IP Warming in Marketing Cloud: A Strategic Guide for Optimized Email Deliverability

In today’s dynamic digital marketing world, every business seeks to bolster its online presence by effectively targeting the right segment of subscribers. Email marketing stands out amongst all other channels as it boasts the highest ROI (Return on Investment). As per Litmus and Salesforce, email marketing has an average ROI of 3,800%, making it the best marketing investment for businesses. 

Within email marketing, one of the less discussed topics is IP Warming; sending emails from a new private IP address. Doing this sets the tone for all future email marketing campaigns from that IP address. According to ReturnPath, 20% of emails fail to reach the recipient’s inbox, so IP warmup must be conducted with all the recommended best practices in mind.

In this article, we will thoroughly explain the IP warmup campaign process. Then together, we will discover how campaigns should be successfully planned by exploring the key components of the campaign. This article equips the reader with insights into crafting a well-defined campaign and its related challenges.

What is IP Warming?

As per Trailhead, “IP warming is the process of gradually increasing the volume of mail sent by a new IP address. The goal is to build up at least 30 days of desirable sending history so that ISPs have an idea of the kinds of mail coming from your new IP address. 

It’s your chance to build your reputation as a desirable prospect. The ramp-up period can take longer than 30 days for some senders and a shorter time for others. Factors such as your overall list size, list quality, send frequency, and subscriber engagement can influence the amount of time it takes for your IP address to be fully ramped up.“

Planning Your IP Warmup Campaign

 As the famous saying goes, “‘fail to prepare, prepare to fail”. Planning is the most important aspect of any task and this is the case for IP warmups too. Planning an IP warmup campaign should be done as soon as the decision to purchase a dedicated IP is made. 

Clients should be made aware of the importance of this campaign and that it will take up to four to six weeks of work. For marketers, this means that their real campaigns can only be started after the IP warmup campaign is successfully completed. 

IP warming planning module has three main parts to it. Let’s get into detail for each one of them in the subsequent sections. 

1. eDM or Email Templates

IP warmup campaign is like doing a regular campaign but from a new IP address. Like any other campaign, this will also involve sending an email(s). There are some important points that should be considered while choosing the email:

• It is recommended to choose newsletters as email content.
• Contents like surveys, and progressive profiling should be considered since they can be used for weeks. 
• Don’t choose time-sensitive email content like coupon codes etc., as it might expire before ending the IP warmup campaign.
• Email and its subject line should entice subscribers to open the email.

2. Audiences

Audiences or subscribers are another important factor when planning an IP warmup campaign. The right audience selection is paramount to the success of the IP warmup campaign, as it helps to build a positive sender reputation and ensure email deliverability.

The audiences or subscribers chosen for the campaign should be active, engaged, and have previous interactions with the brand.

Some examples of interactions include: 

• Opening emails.
• Clicking on the links inside the email.
• Making a transaction based on email.
• Responding to the feedback/survey over the email.

If the subscribers selected are not engaged and active, the campaign will be at risk – the whole idea of this exercise is to build a reputation, and it is via subscribers actively opening and clicking the emails. 

Active and engaged audiences can be extracted from the Marketing Cloud by writing an SQL query in Automation Studio. This query will extract the data from the following data views:

• Open data view
• Click data view 
• Send data view

3. Other Factors

Here are some other important factors that should be kept in mind while creating an IP warmup plan…

Initiating the campaign:

IP warmup can be initiated at any time of the year. However, consideration should be given to the sale season which typically starts in the middle of November and goes on until around New Year’s. It’s best to avoid starting IP warmup campaigns during the above phase of time, as ISPs get swamped with emails from new IPs trying to take advantage of the season. There also might be a chance that your new IP will be under more scrutiny than at other times of the year.

Holidays:

While creating an IP warmup plan, consider what regional and national holidays are taking place in between the duration of the plan. Based on your previous engagement experience during holidays, you can include or exclude emails sent during holidays. 

Weekends:

Just like holidays, weekends also should be considered while creating the plan. Based on your previous engagement experience during holidays, you can include or exclude emails sent during weekends. 

Other simultaneous campaigns:

There could be parallel campaigns running via other ESPs or other IPs/BUs from Marketing Cloud. In the event of such scenarios, IP warmup planning becomes more complex.

In the event of simultaneous campaigns, remove common subscribers from the IP warmup campaign. It’s not advisable to send too many emails to the subscriber.

Also, If subscribers are overlapping between two campaigns, then the details of unsubscribes, spam, and hard bounce should be shared between the two systems.

While running the daily IP warmup journeys, marketers should exclude subscribers with statuses of unsubscribes, spam, and hard bounces. This will help to ensure that the IP warmup campaign respects subscribers’ choices.

Max volume of emails sent:

We should be aware of the maximum number of emails sent in a single shot as this number will guide the IP warmup plan. If the maximum number of emails sent in a single shot is 500K, the IP warmup should scale to 500K on the last day of the campaign. There could be scenarios in which the maximum number of emails sent in a day is greater than the IP warmup subscriber list. In the event of this situation, there will be more than one email sent to the subscribers.

Recommended IP Warmup Plan

Now that the important factors deciding the IP warmup plan are understood, let’s look at a typical IP warm-up plan. Please keep in mind that the plans showcased here are based on generic guidelines and it is advisable to use them by adapting to your use case. 

Typically, there can be two types of IP warmup plans. The first one is a simple plan that considers daily subscribers as a whole, and the second is based on the subscriber email domain.

• Domain-Based Plan: Subscribers are segregated by their business email domains from Gmail, Outlook, AOL etc. The business domain should combine all relevant domains i.e. outlook.com, live.com, and msn.com should be considered as a single domain. It is recommended to extract the top five domains by subscriber numbers and perform the IP warmup on them. We can use the same plan but segregate each day’s send amongst the top five email domains by number.
• Non-Domain Plan: In this instance, subscribers are not segregated based on their email domains, and are instead segregated based on the daily sent numbers. 

See the below sample non-domain plan for your reference.  

Here are some stand out points about a non-domain plan:

• The green column represents each days send.
• The yellow column represents the remaining unique subscribers left from the previous send. It is calculated by removing the previous day’s send from the total number of left subscribers. 
• To illustrate my points, the 6th day sent will be a deduction between the previous two columns i.e. Column L- Column K. 
• This formula will drive the full IP warmup plan.
• There will be three different emails sent during this duration of the plan. 
• When you post the 11th days send, the number of unique subscribers will be less the next day’s send. This means you would need to reuse the existing subscribers who have been targeted using Email 1. Since you cannot send the same emails to previous subscribers, you would have to use another email to target them.
• The 12th day send will be 60000 subscribers = 13600(left subscriber from 1st send)+46400(reused subscribers).
• The 13th day send will be 100000 subscribers = 53600(left subscriber from 2nd send)+46400(third-time subscribers).

This assumes that the maximum single send is 100K or that your total count of subscribers is 100K. If your max single is below/above 100K (or total subscriber count), you can update the plan accordingly. 

It recommends sending the email on each of 13 calendar days. However, you can create the plan by business days based on the recommendations in the above section.  Also, the above plan will be stretched to more than 13 days considering holidays and weekends. 

Summary

A well-designed IP warmup strategy is essential in creating and maintaining sender reputation. By carefully considering the factors discussed in the article, you can create a successful IP warmup plan. 

These factors will provide you with generic guidelines for your IP warmup plan but they cannot guarantee the IP warmup as each scenario is different from one another. Factors like geographic location, composition of the subscribers, quality of subscribers, historic email activities, etc., also play a part in the sender’s reputation.