Email “Warm Up” & Whitelisting
I’m going to be honest with you all … all these changes with email have me on edge too. Just last week I had a contact not receive an email that I sent. This is an email that is part of a email sequence that has gone off without a hitch countless times before. Everything on my backend looked fine - email was marked as sent at the set time. I checked my DMARC report and my emails for that date passed SPF and DKIM. My contact even checked their spam folder and nada.
Frustrating, but sometimes that’s just the mystery of the internet. I’m always working to increase my understanding and knowledge so that I can prevent these issues for my set-up. And likewise, I want to make sure you know what to do to.
So, today I’m sharing two things you can do to help your emails land in your audiences inbox and similarly as a consumer or fellow business owner make sure that you are receiving emails that you want and need.
Warming Up Your Email List
If you’ve been sending on your email services providers (ESPs) domain then you've been using their reputation. Now that your domain is authenticated your emails are now sending via your domain name and hence your reputation. As a “newbie” to the email world - you don’t have one yet! This means that you have to gradually grow your reputation (your "trust”) so that the internet knows that you are a safe sender.
Let’s say you have an email list of 2,500 people. Now since authenticated when the internet sees you sending out an email blast to these subscribers it’s like “whoa, hold up! who dis?” Especially if that list of 2,500 people has subscribers that are not particularly active or engaged with your emails (and that’s a whole other story for another day). Your domain can be flagged as suspicious or worse and that’s a hole you don’t want to have to dig yourself out of.
Enter warming up your email. Warming up your email list consists of sending out emails to a small group of engaged/active subscribers. You then gradually increase the number of subscribers that you are sending to. This helps establish your email patterns and grow your reputation such that you cans end to your entire list. The timeline for this process depends on the size of your list and requires close monitoring to assess how your emails are being received (or not!) by your subscribers.
So, how to select these small groups/parts of your list to send to initially? Some ESPs are more sophisticated than others with ways to select and segment your list to making it easy for you to send to those that actively open your emails and interact with any of your CTA’s. If you don’t have a way to select from your list when preparing an email blast automatically then you may have to go in and develop your own list or segment of trustworthy contacts. For some, this may be friends and family members and then extending the list bit by bit.
If you’re not sure how to go about doing this in your ESP shoot me an email at sara@sarasovie.com or a DM on Instagram (@sarasovietech) and I’d be happy to assist you in how to do so with your provider!
Whitelisting
On the flip side it can be so frustrating to want to receive emails from someone and not! See: my example above with the reminder email for our meeting with my contact! So, as a business owner you can educate and recommend to subscribers on your list to “whitelist” your email and vice versa you can make sure to whitelist businesses or people that you want to hear from.
So, what exactly is whitelisting and how do you do it? When do whitelist an email address you are essentially adding their email information to your approved senders list. This tells your email provider that you know and trust emails from this sender and therefore always let them in. How you go about this varies based on your email provider. Here are “how to’s” for a few common email providers:
Gmail (Web Based)
Once logged into your Gmail account, find the “cog wheel” in the upper right hand corner, click and select “see all settings”.
Find the tab labeled “Filters and Blocked Addresses” and select “Create a new filter”.
Enter the emails or domains that you want to whitelist into the “from” section.
Click “create filter” to confirm
Select “make sure to never send to spam” and then click “confirm filter” once again.
Done!
Outlook (Web Based)
Once signed into your Outlook inbox (web based only) click the gear icon in the upper right hand corner and select “all settings”.
Look on the left sidebar - click on “Mail”, then “Junk email.”
Select “+Add” under “Safe Senders and Domains” to add a contact to your allowed list.
Type in the domain name or email address you wish to add to “Safe Senders”.
Done!
Yahoo (Web Based)
Locate the “Settings” icon in the upper right hand corner and then locate & click “More Settings”.
Click “Filters” and “Add New Filter” to add a new contact (email address or domain name) to your approved list. Click save.
Done!
So, pretty easy across all 3 of these commonly used email providers to ensure emails won’t go to spam. Please note the above directions are only for web based as mobile set up will be different. Feel free to copy & paste this information to your subscribers to make sure they are whitelisting your email/domain to get your emails! And again, likewise do it for any contacts that you want to make sure you hear from as well.
Holler at me with any questions!
