Warming Up an IP Address

As you probably know, as a sophisticated email marketing professional, you want your own dedicated IP address from which to send your email campaigns. More information about the difference between shared and dedicated IPs can be found on our site but today we want to address the important topic of establishing a positive profile for your dedicated IP address.

You just went out and purchased a dedicated IP address so now you don’t have to worry about reliable delivery anymore right? WRONG!

 Although your new IP address doesn’t have a bad reputation with ISPs, it doesn’t have a good one yet either. Its important that you take proper steps to ensure that you “warm up” your IP address with a careful schedule while following all the usual best practices to ensure reliable delivery.

The idea of warming up your IP involves a slow progression from day to day and/or week to week to build up to your ideal sending volume. Don’t send out 5000 emails on the first day. Instead, identify your long term goal of total sending volume and devise a plan to slowly build to that number. An easy way to do this is to write an email that isn’t super time sensitive. Send this email to portions of your list(s) over time, starting with smaller portions and building up to larger pieces of the list.