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.
Building your email accounts’ reputation:
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 setting your account up for success.
Note: “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 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
- Send and receive quality emails
- Configure your email correctly
Time
Just like a credit score, time is a factor here. How much time is 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 sender.
Quality emails
Sending and receiving quality emails is like arriving to 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 have your email be that weird person at the party.
You can start by sending your friends an email and having them all respond. (You can respond 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 no more than 4 people with the same domain or company as this looks suspicious to email providers.
If you can, try to email people with different email hosts, like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo etc. Be sure to send these one at 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 and reduce the chance of the recipient’s email provider from blocking your message. It is like when you go in for a handshake; making eye contact and having a firm handshake are details some people forget, but shouldn't. Don’t forget the details of your email configuration.
- First step is to do a mail tester, detailed instructions here
- The mail tester will let you know what you can improve. You can send the results to your IT team to make the adjustments. If you are the IT team, and everything else, be sure to focus on updating the SPF records. Instructions and guides can be found in the mail tester results, be sure to expand the boxes.
- Wait 24 hours for those changes to sink in
Note: Be sure to learn more about what your email provider offers, such as email limit per account per day. During the warm up period you will not get close to this limit, at all, but once you start sending more emails we do not want to exceed this limit.
Where to start:
Follow the guide under Configuration to ensure your email is setup for success.
Then we will want to ramp up slowly, like really slowly. We want to send 10 emails a day, then 20, 30 etc. These should all be sent manually and should be personalized. 50 emails may seem low, but remember the follow up emails are also being sent out of this address so 50 is a good number to strive towards.
You’re sending should look like that kid back in 5th grade that never missed a day of school - consistent. You do not want to send 30 emails and then all of sudden send 80 the next day. So send a lower amount of custom emails, constantly, manually, for at least 4 weeks.
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 AB testing. These tools will make your emails unique and look less like spam. (Remember you can send your emails to Mail Tester to see how spammy they look).
Let your campaign run. As it is ending you can adjust your sending limit and increase it slightly, like 60 or 70. Work on launching another campaign. Repeat.
As you ramp up, be mindful to stay under your sending limits. Each provider has a different limit, once you know your limit you can set it in your account to ensure you do not go over it.
NOTE: 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.
Now what?
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 as the
- Quality of your messages
- Target Audience
- Consistency of sending
- Volume of sending
will always be factors to your email health. If you notice your open rate dropping or an increase of bounced emails, these are good signs something is faulty. Start with using Mail Tester (see configuration section) to see your score and from there we can always help to improve your results.
