How AiSDR Ramps Up Client Email Volume 73% Faster

Email warm-up plays a critical role in successful cold outreach. So much so that we’ve regularly covered how to do it on our blog, even publishing whenever best warm-up practices change.

Currently, best practices maintain that warm-up takes ~4 weeks to be effective.

However, that’s a bit too slow for us.

Since an AiSDR subscription is month-to-month, ramping up volume fast is a must. Otherwise, customers will churn because they’ll go a month without any emails to show for it.

Here’s a quick behind-the-scenes look at how we speed up warm-up 73% faster.

TLDR: 

• The goal: Increase outgoing email volume as fast as possible
• The tactic: Set up domains and start warm-up asap
• The result: Launch cold email campaigns 73% faster

Step 1: Set up alternative domains and mailboxes on Day 1

Current best practice maintains that new domains and mailboxes should warm up for ~4 weeks before sending cold emails. This allows the domains and mailboxes to build a strong sender reputation with email providers, in turn helping your emails land in lead inboxes.

But like I said, AiSDR can’t afford to wait around for 4 weeks.

That’s why on day 1, as soon as a new client creates their AiSDR account, we help buy new domains, set up new mailboxes, and configure essential email security protocols:

• Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
• DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)
• Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC)

Skipping these protocols is strongly discouraged. While using a different AI SDR, a client of ours didn’t set them up correctly and saw their domain quickly blacklisted. Once the protocols were properly configured, their email performance surged.

Step 2: Start warm-up immediately

As soon as the new domains and mailboxes are up and running, we start warming them up.

The end goal of warm-up is to maximize email deliverability and score a good sender reputation.

Warm-up involves different actions like:

• Sending emails a small number of emails every day (even weekends)
• Receiving replies to emails sent
• Responding to those replies received
• Making conversations as important
• Adjusting language in emails so that they’re reasonably unique
• Sending emails at different times of the day

All of this can be done manually, but as you can imagine, it’s time-intensive. 

AiSDR simplifies this with the help of an automated warm-up feature. All we have to do is connect a new email account to our warm-up and we let it run.

Step 3: Increase outgoing volume gradually

For the first 5-7 days, we let warm-up naturally run its course.

After the first week, we:

• Increase the maximum outgoing email volume per mailbox by a small number
• Assign the mailbox to an outbound campaign
• Start sending emails using the mailbox
• Prioritize replies to incoming emails over new first-touch emails

The trick is to start small and slowly grow. The max daily volume is usually increased by no more than 5.

This helps prevent email providers from flagging emails as spam and blacklisting inboxes.

Step 4: Monitor the sender reputation on a daily basis

Sender reputation is scored on a scale of 0 to 100. The closer it is to 100, the better the reputation.

Here’s a general breakdown of inbox reputation scores.

New mailboxes start with an average reputation. Scores under 70 are a red flag. And if it drops under 50, email providers will likely block the account.

After the first week of warm-up, we should see inboxes with scores in the 80s, giving us some room to start running cold email.

Once we start sending cold SDR emails, we watch the reputation score. If it starts to drop back to the mid-70s, we pause cold emailing and let warm-up run automatically once again to rebuild the sender reputation.

After it gets over 80, we might resume cold emails from the mailbox.

The Result

Our approach has helped clients achieve these results:

• Cold email campaigns using new email accounts are running 73% faster
• Client campaigns start with a baseline open rate of 40%+, with the max reaching 75% while the overall open rate over time hits 68%