What To Know When Selecting a New Email Service Provider

Changing to a new email service provider (ESP) can be a stressful experience for any email marketing professional. Regardless to which ESP you're migrating your email programs, you need careful planning and execution. From a deliverability perspective, you'll be getting a new IP address and sending your email campaigns from a new infrastructure.

Receiving ISPs track sender reputation predominantly by IP address. So switching to a new ESP means you need to start over and rebuild your sender reputation. Here are some key deliverability considerations when migrating to a new ESP.

Warming Up Your IP Address

Like going on a first date, you only have one chance to make a good first impression with ISPs. Successful warm up starts with establishing a good sender reputation over the first several days of emailing. Let's use the analogy of someone who has no credit history going to a bank for a loan. Since you have no standing, the bank will naturally be suspicious of your ability to repay the loan.  

The same basic logic applies to how your new IP is treated by the respective ISP filters. You have to establish your reputation as a good email sender before the ISP filters will allow you to send your email campaigns without interruption. Warming up your IP address improves delivery performance, establishes credibility with ISPs, and builds your reputation as a legitimate email sender. 

So what can you do?

You can start with selecting a few email campaigns that typically perform well-campaigns that usually have high open and click through rates. Starting with your best performing campaigns will begin to train ISP filters to see that the email you send is well received by your subscribers. In addition to selecting your best campaigns, segment your audience to include only your most engaged subscribers. 

ISPs tell us they want to see emails sent to a small, highly engaged audience-at volume levels they have prescribed-during the first days of IP warm up.  The best way to do this is to segment your audience by how long it's been since a subscriber has opened or clicked on an email message from you. During the first week of sending from your new IP, only send to addresses that have opened or clicked on a message from you recently-in the past three months for example. The specific criteria will vary for each sender-based on size of your email list, etc.-but sending only to recently engaged subscribers is critical during the warm up period.

After the initial warm up, you need to ramp up volume gradually over the course of four to six weeks, maybe more for high volume senders. If you increase sending volumes too quickly from day to day, you may run into ISP volume triggers. Ramping up your sending volume over time will establish a volume profile, and allow you to reach your regular sending volumes.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid During IP Warm Up

The road to IP warm up wonderland, as it were, is filled with potential hazards.  Email marketers need to be aware of these at all times. From our experience, the most common pitfalls to avoid during IP warm up include: low subscriber engagement, high spam complaints, too many hard bounces, and increasing sending volume too quickly.

Here's how to avoid these common pitfalls:

While building sender reputation on your new IP address, send to a small, highly engaged audience. Send your most relevant email campaigns, and send only to people who have opened or clicked on an email message recently. This is critical. By sending to a highly engaged audience, you'll also be keeping spam complaints and spam trap hits to a minimum.

Ramp Up Volume Gradually

Exclude new signups from any campaigns you send during the first week of the warm up process. While new signups usually have high open rates, they also have high hard bounce rates and may include spam traps that will hurt your fledgling sender reputation.

Insist on porting over all suppression files from your previous provider. Any address that hard bounced, unsubscribed, or complained on your previous platform must remain suppressed. High hard bounce (invalid) rates are the fastest way to trigger filtering and blocking on your new IP. Ramp up your sending volume slowly, and do so in gradual increments.

At the end of an official IP warm up period, your sender reputation is nascent. Think of your new IP like a newborn that needs your protection. Jumping to full volume too quickly will trigger blocking and filtering, destroying the reputation you've worked hard to build.

Do Transactional-Only Email Streams Require a Traditional IP Warm Up?

Transactional-only email streams do not require a traditional IP warm up, and there are a couple of reasons:

Transactional email usually performs well with regard to sender reputation, so we don't see the typical deliverability problems associated with warming up a new promotional IP.

You cannot plan and control transactional email streams the way you can with promotional, where you select specific campaigns to use for warm up, specify segmentation criteria, etc.

Email senders typically see good delivery rates on new transactional IPs through what we call an organic warm up. Transactional email streams that are truly transactional-like order confirmations, shipping notices, etc.-should have high engagement and build a good sender reputation from the first day of sending from the new ESP.

The one caveat to consider for warming up a transactional-only IP address is to consider how quickly sending volume will build on the new IP. Rather than switching everything over to the new platform on day one, it is better to migrate a few transactional programs over to your new ESP during the first week of sending. This way, the volume builds over the first week and doesn't spike too quickly on the new IP.

Plan for Success and be a Success

So if you're considering an ESP migration, now you know the basics of a successful IP warmup. Follow these principles, and you'll be successful.   

Modern Marketers must orchestrate and deliver marketing messages that are relevant to individual preferences and behavior. Getting email delivered to the inbox is critical to this process. To learn more download Email Deliverability: Guide for Modern Marketers.