Creating a brand new email account is a great strategy when it comes to sending more outbound emails. But if you create a new email account and immediately start sending bulk emails, you will be in trouble. There are a few things to know to keep your email account safe before you hit send.

New email accounts do not have a reputation, meaning they have no history of sending emails – good or bad. We want to prevent your email provider from suspending or blocking your account due to suspicious activity; the only way to do this is through time and set your account up for success.

NOTE: “Brand new” email address means a whole new account as if you hired someone on your team. This is not an alias account.

Why does reputation matter?

Without one (or with a bad one), your account is more likely to be suspended or blocked.

Email providers are cutting down on spam and malware and can suspend your account if your email looks even remotely like spam. Even with taking measures to prevent spam, your emails could still be rejected. There are 3 types of reputations: Good, Neutral, and Bad.

How do I build my email reputation?

Time

Just like a credit score, time is a factor here. How much time - it's dependant on your email provider, but if you ramp up slowly and work on sending great content, you will be in good shape. If you rush, you will be labeled as a bad sender and will be difficult to change to a good one.

Quality emails

Sending and receiving quality emails is like arriving at a party and introducing yourself to everyone there through a handshake. If a few people do not shake your hand back, you are now the weird person at the party. Don’t make your email be that person.

You can start by sending your friends an email and having them all reply (you can respond to them back as well). The responses let your email provider know that these are messages that the receiver wanted to see and are not spam or malware (handshake accepted).

Avoid emailing more than 4 people with the same domain or company as this looks suspicious to email providers. Try to email people with different email hosts, like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. Be sure to send these one at a time and not to use any automation at this point, slow and steady wins the email game.

Configuration

Setting up your email correctly will improve your deliverability. Thanks to that you can reduce the chance of getting into spam. It is like when you go in for a handshake; making eye contact and having a firm handshake are details most people pay attention to. Don't forget to make a good first impression as well as don’t forget the details of your email configuration.

There are the four main records that you should configure:

NOTE: Deliverability setup → As of February 1, 2024, new email sender requirements by Google and Yahoo! require email authentication from custom domains. Non-compliant emails risk being marked as spam or not delivered. Repeated offenses may lead to domain blacklisting. Our Done For You service offers two levels to help ensure compliance - a basic one, and an advanced one. Learn more about it here: click!

1. Start warming up your domain

Once you have your DNS records set up, you can begin the warm-up process.

The best way to warm up your domain is by using our own tool called Warmbots - you can read all about it here. This tool automatically exchanges dummy messages between all the Warmbots users, which creates a natural-looking traffic on their inboxes, and thus builds a strong reputation for them.

It's recommended to warm up the inbox for at least 2 weeks before you start sending out your campaigns.

Important note:

Please note that from 1 June 2023, Warmbots will stop warming up Gmail email accounts connected via our native Google integration. You can still enable Warmbots, but it will only provide you with the ability to monitor your deliverability, without the warm-up capabilities.

You can read more about the decision and how to maintain good deliverability in Gmail here: click!

2. Create your first Growbots campaign

Select your target audience, that you know would truly benefit from getting an email from you. If you email random people, they will likely mark your email as spam.

Remember the magic number of 50. No more than 50 prospects with 4-6 emails in your sequence, we are still not out of the woods.

Use the Personalization tool to update your first email to these prospects before you launch the campaign. Using the ‘Add variant’ option in your sequence will also help, as this is built in A/B testing. These tools will make your emails unique and look less like spam.

Let your campaign run. You can start to increase your daily sending limit by about 20 each two weeks.

As you ramp up, be mindful to stay under your provider's sending limits. Each provider has a different limit, once you know yours, you can set it in your account settings to ensure you do not go over it (if you don't know how to set up your sending limit, please check this article). We recommend not to send out more than 100 messages a day from one inbox.

NOTE: At first, do not use open or click tracking if you do not need to. This tracking adds tiny images to your message and if you have more images than text, your email could be flagged as spam. You can always add these trackers after a few campaigns. Once you enable this feature, check out adding a CNAME record to boost your deliverability.

3. Keep an eye on your email health

Email providers are constantly watching as if you are the waiter that is finally here with the food. You will have to monitor your email account because these guys:

will always be factors to your email health. If you notice your open rate dropping or an increase of bounced emails, these are serious signs of something being faulty. If you believe that your deliverability is below average, you can always reach out to our Support Team, and they will conduct a test for you!