Despite what others say, social media is the growing digital marketing trend; email marketing remains one of the most effective digital marketing channels in 2021. It is simple to manage, more direct, and more affordable. Not to mention that opening your inbox is much less convoluted than your social media’s newsfeed and receiving an email gives a sense of urgency.
However, it doesn’t mean that email marketing is just about to write and send. There are strategies on how to do it right, and IP warming is one of them. Discover what IP warming is all about and the other practices to follow in being an effective email marketer below.
Do IP warming
Establish a reputation as an email marketer as well as for your domain and IP address. Send increasing volumes of email campaigns over time. This will ensure that your emails won’t be blocked, rejected, ignored, or be sent to the spam box.
IP warming will help the internet, and email service providers (ISPs and ESPs) analyze your sending habits. When they’re done exploring, you’ll be identified as a legitimate email marketer, and your campaigns are directly taken to your customers’ inboxes.
Build a clean email list
Work hard to grow your mailing list the clean way. Avoid buying email lists with spam traps, inactive users, bots, and disinterested users. Instead, focus on creating highly-engaging content. Write attention-grabbing subject lines.
Have a clear call-to-action (CTA) at the end of your email campaigns. Better yet, offer incentives to subscribers who can invite more users to your mailing list. And keep on writing exciting content to keep your subscribers excited from receiving your campaigns.
Establish a sending schedule
To do IP warming, you need to follow a predetermined email sending schedule. For example, you can follow an x2-x5 sending schedule. Start by sending 50 emails to 50 of your customers today. Send 100 campaigns to 100 customers tomorrow. Increase your campaign volume by 500 for 500 subscribers the next day. Then send 1000 emails the day after that. It goes on.
It’s also essential that you follow a specific time for sending email campaigns. This will increase your campaign engagement rates because your recipients will adjust their email reading schedule to match your campaign sending times. But your safest bet is to send during 5 am to 7 am, 10 am to 1 pm, and 8 pm to 12 mn. There are hours where your subscribers are done with work, on break, or lying on their beds, readying for sleep.
Test your emails before sending them
Errors in campaign sending can happen. Sometimes it’s your fault. Other times the internet, ISPs, and ESPs are to blame. Whichever the cause for error will be, make sure that they can be avoided. Do practice sending your email campaigns to yourself first before sending them to your customers.
Doing so will also help you identify the cause of problems that you can quickly fix. This means little to zero campaign delays.
Create automated email campaigns
Make your customers feel comfortable in joining your mailing list by setting up an automated welcome email system. There are more uses for email automation. One is to send transactional emails for added security. The other is for timed automation for subscribers in different time zones.
Time-automated emails are beneficial for users from different time zones because they are kept up to date on what’s new in your business as if they live near your area.
Segment email lists and personalizes email campaigns
Content relevance and personalization is more important in email marketing more than ever. It shows how much you care for your customers’ buying experience. So know what the interests and preferences of your customers are through asking them in the signup process.
Then put these new customers into segmented lists according to the data they provide. Create campaigns that are best suitable for each segmented list. Keep in mind that customer interests and preferences change as well.
Pay attention to their buying habits, search queries, and engagement behavior to promote or introduce products in the future that they might like.
Use double opt-in confirmation
Prevent bots and spam traps from joining your mailing list by using a double opt-in confirmation. Bots don’t engage with your emails, and they can mess with your engagement rates. This would then result in your email address, IP address, and domain getting blacklisted.
Spam traps are used to detect spam-worthy content in your campaigns. While you’re not a spammer, there will be times when you’ll accidentally use spammy words in your email body. This could present the same kind of trouble bots cause once they’ve joined your mailing list.
Final Thoughts
Most of the mentioned acceptable email marketing practices are about focusing more on the customer. To collect data from them such as their product interests, content preference, and personal information use the data you gathered to put them into segmented lists.
Then, create email marketing campaigns that match or are similar to their interests and send the campaigns on times they prefer. But first, don’t forget to do IP warming to avoid getting blacklisted. And always keep the bots and spam traps out of your mailing list.