Marketing Cloud Next Domain Warming

Authentication Guidance

Before you begin warming your IP or sending domain, make sure that your domain meets bulk sender guidelines enforced by major MBPs. Then, test that your emails follow DMARC, SPF, and DKIM authentication protocols through a service such as aboutmy.email.

We recommend sending to your most active and engaged subscribers during this critical period. MBPs use these initial sends to assess your sending reputation. The more opens and clicks your messages get, the quicker your sender reputation is established.

Reputation Scoring

The process of warming an IP address or domain is contingent on its reputation with MBPs. Your reputation score is based on the number of opens, clicks, bounces, and complaints an IP address or domain receives. A higher reputation influences how quickly you can increase your send volume.

To improve your reputation, make sure that you have a clear double-opt-in process and follow good list hygiene practices. Give recipients a say in the kinds of content that they receive and how often they receive them. Remove unengaged recipients from your mailing lists, and limit email sends to only those recipients who have engaged in the last six months.

High bounce rates, especially hard bounces, hint at a low-quality mailing list. A high complaint rate signals that your recipients don’t want your emails or think that the emails are spam. In general, aim to keep bounce rates under 2% and complaint rates under 0.1%.

Increasing Send Volume

To build a strong sender reputation, gradually expand your audience based on email interactions. For your first week, slowly increase your send volume. Send emails to only your most engaged recipients, including new sign-ups and anyone who’s engaged in the past month.

After that, expand your sending list each week by one month of engagement. For example, during week two, send messages to anyone who’s engaged in the past two months. During week three, send messages to subscribers who have engaged in the past three months, and so on.

Starting during the sixth week, proactively remove unengaged recipients from your list. Don’t send messages to subscribers who haven’t engaged in over six months.

If at any point you notice a dip in performance, scale back your send volume to the last successful threshold to protect your sender reputation.

Increasing Send Volume

Throughout the warming process, if engagement is low or your messages are hitting spam filters, limit daily volume increasing to 10-20% and remember to focus on only the most active subscribers. When you see high open rates and minimal issues, you can start to increase sending volume by 20-30% each day.

After you send a message to 60-70% of your total audience volume, you open up sending to everyone. This process usually takes senders four to seven weeks.

Avoid Spam Traps

The most common types of spam traps are honeypots (addresses created specifically to catch spammers) and recycled spam traps (addresses that can be reused after 6-12 months of inactivity). Successful honeypots suggest issues with your opt-in process or that your list may contain purchased data. Successful recycled spam traps suggest list hygiene issues and that you should scale back your audience to recipients with engagement in the last six months. Too many successful traps can cause blocklisting issues with specific receivers, or even listing at Spamhaus (a third-party data provider for some MBPs) that can cause widespread blocking issues.

You can generally avoid spam traps if you:

• Don’t purchase or rent lists.
• Actively remove hard bounces from your campaigns.
• Continuously re-engage your inactive recipients. At three months of no engagement, a subscriber is considered uninterested and the odds of winning them back decrease greatly. Consider a highly targeted campaign designed to win back their business. If they still don’t engage, consider dropping them before the six-month window.
• Remove unengaged recipients. After six months of no engagement, remove them from your mailing list.