IP Warming - Establishing a Successful Sending Reputation

Overview

Warming your IP address is crucial to establishing a successful sending reputation and improving your deliverability. This article provides tips to help you properly warm up your IP address.

Recommendations

• Send only to the most active customers (i.e., those customers who actively open and click email campaigns) since high delivery rates will help your IP address's reputation.
• Space mailings over several days and split up mailing lists to create smaller segments that will allow your IP address to get established. Try to split larger lists into smaller segmented lists, and send mail to only one segmented list per day over the first few days of the initial send for a campaign. Avoid and eliminate large spikes by sending  10,000 emails to active customers on Day 1, and then gradually increase every 1-3 days until you reach full capacity by Day 30.
• Monitor bounce rates to be equal to or less than 3%. Some blocking and filtering is normal as your IP warms. 
• Start doubling your daily sent mail volume on a week-to-week basis after the initial warm-up period has been established. Sending to smaller segmented lists every business day of the week is recommended rather than sending to one large list on one day of the week and not sending email on any of the remaining days in the week.

Following these recommendations will allow you to create and establish a stable and reputable IP address with improved delivery performance.