‘Burning your domain’ may have ancient Roman connotations attached to it, but in the context of Salesforce, it usually refers to a failed outreach. If your outreach emails are landing in the spam folder or getting blocked entirely, you are likely facing this common Salesforce challenge.

Stop Burning Your Domain

It is typically a result of your domain reputation taking a hit because of a sudden increase in email volumes or low engagement rates. What you need is a properly planned warm-up strategy so that your carefully crafted campaigns do not end up in the recipients’ spam folders, buried in their inboxes, or flagged by their ESPs.

Let’s get started.

Why are Email Warm-Ups Important?

Your email domain is like a fresh new phone number that you use to send emails to your contacts. ESPs like Gmail, Outlook, etc., are inherently distrustful of unknown ‘numbers’ (email domains). This enables them to protect their users from spammers who frequently use new domains. They do this by watching how their users react to your emails:

  • Whether they opened or clicked your emails, or marked them as spam
  • Whether your sending volumes are steady or spike at random times
  • Whether your lists contain invalid addresses or if you are respecting consent

When your domain suddenly starts sending thousands of emails without any prior history of such behavior, your emails may be perceived as spam. This leads to several red flags:

  • Emails are routed to spam folders.
  • Delivery is delayed because of deferrals.
  • Your IP or domain is blacklisted.

In short, burning up your domain is long-term damage that you may not recover from easily. It is for this reason that warm-ups matter so much. It is a process of building a positive reputation with inbox providers like Gmail by sending consistent batches of email to your lists and engaged users.

Warm-ups establish consistency, enabling you to increase email volume over time without triggering any red flags and establishing yourself as a reputable, legitimate sender.

Warm-Up Your Salesforce Domain in 21 Days: A Guiding Plan

[Source, alt text: Skipping warm-up may cause your IP and domain to get blacklisted or flagged.]

Email warm-up requires careful planning and execution. By following the guide below, you can achieve excellent deliverability results for your emails:

Planning Your Warm-Up Campaigns

For a manual domain warm-up, your plan needs to be meticulous and adhere strictly to the strategy:

  1. Design small batches of email (about 100 to 200) to send every day.
  2. Increase the email volume gradually, say 20%-25% daily, to maintain consistency while expanding reach.
  3. Avoid sending emails on weekends and holidays, as engagement rates tend to drop during these times.
  4. Account for all the breaks and stretch this warm-up process to about 4 weeks, which comes up to 21 weekdays.

Even if you need to send 1,000 emails every month, it is important to follow this warm-up process to build trust with ESPs slowly. Within 4 weeks, you will have significantly increased your sending volumes to reach your target.

Segmenting Your Audience

Sending mass emails blindly to all the contacts you ever recorded is sure to get your domain flagged. Your email strategy needs to target and engage the right audience from the first day:

  1. Start with your most engaged opted-in subscribers. These are the people who know and like your brand.
  2. Initiate engagement with cold or unverified contacts to warm them up instead of directly sending them emails.
  3. Leverage Salesforce Classic list views or campaigns to segment your audience. If necessary, involve your admin in list imports and exports.
  4. You can achieve relevant targeting even with simple filters like “Last Opened Date” or “Contact Created Date”.

Proper list segmentation helps you achieve higher open and click rates, which sends positive feedback to inbox providers.

Tracking and Tweaking Your Metrics

The warm-up requires continuous monitoring if you are doing it manually. With MassMailer, you get access to Email Monitor, which lets you track the following important metrics:

  1. Open and click rates, which signify recipient engagement.
  2. Bounce rates indicate there are issues with your lists.
  3. Spam complaints, which means recipients don’t want to see your emails. Pause your campaigns immediately and address the issue.
  4. Unsubscribes occur when you send emails too quickly or frequently.

Poor engagement and spam complaints are the telltale signs that you need to stop your campaign and reassess the warm-up strategy.

Bonus: Watch this YouTube video for a more detailed understanding of manual warm-up.

Segmenting Lists with Salesforce

Salesforce provides convenient native list views and campaigns, using which you can manually group your contacts for IP warm-up:

  • Control your batch size (10, 25, 50, 100, or 200 records at a time) using list views.
  • Be consistent in sorting your lists (for example, by creation date) to avoid saving duplicate addresses.
  • Email records occur sequentially without overlap for multi-day warm-up processes. Alternatively, you can create daily campaigns, export a subset of members, and reimport them to ensure cleaner and more accurate tracking.

You can significantly speed up this process by having a Salesforce admin on board with it.

 

Manual x Automated Warm-Up: The Best of Both Worlds

Automatic IP warm-up tools (like MassMailer’s integrated automation) help you build a good sender reputation by gradually increasing the load in the background. With that said, you still need to monitor segmentation and the subtle engagement nuances of your lists.

Manual warm-up facilitates:

  • Human oversight for maintaining high-quality lists and effective messaging.
  • Real-time correction in strategies if metrics turn unfavorable.
  • Customized pace that fits your audience and their needs.

Coupled together, manual and automated warm-up form a double layer of protection to ensure your domain builds a good reputation.

Handy Tips: Maintaining Domain Health

Your work doesn’t end with warming up your IP – it still needs periodic maintenance:

  • Be consistent with cleaning your lists to remove inactive, invalid, and spam-trap addresses. This prevents bounces and complaints.
  • Drive engagement by crafting personalized subject lines and content.
  • Leverage Google Postmaster Tools to monitor your domain health and sender reputation.
  • Do not use overly promotional language, and steer clear of spam-trigger words like “Free,” “Urgent,” or “Guaranteed”.
  • Execute pre-campaign scans using tools like MassMailer’s Email Monitor to verify emails before a campaign is sent.

Scale Up Your Campaigns Without Burning Your Domain with MassMailer

Warming up your IP is the cornerstone for good sender reputation and achieving high deliverability. Using the thorough 21-day plan discussed in this blog, combined with MassMailer’s automation capabilities and tracking, you can easily scale up your campaigns without risking your reputation or deliverability.

Reckless email blasts are a thing of the past. With MassMailer’s well-orchestrated IP warm-ups, you can send thousands of emails and build a strong sender reputation. Start your 15-day free trial today, or schedule a live demo now.