Reputation Warm Up

Reputation

One of the key factors which determines how your emails are handled by mailbox providers (such as Gmail, Outlook, …) is reputation. Reputation is a score that each provider assigns to an email stream they see coming from a certain sender. This score is usually assigned to IPs and/or domains and is influenced by a large number of deliverability aspects. It will ultimately determine if your emails will arrive in the inbox, the spam folder or be blocked entirely.

When you are just getting started or when you acquire new IP(s) or domain(s), your reputation is usually quite neutral. This means mailbox providers don’t know you and are not sure if the traffic you’re sending their way is trustworthy. Therefore, they will be cautious and apply strict filtering during the first mailings. To gain their trust, it’s important to go through a “warmup” phase, during which you will slowly introduce your domain, IPs and emails to them and build up your reputation score.

The warmup phase

Reputation can be tied to your IP(s) and your domain(s). Each mailbox provider determines how they calculate a reputation score and what metrics will be involved in this process. Because of this there can be a lot of differences between how providers handle these things. One thing they all have in common though, is that you need to warm up your reputation.

Warming up your reputation takes on average about 6 weeks depending on the quality and consistency of your traffic. During this process you will limit your volume and sending speed. Additionally, it’s important that during this period you send emails to your most engaged users only (users who have clicked and viewed your emails recently – preferably during the past 2 weeks). Try to keep your mailings as consistent as possible, preferably daily batches which start small and increase on a daily basis.

As mentioned before, the sending speed and volume will be lowered significantly during the first mailings and will be increased after every successful campaign. A successful mailing means the overall results of the campaign are positive. In that case, the speed will be increased. We will also check external tools such as Google Postmaster Tools, SNDS, Returnpath, … to check domain and IP reputation progress. If certain issues are detected, such as abnormally low engagement results, bounces containing messages from mailbox providers that tell us to slow down, external tools showing issues or emails arriving in the spam folder, it might be wise not to increase the speed and maybe even lower it depending on the situation you’re dealing with. Don’t worry if the initial campaigns struggle with some issues during warmup. This is to be expected on a new environment and will improve over time. To give you an idea of what would be a good warmup schedule we added one below. Do keep in mind that this is an average schedule which might need to be adjusted for your needs and your types of campaigns. Our deliverability team can help you customize this.

General domains

Day	GMAIL.COM	Hotmail-Outlook	Yahoo/AOL/Verizon	Others
1	200	5,000	10,000	2500
2	200	5500	13000	2800
3	200	6100	17000	3400
4	300	8700	22000	4000
5	400	7300	28500	4500
6	500	8100	37000	5000
7	700	8900	48500	6000
8	900	10500	62500	7500
9	1300	13000	81500	9000
10	1900	15500	106000	11500
11	2700	18500	138000	15000
12	3700	22000	179000	25000
13	5000	26500	233000	40000
14	8000	31500	303000	60000
15	16000	41500	394000	90000
16	26000	53500	512000	150000
17	50000	69500	665000	220000
18	90000	90500	865000	350000
19	150000	118000	1120000	500000
20	200000	153000	1460000	650000
21	270000	199000	1900000	800000
22	350000	259000	2470000	1100000
23	420000	337000	3210000	1500000
24	500000	438000	4180000	1900000
25	650000	569000	5430000	2500000
26	800000	740000	7060000	3200000
27	950000	960000	9170000	4000000
28	1100000	1250000	11930000	5490000
...	Volume +30%	Volume +50%	Volume +30%	Volume +50%

French domains

Day	Orange.fr	LaPoste	Free.fr
1	1000	4000	4000
2	1300	4200	4200
3	1700	4400	4400
4	2200	4700	4700
5	2900	5100	5100
6	3700	5700	5700
7	4800	6500	6500
8	6300	7200	7200
9	8200	8500	8500
10	10500	10000	10000
11	14000	14000	14000
12	18000	17000	17000
13	23500	22000	22000
14	30500	30000	30000
15	39500	40000	40000
16	51000	55000	55000
17	66500	70000	70000
18	88500	95000	95000
19	112000	130000	130000
20	146000	180000	180000
21	190000	250000	250000
22	247000	280000	380000
23	321000	500000	500000
24	418000	750000	750000
25	543000	1000000	1000000
26	706000	1500000	1500000
27	917000	2200000	2200000
28	1190000	3000000	3000000
...	Volume +30%	Volume +30%	Volume +30%

Italian domains

Day	Libero.it
1	2500
2	2800
3	3400
4	4000
5	4500
6	5000
7	6000
8	7500
9	9000
10	11500
11	15000
12	25000
13	40000
14	60000
15	90000
16	150000
17	220000
18	350000
19	500000
20	650000
21	800000
22	1100000
23	1500000
24	1900000
25	2500000
26	3200000
27	5930000
...	Volume + 30%

A few notes about these volumes:

They are maximum volumes per sending domain
Sending less is allowed but the volumes for the following day will have to be recalculated
Sending more is not allowed
Use your most engaged users (e.g. last-30-day-openers) first
Monitor delivery rates and open rates and look for patterns

Summary

During the warmup period:

Start slow and slowly ramp up the (daily) volume
Target your most engaged users first
Try not to target a user more than once per day
Follow the schedule
Follow the advise of the deliverability team
Don’t make any unexpected moves

To give you an example: We’ve had a case in which the client didn’t follow the schedule and increased the daily volume significantly over night. As a result, their domain reputation at Gmail dropped from “high” to “Bad” in less than 4 days. All of their emails arrived in the spam folder as a result. It took over a month to restore the domain reputation and get their emails back into the inbox.