When new users begin sending emails from GlassHive, they may notice that their messages are flagged as spam or aren't reaching inboxes, even if their domain has been established for years.
This occurs because the emails are being sent from a new IP address that email service providers (ESPs) like Gmail and Outlook are unfamiliar with. ESPs assess both the reputation of your sending IP and domain to determine if an email should be delivered to the inbox, spam folder, or blocked. While both the IP address and domain might individually have strong reputations, when they're used together for the first time, ESPs see this combination as new. Since they haven't previously observed the two working together, there's no established trust between them.
Without a solid history of your domain sending emails from this IP address, ESPs can't fully trust the combination, which leads to emails being flagged as spam. This is a common challenge in email marketing and is the reason for domain/IP warming—a process that gradually builds trust with ESPs over time.
If you haven't yet authenticated your email domain, you can learn how to do so with the article below.
Warming Up Your Domain
Domain warming is the process of gradually increasing the volume of emails sent from your new IP address over time, allowing ESPs to get familiar with the domain/IP combination and to establish trust.
There are a ton of articles online about domain and IP address warming. However, since ESPs don't publicize the criteria for what they deem a "safe domain/IP address reputation", a lot of this is just e-marketing best practices with a little common sense. Feel free to search "Domain/IP Address Warming Best Practices" for more info.
The point is, that there is no "one way" to warm up your domain/IP address combo. However, here is a good method for those just starting to send campaigns with GlassHive.
As you get to know the app and its different features, it's a good idea to test them internally. Create a test list with test contacts from your team who won't mind receiving emails from you as you test out features like inserting personalization into emails or sending your first proposal or graphical email via GlassHive. This also helps to warm up your domain by following the best practices associated with IP warming:
You're sending to a small group.
You're sending to recipients who want and are expecting to receive your emails.
If anything does go to spam, these are contacts that you can easily ask to remove any emails from their junk folders and mark as "not spam". These positive actions of contacts opening your emails and marking them as not spam helps to raise the new reputation of your domain sending from GlassHive servers.
Once you've gotten a handle on the features that you think you'll be using the most with GlassHive, you can try sending emails to clients/accounts from GlassHive. This helps you warm up your IP/domain combo by:
Again, you're sending emails to a small group. Your client list is probably going to be larger than any test list you make, but still smaller than a list full of untested cold leads.
These are clients, people who are used to receiving emails from you, and even if they're not opening every email, they're probably not marking it as spam.
Finally, after a few weeks of getting to know the app and sending emails to clients, your IP/domain combo should be warm enough to start sending campaigns to cold leads.
Different articles recommend different time frames for each of the 3 steps above, but on average it can take 2-4 weeks or around 30 days of good sending behavior for ESPs to trust new domain/IP address combos or to trust domains that have been flagged as spam (keep this in mind if you accidentally send a campaign without scrubbing the contacts and get a high bounce rate).
We recommend 2 weeks of internal testing, followed by 2 weeks of sending to clients before you start to send campaigns to cold leads.
You can also check out the article below for general best practices when sending emails from GlassHive.