What is IP warming and why should I do it?

When you start with a brand new Gateway eNewsletter account, you also start with brand new IP addresses. These IP addresses will have no history—good or bad. To suddenly start sending out large batches of email from an unestablished IP can raise red flags to the various ISPs (Internet Service Providers such as AOL, Gmail, Comcast, and AT&T) causing your mail to be blacklisted.

Ascendant helps protect that reputation by providing every client with 2 types of IPs—one for subscribers and one for non-subscribers, throttling your emails (regulate email send rates), scrubbing any new lists prior to upload, automatically removing hard bounces, maintaining separate lists for viewers and subscribers, and providing extensive reporting and list building options.

A huge part of successful e-newsletter campaigns is building and maintaining a strong IP reputation with the ISPs, who work to protect against spammers. Building a good reputation takes time and also requires consistent use of best practices. While Ascendant provides you with the tools you need, you will need to employ best practices with your e-newsletter campaign, starting with warming up your new IP address. The first 30 days should be used solely to warm up that new IP and establish a good reputation.

1. Be prepared for slow delivery: You do not want to catch the negative attention of the ISPs by flooding them with a bunch of emails all at one time. For this reason, your account is initially set to mail 500 items every 5 minutes. This is intentionally slow so as not to raise any red flags with ISPs.
2. Send to smaller lists: Try not to send to more than 10,000 contacts at a time. We can work with you to split your All Contacts list into smaller batches. If you have a larger list, send out the same mailing to smaller groups each day to until you reach everyone. For example, if you have a list of 60k, break it down into 6 lists. Send your newsletter out to the first list on Monday, make a copy and send it out to the second list on Tuesday, and repeat until your newsletter has reached your entire list.
3. Be consistent: During these first 30 days, try to send a new mailing at least once a week to your segmented lists. Don't send more than once a day, and don't send to the same list more than twice a week. Believe it or not, sending not enough can hurt your reputation just as badly as sending too much. If there are large gaps of time between mailings (several months or more) and you plan on mailing to a large list all at once, that can damage your reputation.
4. Follow best practices for creating content: Send content people want to see to people who want to see it. For more information, see our article Optimizing Content for Deliverability.
5. Establish your communications plan: Determine your goals, set specific targets with deadlines, establish strategies for reaching your targets, and continually evaluate and refine your strategy. For more information, see our article Establishing a Communications Plan.

After your 30 day warm up period has passed, we will bump up your delivery rate, and you can begin progressively compressing your lists. For example, if you have a 60 k list that has been split into 6 smaller lists, initially it will take you 6 days to send out a mailer. After 30 days is up, send to 2 lists a day for a couple weeks, then send to 3 lists a day for a couple of weeks and so on until you are eventually sending to the full list in one day. (For larger lists of a 100k or more, it's a good idea to continue splitting your mailings up over a couple of days if possible.)