiving messages regularly.

That said:

Slowly ramping up the emails you send isn’t enough.

Your warm-up emails must also get engagement, meaning recipients engage with your emails, for example, by replying to them. This engagement signals to ISPs that your emails have value.

After a few weeks of warm-up action, your email should be ready for the real thing: your (hopefully) highly-converting outreach.

However, you must first decide on a warm-up strategy to get there.

If email warm-up is new to you, you may have some doubts about:

• ➡️ What the best warm-up schedule is
• ➡️ How to know when an email address is properly warmed up
• ➡️ What to do if your domain is brand new (emails can be at different stages of the warm-up process)

Email warm-up is typically achieved using an email warm-up service, but it’s not impossible to manually warm up your email. We’ll show you how to do both.

Why you need to warm up your email ♨️

What good is spending hours on a cold email if only a small percentage of your prospects will ever read it?

Email warm-up can significantly improve your sender reputation, leading to higher deliverability because your emails are considered more trustworthy.

Spam filters will be more lenient with your emails, which reduces bounces and spam folder placement.

All this good stuff will lead to higher open rates, more engagement, and more revenue.

Most importantly: email warm-up lays a strong foundation for long-term email outreach success.

Do you need to invest in a warm-up service?

Most likely, yes, because:

1. Manually warming up an email is a lot of work
2. Email warm-up is an ongoing process. If you stop it after warming up an email, you risk your sender reputation.

Perhaps if you plan on doing email outreach on a very small scale, manual warm-up is viable. For professional email outreach, using an email warm-up tool is probably necessary.

Even so, we promised to show how to do manual email warm-up, so here’s the plan if you’re going the manual route.

1. Take care of your email authentication: For any kind of email warm-up, your email authentication records like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC need to be on-point. These offer further trust-building benefits that boost your deliverability.
2. Begin warm-up with low volume: Send 10-20 personalized emails per day to friends and family who are likely to engage with your emails.
3. Gradually increase sending volume: Increase your sending volume by 10-20 daily emails every week. If you send out 10 daily emails in the first week, you increase it to 20-30 for the second week, etc. Continue this process until you get to your target volume. The warm-up process can take a couple of weeks or even months if you’re a high-volume sender.
4. Ask recipients to engage with your emails: Engagement signals that your emails are important and is thus an essential building block of your sender reputation. Good engagement signals are opens, replies, and clicks.
5. Be consistent: Establish a natural sending pattern instead of sending all emails at once. Sending many emails in a short time frame can alert spam filters.
6. Monitor your deliverability score: Email deliverability tools can give you valuable insights about your deliverability score.
7. Keep your list clean: Remove unengaged and invalid email addresses to reduce bounce rate and boost deliverability.
8. Look out for spam traps: If, after a few weeks, you’ve run out of friends to contact, you may be tempted to purchase email lists. However, these may be full of spam traps, email addresses specifically created to catch spammers. These spam traps can put you on blacklists and destroy your deliverability.

Warm-up forever

Many people mistakenly assume that you can stop the warm-up process after warming up an email.

However, email outreach tends to have lower engagement than regular email. Your warm-up emails can make up for this drop in engagement.

By keeping the warm-up process on, you’ll get better deliverability and more consistent engagement from your email recipients over time.

In other words:

Email warm-up helps keep your sender reputation up. It’s an essential part of maintaining your email deliverability.

The need to keep email warm-up going at all times is yet another reason why doing it all manually may not be feasible. It would mean you spend a lot of time warming up your email that could be spent somewhere else.

Warm-up Tools Explained 👩‍🏫

An email warm-up tool sends and receives warm-up emails through your email account.

The cool part is that, once set up, the warm-up process is automatic.

The warm-up tool automatically sends emails from your account and replies to them, too.

One of the best email deliverability tools is lemwarm. Its warm-up and other deliverability features make hitting 80% open rates possible.

‍

Email warm-up: What you need to know

Expect email warm-up to take around four weeks.

After this initial period, you can start your outreach while you keep warm-up on.

Here are the recommended settings for lemwarm:

• Warm-up emails per day after ramp-up: If your email account is less than six months old, this number should be 30, but if it's older than that, it should be 40.
• Ramp-up increment value per day: Should be ‘1’ if your email account is less than six months old, and ‘2’ if it’s older than six months

‍

If your ramp-up value is set to 2, here’s how many emails you’ll send out in the first few days:

• ➡️ Day 1: 2 emails
• ➡️ Day 2: 4 emails
• ➡️ Day 3: 6 emails
• ➡️ Etc., until your reach 40 emails/day (day 20).

The idea is to increase the number of daily emails sent gradually.

Do not send any real campaigns during the initial warm-up phase. But if you absolutely have to start your campaigns before it’s completed, start with a low volume and increase it slightly every week.

Remember to keep lemwarm on at all times to maintain good deliverability after the initial warm-up phase.

How lemwarm works

lemwarm sends unique emails from your account to other lemwarm users, a network of 20,000 people from 100+ countries.

Instead of interacting with fake email addresses, as is the case with some warm-up tools, lemwarm sends warm-up emails to and from real email accounts.

We use our Smart Content Algorithm to generate subject lines and messages.

lemwarm will also reply to the emails and keep the replies under the same conversation thread. The replies are also unique content so that they look just like human-written emails.

Setting up your lemwarm account

It’s easy to set up your lemwarm account.

Once you’ve created an account, lemwarm’s dashboard will show you what steps to take:

‍

Step 1: Choose a lemwarm plan

lemwarm offers two distinct plans: Essential and Smart.

‍

The Essential plan is lower priced and helps you maintain good deliverability by sending generic human-like emails. It also allows you to monitor your deliverability score.

The Smart plan offers more advanced features, such as the Smart Cluster, which allows you to personalize your warm-up emails based on your target industry and audience.

Step 2: Connect your email provider

Click “Connect your email provider.”

‍

Then, hit the “Connect new email addresses” button:

‍

On the next screen, choose your email provider:

‍

If your email provider is Google or Microsoft, all you have to do is log in and you’ll be good to go. For other providers, you must configure SMTP and IMAP server information.

Step 3: Verify your email address

Click on “Verify your email address,” and you’ll receive a confirmation email in the inbox of the email you used to register your lemwarm account.

Click on the confirmation link. Then, you’ll be ready to start warming up your email.

It'll also give you access to the DNS Check feature, which provides information about your technical setup.

‍

Your technical setup is important because it directly influences your deliverability.

Typically, your technical setup consists of your domain’s authentication DNS records SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, in combination with your MX records (needed for getting replies).

Check your DNS records by using our technical setup checker below. ⬇️

Finally, your technical setup isn’t complete without a custom tracking domain. If you use the tracking domain offered by your ESP chances are it will negatively affect your deliverability.

Customize lemwarm settings ⚙️

At lemwarm, we know that every situation is different.

That’s why we let you customize lemwarm’s settings according to your domain’s age and business specifics. This allows you to maximize your deliverability.

Smart ramp-up and warm-up

Your domain’s age plays an important role in deciding on the right warm-up strategy.

To modify your ramp-up and warm-up settings, go to the cockpit in your account’s dashboard.

‍

The Warm-up email per day after ramp-up value allows you to set the number of emails lemwarm should send per day after the ramp-up.

As mentioned earlier, if your domain is older than six months, this value should be 40; if it's younger than six months, it should be 30.

For the Ramp-up increment value per day, we recommend 2 if your domain is older than six months. If it’s not, leave it at 1.

The initial warm-up should take a month or so. When completed, expect open rates to reach 50%.

You can start sending campaigns after this initial warm-up phase, following this sending pattern:

• ➡️ Week 1: 20 daily emails
• ➡️ Week 2: 40 daily emails
• ➡️ Week 3 and after: 60 to 100 daily emails

💡 To achieve an 80% open rate, it’s essential to leave lemwarm on at all times.

The Smart Cluster

For ultra-personalized warm-up emails, use lemwarm’s Smart Cluster.

This feature allows you to adjust your warm-up emails to your industry and email goals.

The subject line and message of each warm-up email will be customized based on the information you feed to the Smart Cluster.

‍

Here’s why that’s important:

Email providers evaluate the content of your emails and if it’s relevant to your business, it will be deemed more trustworthy.

In other words:

The Smart Cluster is an important piece of the email deliverability puzzle, so make sure to use the Smart Cluster to tailor your warm-up emails to your business.

Here’s how to do it in Gmail:

And here’s how to do it in Outlook:

Monitor your deliverability score

One of lemwarm’s most useful features is the deliverability score meter.

Your deliverability score tells you a lot about, well, your email deliverability!

Here you can see three different score ranges: red, orange, and green. Here’s what they mean:

If your score is in the red range:

• Your domain may be blacklisted
• Your technical setup may have issues
• There may be issues with your configuration

If your score is orange:

• Your results are not optimal yet. If you want to start sending campaigns anyway, keep them low in volume

If your score is green:

• You are ready to start sending campaigns. Remember to keep lemwarm on to maintain and monitor your deliverability.

Just below your deliverability score, you’ll see detailed reports on the total number of lemwarm emails sent and the number of emails saved from spam and category folders.

There’s also a chart showing where your emails are landing:

And a chart that reports on where your replies are landing:

The deliverability score, combined with the detailed reporting, lets you know whenever a deliverability problem needs to be addressed.

After the initial warm-up

It can take four weeks to warm up your email account.

However, email warm-up is never done as disabling it could lead to deliverability problems.

So, after the initial warm-up, you have three important ongoing tasks to take care of:

• Keep email warm-up enabled
• Increase sending volume gradually
• Track your email deliverability

Some things to keep in mind regarding email warm-up 🧠

Email warm-up may seem like a complicated concept at times. To simplify it, keep these three things in mind:

1. Email warm-up directly influences your sender reputation and thus, your deliverability
2. When vetting warm-up tools, make sure they use real email accounts and reliable sending practices
3. The warm-up process offers a continuous deliverability boost. Therefore, it can never be turned off.

Email warm-up FAQ

What is an email warm-up strategy?

An email warm-up strategy builds up a sender reputation for new sending domains or domains with a poor sender reputation. Newer domains require a less aggressive warm-up strategy, while older domains can be warmed up quicker.

How Many Emails Should You Send Daily When First Warming Up an Email Account?

2-5 emails/day for the first five days. Increase incrementally after that.

Do email warm-up tools actually work?

Absolutely. While there are some questionable warm-up tools around that do more harm than good, a good warm-up tool will significantly boost your email deliverability.

What is the best email warm-up tool?

With its advanced deliverability features, such as warming up your own templates and deliverability issue alerts, we believe it's lemwarm.