How to Warm Up an Email Account (July 2024 Update)
A cold mailbox will quickly stall your outreach. Find out how to warm up mailboxes and ensure your emails land in inboxes.
Email service providers like Google, Microsoft Outlook, and Yahoo have made cracking down on spam a priority in 2024.
As a result, many have proclaimed the end of cold email based on new rules released earlier this year.
However, cold email is far from over. Outbound is still a viable channel for business growth so long as you properly manage the mailboxes you use for cold outreach.
That’s why we’re revisiting how to warm up a new mailbox and updating our suggestions based on the new email rules.
What is email warm-up?
Email warm-up is the process of sending an increasing number of emails from a new email account, getting replies to those emails, and sending answers in return.
By repeating this process over several weeks, the new email account will build a positive inbox reputation, which in turn will improve its email deliverability and avoid triggering spam filters.
However, you can’t just ramp up from 0 to 60 emails in one day. This is a surefire way of an insta-block.
How is inbox reputation scored?
By starting slow and gradually growing volume, you build your inbox reputation – a score that shows the trustworthiness of emails sent from your inbox.
When assessing your inbox reputation (also sometimes referred to as sender reputation or domain reputation), email service providers look at several factors:
- Are you sending mass emails immediately or was your reputation earned the hard way?
- Are your emails being opened, ignored, or marked as important?
- Are your emails being forwarded to specific folders?
- Are your emails being ignored, deleted, or marked as spam?
Inbox reputation scores are assigned on a scale from 0 to 100. The closer your score is to 100, the better your reputation.
Here’s a general breakdown of inbox reputation scores.
| Score | |
| Good | 81+ |
| Average | 70-80 |
| Poor | 0-69 |
New email accounts start with an ‘average’ reputation. Scores under 70 are a red flag, and once the score is under 50, there’s a strong chance the account will be blocked.
Every action after an account is created – such as sending, responding, reading, marking as spam, etc. – will impact your reputation.
Everyday actions such as sending and receiving a few emails each day improve your reputation.
Unusual actions like sending large volumes of emails that are ignored or marked as spam hurt your reputation.
How much time is needed to warm up an email account?
Email warm-up now takes 4-6 weeks.
A few years ago, warm-up needed as little as 14 days before increasing to 4 weeks last year.
While you can still warm up accounts in 4 weeks, we suggest playing it safe and gradually ramping up outgoing volume from 5 emails in the 1st week to 30 emails in the 5th or 6th week.
What you definitely shouldn’t do is crank up outgoing volume from a low number to a high number overnight. One of our customers did this while using a different sales platform only to see their accounts get blocked very quickly.
When they came to us, we were able to help them get their cold outreach restarted by creating brand-new accounts while commencing the slow journey of ‘rehabbing’ their accounts.
Why is email warm-up important?
If you’re planning to run your outreach using your account, it’s absolutely essential that you make sure your account is warm.
Inbound and outbound sales campaigns are treated very differently from typical work correspondence.
Even the best sales campaigns are lucky to achieve ~50% open rates and 10% response rates. With the new rules, all it takes is a small percentage of people to mark your campaign as spam to break your outbound and get your account blocked.
| Without email warm-up | With email warm-up |
|---|---|
| Your deliverability drops | Your deliverability improves |
| Your emails end up in spam | Your emails land in inboxes |
| Your domain is blacklisted | Your inbox earns a good sender reputation |
| You are blocked from sending emails | You can safely scale your outreach |
Benefits of email warm-up
Warm-up can be inconvenient and time-consuming when done manually. Fortunately, there are several benefits to warming up your mailbox (aside from helping you avoid being blocked).
Here are some of the benefits of email warm-up:
- Builds up your inbox reputation (if you don’t have one already)
- Repairs a poor inbox reputation
- Improves deliverability for email outreach
- Helps scale your outreach faster
- Prevents your campaigns from being set back 4-6 weeks
What are your options for email warm-up?
Luckily, you’re not stuck with just one option for warming up a new account.
There are three options available to you: manual, outsourced, and automated.
Option 1: Manual warm-up
Manually warming up your account is generally considered the safest option since you maintain full control and don’t have to hand over log-in credentials.
It will take a lot of time though. On the bright side, warm-up is pretty simple.
All you need to do is start sending emails to friends, family, and colleagues and have them open your messages, reply, and mark the conversation as important. You can even send emails to other email accounts you own.
You can even use generative AI to save you time by thinking up different ways to phrase initial emails since sending the same email multiple times to different people can be a red flag to email providers.
Here’s a quick rundown of the manual process from start to finish:
- Create your email account
- Set up a custom “from line” and signature
- Avoid using photos or links in your signature during warm-up
- Set up your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC policies
- Send a couple of emails to contacts (family, friends, colleagues, etc.)
- Tell your contacts to…
- Mark the conversation as important
- Reply to your email
- Reply to the responses you receive
- Repeat the Send-Receive-Reply process each day for 4-6 weeks, gradually increasing the number of emails sent from a couple per day to your expected daily volume (no more than 30 per account and 100 per domain)
The advantage is that manually warming up an account is free and email providers will see you as a human (Yay! Humanity confirmed! 🥳).
The disadvantage is that warm-up requires regular “maintenance”, and if you do warm-up manually, you’ll need to repeat this process for as long as you want to use the account. Making matters more challenging is that a long break with no warm-up or campaigns could “erase” all the progress you’ve made.
Option 2: Outsource your warm-up
Let’s be real – Manual warm-up isn’t anyone’s first choice for fun. And if you want it done properly, you need to send messages and get responses every day (preferably including weekends).
Alternatively, you can hire someone to do it. There are freelancers and agencies that you can outsource your warm-up to, and they’re supposed to get it done by the intended deadline.
However, there are some drawbacks:
- Costs will vary significantly (and cheaper doesn’t always mean better)
- You’ll need to do a bit of research to ensure the person/agency you hire is trustworthy (and won’t cut and run)
- They may make a mistake during the warm-up process, and depending on the terms of your agreement, you may need to pay them to do it again or do it yourself (in which case, you lose time and money)
So while you save time, you are shelling out money every month for as long as you want them to warm up accounts.
Option 3: Automate your warm-up
If (A) you want to save yourself hours of manually warming up and (B) you don’t want to deal with the chances of human error, you can delegate your warm-up to an automated solution.
There are several software solutions available that will help you automate your warm-up. Some sales outreach platforms like AiSDR also offer you the ability to connect and start warming up your account at no extra cost as part of the subscription.
While this is a fast and painless way to begin building your inbox reputation, you’ll want to check their terms of service, as well as how their warm-up works. For instance:
- Do they use real or temporary accounts to help build your inbox reputation?
- Are messages “real” or “gibberish”?
- Do they just send and receive messages?
- Do messages receive engagement (i.e. marked as important)?
The more positive responses, the more reliable the service.
If you’re considering automating your warm-up, there’s one more advantage that might make it the preferred method.
Simply put, you can leave your warm-up on.
This will ensure a steady stream of messages guaranteed to receive high engagement. Considering that your cold outreach will likely have a low open and reply rate, keeping your warm-up enabled will help balance out changes to your inbox reputation.
And since AiSDR runs warm-up for you at no extra cost, you can sit back and relax as your campaign moves forward.
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