Our email deliverability experts answer the top 10 questions about the inbox warming process to help make your email marketing migration effortless.

When onboarding a new email marketing platform, there’s a period called inbox warming. This period of slower sending proves to the mailbox providers, like Gmail and Microsoft, that your emails belong in the inbox. Subscribers want your emails and subscribers engage with your emails.

This step is crucial to keep your deliverability and sender reputation intact. Onboarding in email is different than onboarding in SMS. It takes more time, but taking this time is beneficial for both your brand and your subscribers. Here are some common questions we get asked when onboarding customers to Attentive Email.

1. Is there anything I can do ahead of a migration to speed up the warm-up period?

The best two things to do ahead of migrating to our platform is to: 

• Gather the last open date of each recipient you plan to migrate or run one last winback campaign to increase your recently engaged list. This helps prioritize what recipients to include in the full warm-up timeline as they’ve recently engaged and will be more likely to open your email when it comes from a new domain—telling the ESPs that your emails belong in the inbox even if they’re coming from somewhere new.
• Assess what evergreen content will be best to be sent to recipients during the warm-up period and have that content ready to upload in your new system.

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2. Are there specific segments I should use during my warm-up period? Such as VIPs, repeat shoppers, location-based subscribers, or recently engaged subscribers? 

It’s best to gather a list segmented by “last open date” and include it in the upload of subscribers. You want to segment based on recency of engagement during this time. If you have other attributes in mind, discuss with your implementation contact to determine which ones to use in your segmentation strategy. 

Let’s look at a success story: After moving to Attentive, Blenders Eyewear created subscriber segments based on engagement levels in the past 30, 60, and 90 days. This segmentation strategy strengthened their deliverability rates as the mailbox providers recognized the recipient recently engaged with the sender and is more likely to engage with another email. 

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3. What’s an ideal list size when starting the inbox warming process?

Have a target in mind of how many typical daily recipients you send to. We advise to warming up to that point so when you are in a steady state of sending, that’s what inbox providers have seen from you on our platform. 

Have a target in mind of how many typical daily recipients you want to send to and build to that steady state. At Attentive, we recommend only warming up to those that have opened an email in the last six months. Which means some brands may only be sending to 10% of their list during the warm-up period and some brands may be sending to 80% of their list if said list is exceptionally clean (and has a high number of engaged recipients). Then, you can start targeting less recently engaged recipients as the mailbox providers recognize your send volume—that target number you should have in mind. 

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4. Should I refrain from running A/B tests during a warm-up period?

Yes, we advise avoiding testing during warm-up to ensure better deliverability. At Attentive, our team focuses heavily on the scientific approach where there are set controls and ideally we only change one variable at a time. It’s best for the warming of a new infrastructure to be the only variable during warm-up and to have that process resolved prior to testing another variable in an A/B test. 

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5. How can I tell if bots are inflating my click rate?

That’s a great question as bots can impact click and open rates. If you’re sending emails to domains that end in .gov, they’ll have advanced spam checkers and will automatically open and click your emails. You can segment out these domains in reports as you know those aren’t real clicks. 

The goal is still to get your human recipients to open and click your emails, but even these bot clicks are good news. This means your emails are landing in the inbox.

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6. Which is more important in email: My audience or my subject line?

Audience in the email world trumps subject line and content. Sending to unengaged subscribers can signal to the mailbox providers that your emails aren’t valuable or relevant. Over time, your emails could stop landing in the inbox. Always start with your audience in email marketing.  

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7. I understand that my email metrics might look a little off during this transition. What are some warning signs that something’s wrong?

Since you’re doing your warm-up with more recently engaged recipients, some metrics may actually look a bit better compared to your legacy platform. Opens and clicks can take 72 hours to fully populate from a campaign, so it’s best to look at the open and click rates on a rolling basis. And, as long as the rolling average is healthy, we’ll advise for the warm-up to continue. 

If there’s a sudden spike in bounce, block, spam complaints, or unsubscribe rates, you may want to pause to not have the matter continue to get worse.

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8. I want to run a winback campaign to re-engage subscribers, but how do I do that without hurting my deliverability? Do I do that before the migration?

Yes, it’s wise to see if you can get the most recipients to engage and/or purchase prior to migrating so you have the most up-to-date engagement from each recipient. The idea is to not do this with your full list of subscribers that you’ve gathered over all time. 

Ideally you’re only reaching back to recipients that you have found have a chance of engaging and converting (i.e., more than a 1% open, click, or conversion rate historically). If you send too aggressively prior to migrating and you plan to use the same sending domain on your new platform, it may impact the timeline of the warm-up.

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9. Why are my subscribers saying my emails are in the spam folder?

Don’t worry too much about this as the mailbox providers do this from time to time to test their filters and identify false positives. They’re trying to see what they can put into the spam folder to train their algorithms to properly identify spam. 

The good news is that when your subscribers check their spam folder and move your email out of it and back into the inbox, the mailbox providers see that action and rework their algorithm to put your emails back in the inbox. 

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10. What’s the most important thing I need to think about when it comes to email?

The most important thing is that never changing your email strategy‌ makes your email marketing worse. If you’re not paying attention to your metrics and making adjustments now, it could turn into a sneaky, but big problem in the future.

Email needs to be valuable and targeted. Remember, your audience is more important than your content. Email can be a fun playground, but it isn't the channel to try anything and everything. 

If you send an SMS message that no one engages with, it’s not great but it’s not going to impact your ability to text that subscriber again. It’s just a financial hit to that campaign’s budget. If subscribers stop engaging with your emails or the mailbox providers flag your emails as spam, your messages might not even reach your email subscribers in the future. Poor email marketing doesn’t just impact your finances. It can impact your ability to reach the people who would be engaged. 

Want to dive deeper into optimizing both your email and SMS sends? Watch this quick three-minute video to catch up on the best practices for using SMS and email together:

Learn more about Attentive Email by scheduling a demo.