What Is Email Warm-up and Why Is It Important?

The average open rate for cold email is 24%.

That means that 76% of your work is in vain if you don’t improve on the average open rate.

Shocking? Yes!

Hopeless? Absolutely not.

A practice called email warmup can help you increase open rates significantly.

Email Warmup Explained 👨‍🏫

Some people use a personal email address for outreach, but make no mistake…

For professional email outreach you must use your own sending domain.

If it’s a new domain, it will have no sender reputation in the eyes of Internet Service Providers. So, if you just start sending out hundreds of daily emails out of the blue, ISPs will see you as a potential spammer.

Instead, you must warm up your domain so that there’s a natural increase in sending volume and frequency.

At the same time, you must get a decent percentage of replies to your emails that indicate that what you’re sending is worthwhile.

As a result of the email warm-up practice, if executed correctly, your domain’s sender reputation will improve.

And when that happens, well…

Your open rates will follow suit!

Why Email Warmup Matters

Successful email outreach starts with actually getting your emails opened.

If that seems like a no-brainer, think back to the stats we shared in the intro of this post. They perfectly illustrate the weight of importance of good open rates.

The best-ever written cold outreach campaign won’t get results if nobody reads it. So before you write a campaign, warm up your email first to make sure your prospects actually see it.

How Do You Actually Warm up Your Email

Manual email warm-up

You could warm up an email manually, but…

It’s a heck of a job, and you’re usually much better off investing a small monthly fee in a warm-up service that does it for you.

You see, increasing sending volume and frequency, the first part of the warm-up equation, isn’t that hard to do. Just turn on the dial (and watch your emails land in spam ;-).

However, you must also ensure you get relevant replies to your warm-up emails.

The more daily outreach emails you want to send after warm-up, the more warm-up emails you must send, too.

Doing email warm-up, thus, could become a full-time job. ;-)

Fortunately, there’s a much better way, which we will discuss below. ⬇️

Using an email warm-up service

Why go through all the hassle of warming up your email manually if there are services that can do it for you?

Typically, you connect your email account to their platform and they take care of warming up your email.

They gradually increase your sending volume and frequency while also ensuring that your warm-up emails get replies.

You may wonder how long email warm-up takes. Well, you can get through the initial phase in a few weeks, depending on your domain’s age and reputation and whether you’re just warming up an email vs warming up a domain.

But as with almost anything in life, there’s a caveat:

Not every warm-up service helps your sender reputation improve. Some actually harm your email deliverability by sending spammy warm-up emails.

In short, there are a lot of sub-par warm-up services around.

The Next Step - Picking a Good Warm-up Service 🚶‍♂️

Warming up your email is essential for email outreach.

But since warming up your email manually is not really an option, you’ll probably have to invest in a warm-up service.

But which warm-up service actually increases your deliverability instead of hurting it?

Check out our post on the 12 best email warm-up tools to find out.