At Airship we give each of our customers their own IP (Internet Protocol) address for the broadcast of email. Think of this as your company’s postal address but for electronic communication.
Any email which is sent from your address will either positively or negatively impact how likely it is for future emails you send to be marked as spam. Having your own IP address enables you to build your reputation with ESPs (Email Service Providers) without being affected by other senders. This means you need to warm your IP address when you join Airship and keep your database clean by removing hard and soft bounces as well as trying to re-engage lapsed customers (more on that below).
We have automated tools that help with this process but it’s important that you take steps to help you build a positive reputation for your IP address quickly.
How to build your positive reputation (warming up your IP)
There are a number of steps to take to build your reputation. This process is known as “IP warming”. We encourage our clients to adhere to best practice to ensure their reputation is built in the best way possible.
Clean your existing database. By using a third-party service such as Email Hippo or another provider, upload your current data and pass it through them to clean your data.
Avoid the use of historical data. We recommend that you don’t import any data that’s not been interacted with in over 6 months. Some ESPs monitor emails sent to lapsed email addresses and if emails are sent to those addresses it can have a significant negative impact on the delivery of email to any of your customers who use that ESP.
Create your automated customer journeys. This includes your Welcome Journey, Birthday Journey or WiFi Journey. You can quickly create a journey based on a creation date or WiFi interaction date that will drive immediate reputation as the open and interaction rate will be high as it’s fresh data. You can set up your journeys by following our automation guides. These journeys should be set-up at the same time or ideally prior to you starting to send campaign emails to your database.
Start with small volume and gradually increase it over time. When you are ready to broadcast, start by focussing on your best customers to limit the quantity of email you are sending each day. There is no set rule about how many emails you can send in a day as ESPs are careful to keep the configuration of their spam detection systems private. We recommend you start with 5,000 emails per day in the first week then double that amount each week. If you’ve gone through the above steps and have had automated journeys running for a couple of weeks then you can send to larger volumes. The support team at Airship will be able to provide guidance on this.
Split test your sends. Ensure that you split test your campaign broadcasts. You can split test up to five subject lines if your volumes are high enough. The Airship split test tool will automatically send to the most engaged customers on your list first. This helps build your reputation with the ESPs (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, etc) as the emails are generally highly engaged. If you’d like more information on how to send a split test email, check out our support article here.
Activate re-engagement campaigns. This is critical to ensuring that you are removing unengaged customers from your lists. ESPs score email sends on the engagement of emails so by removing those customers that don’t engage, more emails will make the inbox.
How do I learn more about this?
If you have more questions about deliverability and IP warming, please email success@airship.co.uk for further assistance.