The biggest misconception among businesses new to email marketing is that all you need is a list to send to. That’s what you do with postal mail, right?

Wrong.

Postal agencies worldwide are more than happy to stuff your curbside mailbox with as much junk mail as possible. They make their money delivering junk mail. Email mailbox providers don't.

Spammers are the bane of the existence of every mailbox provider. Spammers get paid to send emails. It's all a numbers game. A 1% response rate from half a million emails is 5,000 responses. Not bad!

Email marketing is still the best way to win new customers and to keep the ones you have. The challenge, therefore, is for you -- a legitimate email marketer -- to avoid appearing as a spammer to mailbox providers.
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Failure to heed this sage advice wastes your time, your money – and worse of all – leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth about email marketing.

Your mailbox provider (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo, Live, Comcast), wants to ensure that the emails delivered to your inbox are the ones you want. For this reason, they've developed highly sophisticated artificial intelligence to filter emails sent to your email address. You'd be surprised how many junk emails sent to you were rejected by your mailbox provider without you even knowing!

You're already aware that your email subject lines, and content should avoid using certain words. While this adage is still true to some degree, it isn’t as relevant as it used to be. The problem is that spammers are always head of the game. As mailbox providers start adding more and more words to their Naughty List of Spam Words, the next thing you know, there’s nothing left that you can say in your emails!

​The most important action that you need to take when first starting out sending emails is that you need to take a tip from your Health Club Trainer: get warmed up first.

“IP Address Warmup” is a term for gradually sending emails using an IP address that has either never been used to send before, or at a higher volume than before.

Mailbox providers are suspicious of suddenly receiving emails they know nothing about or at volumes significantly higher than is historical. Hopping from IP address to IP address is a tactic that spammers employ. Therefore, mailbox providers have built into their machine learning the necessary intelligence to detect emails from “suspicious” IP addresses. A suspicious IP address may be blocked so that the mailbox provider no longer accepts emails from that address. Or emails from that IP address may be routed automatically to the spam folder.

“Warming up an IP address” means to throttle the volume of emails sent from an IP address for a brief period of time. An IP address' throttle limit varies from mailbox provider to mailbox provider. The limit also changes, with a higher and higher limit each successive day. At some point, an IP address is sufficiently “warmed up” and the throttling limits removed.

IP Address warming is always recommended when you are starting out using a dedicated IP address to send your emails. (Don’t worry if you don’t know what a dedicated IP address is. That’s a story for another day.) Nevertheless, anytime you are starting out with email marketing – including moving to a new email service provider – you should implement a warm-up strategy.

The most basic warm-up strategy is to send to a small group of contacts initially. If you’re changing from one platform to another, that initial small group would be contacts who have most recently read your emails. If you’re starting out brand new, then your small group will be just any selected at random.

Let’s say you’ve just returned from a trade show, and you’ve now got a list of 500 people who want to hear from you. On the first day, start with just sending your welcome email to the first 100 contacts. On the second day, send your welcome email to the next 150 contacts. On the third day, send your welcome email to the remaining 250 contacts.

As you start creating more email campaigns to send to your list of contacts, follow the same warm-up plan for the next 3-4 weeks. Pay close attention to the key metrics like opt-out rate and spam complaint rate. The latter metric is very key. Mailbox providers have an extremely low tolerance for spam complaints from your email recipients.

Currently, most mid-level to enterprise-level email service providers accomplish some degree of campaign throttling by mailbox provider and IP address. If you're just starting out with email marketing and are evaluating which email service provider you want to use, I recommend you include email warmup strategies and features in your criteria for choosing.