What is the proper way to 'warm' a new Dedicated IP address?

New IP addresses have no reputation! As a result, ISPs (Internet Service Providers) view new emails, coming from an IP addresses that they haven’t seen before are always suspect. This is especially if the email volume is high. Spammers often rotate through IP addresses, so you can be sure that your first emails will also be suspect.  To maximize email delivery on a new IP address, it is important to build a reputation. This does take a little time and planning, but it is well worth it to maximize deliverability.

What is a dedicated IP address?

An IP address is like your home address. It is specific to you only. Most email providers will provide a shared IP address which allows multiple companies to mail from the same address. The positive side of this is that you will be mailing on an address that already has a reputation, so you can send email in volume right away. In addition, DemandCenter will flag bad email addresses immediately (Hard Bounces) and will bounce out after multiple soft bounces. We recommend that you mail to every prospect in your database, ideally five times, before moving to your dedicated IP address. The downside is that your reputation is an average of everyone on that IP address. We continually monitor all IP address for reputation to prevent potential deliverability problems.

Building a reputation

Building a reputation is a simple process, but it will take some patience.

1. During the first month or so using DemandCenter, we typically put your account on a shared IP address. This allows you to start marketing immediately without worrying about starting out with a bad reputation on your dedicated IP address.  IP addresses are valuable!
2. Once you have exercised your database by mailing to each prospect at least once, but ideally five times, you should request a move to your dedicated IP address.
3. With a dedicated IP address, it will be necessary to warm the address so that ISPs can distinguish you from spammers. Your warm time will depend on the size of your database and the number of emails you have that are going to specific ISPs. Ideally you should mail to recent respondents to emails on the shared IP address, you will be less likely to have any complaints which is ideal for a new IP address.

Warming schedule

Week 1

Week 2

First Mailing of Week 2

Second Mailing of Week 2

Maintaining your reputation

To maintain you reputation you need quality and consistency. Quality means, consider you content. Offers for information or tools that help customers make better decisions are appreciated, A parade of sales offers are less interesting, especially if they are repeated or don’t provide substantial cost savings or other perceived benefits. Consistency means continue sending on a regular basis. An email campaign once a week is ideal from a ISPs perspective. However, this is not a recommendation from a marketing standpoint. Emailing once a week is typically too often. The easiest way to keep consistency and not drive your prospects crazy with too many emails is to spit your target audience into groups and mail each group on a weekly basis. This will spread out the total emails sent but won’t over touch your potential customers.

Manage Bounces

It’s important to manage your bounces. If you find that your bounces are going up as you step up the volume in your warming process. Consider lowering the number of emails in your next campaign and check again. If bounces continue, please contact an eTrigue Customer Success Manager for assistance.

To learn more about DemandCenter Campaigns, click here.

To learn how to build a Campaign, click here.

To learn how to edit an existing DemandCenter Campaign, click here.