How to manually warm-up your email: A hands-on approach

Email warm-up is a crucial step toward avoiding the spam folder.

Slowly increasing sending volume and frequency can establish a sender reputation with internet service providers.

You'll get better inbox placement once ISPs know and trust you as a sender.

Typically, you’ll use a warm-up service to warm up your email, but in this post, we’ll discuss how to do it manually.

The importance of email warmup 🗝️

If you have a new email or sending domain, it lacks a sender reputation.

Without a good sender reputation, you may be mistaken for a spammer.

If ISPs think you’re a spammer, they’ll send your emails to the spam folder.

With your emails in spam instead of the inbox, no one will read your carefully crafted campaigns.

A big waste of time and resources!

Instead, build up your sender reputation by starting with a low number of daily emails and increasing them by a low number every day.

But just gradually increasing the number of emails you send, isn’t enough. Your emails also need to get replies and engagement.

If you just send emails into the cyberspace abyss without ever receiving a signal of intelligent life at the other end, your emails will exhibit an unnatural pattern.

Internet and email service providers will notice this and flag your account for potential spam.

Your sender reputation will suffer, and so will your deliverability.

Manual email warmup 

The scalable and sustainable way to warm up your email is by using an email warm-up service like lemwarm.

Even after the initial warm-up phase has ended and your regular outreach has started, you must keep warming up your email to protect your sender reputation and deliverability.

However, you may not have any budget to work with and have more time than money. If that’s the case, you can try to warm up your email manually.

Cover your bases first

To have any chance to land in the inbox, you must authenticate your sending domain first.

This involves setting up your domain’s authentication records like:

• SPF
• DKIM
• DMARC

These essential DNS records help email service providers authenticate your sending domain.

Email authentication helps to prevent spam, spoofing attacks, and other cybercrimes.

Because of the extra security layer that email authentication adds to your emails, your emails will be more secure and have better inbox placement.

Once you have added your email authentication records to your domain’s DNS settings, you can use the tool below to validate them:

Start with a small volume of emails 📈

Any email warm-up starts with sending a low number of daily emails.

Send a few emails to family and friends and increase the number of emails sent every day. Start with 5-10 emails a day and add a few each day until you are at 30.

Remember: If you send out too many daily emails, your email account could get blocked. lempire’s Sales Leader Tal Baker-Phillips even recommends not to go over 30 daily emails in total per email account, which includes the number of warm-up emails that you send.

If you need to send more emails per day, you can use multiple email accounts with lemlist’s Inbox Rotation feature.

Encourage replies and interaction 🤝

Warm-up emails that don't get engagement can be just as detrimental to your sender reputation as sending outright spam.

When sending manual warm-up emails, ask your recipients to reply to your emails, mark them as important, and move your emails to the inbox in case they landed in spam.

These positive interactions let email service providers know your emails are legit and important, which helps boost your sender reputation.

Don’t send out all emails at once 🚨

Manual warm-up should make it harder to do email blasts and send out many emails at once.

However, it’s important to remember that you need to follow a natural sending pattern.

Blasting out tens of emails simultaneously is the behavior you'd expect from … a spammer. Internet and email service providers know this.

Sayonara to your sender reputation!

Personalize your emails 👤

For the most natural warm-up pattern, you don't want all of your emails to look exactly the same.

Make sure you vary your content and personalize all emails.

Fortunately, if you’re going to send manual emails to your friends and family, this should happen naturally.

Nevertheless, it is a lot of work.

Monitor email performance 👀

You need to know how your warm-up strategy is performing.

That means you must have an idea of how many of your emails are going to the inbox vs the spam folder. For manual warm-up, an approximate sense of your inbox vs. spam folder delivery rates may be adequate.

You'd need an email sending or warm-up tool for more detailed reporting.

Here’s what reporting looks like on the dashboard of email deliverability tool lemwarm:

Email warm-up tools ⚒️

It is possible to warm up an email manually.

However, since email warm-up is an ongoing process, you'll have to continue even after the initial warm-up phase.

Yes… That’s a lot of work!

That’s why the overwhelming majority of professionals choose to use a warm-up service instead.

Email deliverability booster lemwarm offers some advanced warm-up features, such as:

• ➡️ Human-like personalized warm-up emails
• ➡️ Warm-up network tailored to your industry
• ➡️ Warm up your own templates

lemwarm starts at $24/month.

However, by purchasing a subscription to multichannel outreach tool lemlist (Email Pro and Multichannel Expert plans), you’ll get lemwarm’s Essential plan for free.

lemwarm's best plan, the Smart plan, offers more advanced deliverability-boosting features.

Your choice 🤷‍♂️

Manually warming up your email can be a daunting task. 

The initial phase of email warm-up can take around a month, which means a lot of effort if you’re doing it manually.

But if you don’t have any money, but do have the time, it may be a good option.

However, for a small monthly fee, you can use an email warm-up service to warm up your email while you focus on higher-value tasks, like creating effective campaigns.

The choice is up to you.

Need more info about email warm up? In this post we explain what email warm-up is, and here we go in-depth on the difference between email warm-up and domain warm-up.