If you loved playing Hot and Cold as a kid, you’re probably a great email marketer today. Here’s a brief refresher. During a game of Hot and Cold, somebody hides a prize or a small object while you’re out of the room. When you come in, you start moving in a direction. If it’s away from the prize, they yell “colder,” “freezing,” or “ice cold.” If you are moving toward the prize, they yell “warmer,” “hotter,” “burning,” or “scorching.” The game encapsulates everything you need to know about leads when you grow up.
A cold lead is a person who knows nothing about your business and receives an email from you out of the blue. A cold email campaign aims to turn those cold leads into warm ones and point them toward the prize—your product or service.
Warm leads know about you in some way. They either signed up for your newsletter or bought something from you and then got on your list. Since they’re already moving in the direction of the prize – they can take action after reading about a “hot offer.”
Unlike the game Hot and Cold, your leads won’t react when you yell “hotter.” That’s because you’re playing a marketing game. And you need to use these nine email warm-up strategies for 2024:
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Take care of your domain
You can’t start an email campaign the moment you get a new domain. You might think it’s a good idea to set up an email address immediately and send a hundred emails daily. However, that’s the fastest way to get blocked. In marketing, everything takes time, even your domain and email configuration. Wait at least 12 weeks (3 months) before you start a campaign. You might think that’s slow, but slow is smooth, and smooth leads to steady growth.
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Start from your line and signature
After you set up an email account and pick a good service provider, it’s time to work your way up. It’s essential to look like a real person and use correct data. If you’re using Gmail, add a picture to your profile. Don’t create a fake name. If you opt for an HTML signature, ensure it’s properly designed and doesn’t take up a lot of space. There’s a thin line between a neat signature and one that gets marked as spam.
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Set the SPF and DKIM
The two things that influence your email deliverability are sender policy framework (SPF) and domain keys identified mail (DKIM). It is crucial not to ignore them. You want to set up SPF and DKIM as soon as possible. Every provider has a different setup, and you need to look for a guide or contact support to get help.
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Send a few emails by hand, and do it for a while
Automation is good, but you have to do some manual labor first. Grab the emails of your friends, business partners, or family members and reach out to them personally. Go slow and go simple. There’s a high chance they will all have different hosts like Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, or AOL. That’s good. Make sure they open the emails and reply to you. That way, you’re getting credibility for every host.
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Write like you usually do
A beginner’s mistake is to send ‘test’ emails and force your friends to reply (every email marketer has done this at least once). Instead, write real messages. Providers pay attention to the content of your emails, and they look for clues to mark you as spam. If you don’t know what to write, ask ChatGPT to tell you some jokes and add a question at the end. You want replies, and the laughs are a bonus.
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Reply and collect some responses
Receiving emails is important to establish credibility for your domain and mailbox. You can start by using your personal email address to send emails to your marketing email address. For the first 12 weeks, engage in back-and-forth replies to warm up the mailbox for your campaign. In the meantime, focus on having regular conversations with yourself and your friends to make the new mailbox appear more legitimate.
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Prepare the campaign
Rushing can only do harmful things to your reputation. While preparing the campaign, write a few variations of the email copy you want to send. Collect some targeted prospects, and work on your ideal buyer persona. You can also take time to check whether your security measures are robust. Use a combination of VPN and antivirus, and perform a DNS leak test to make sure your IP address doesn’t get revealed. Consider the first three months as leeway to craft the best possible campaign and then get ready to fire on all fronts.
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Start an automated test campaign
An automated test campaign needs ten to twenty emails at most. Ideally, you’ll use the same texts from your email conversations with friends, business partners, and relatives (step 4). These are valid emails, and they already generated replies. Use a test email address from Mail-Tester to be the first prospect on the list. The tool will tell you if your email account settings are correct and what is the quality of your copy.
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Don’t send too many emails at the start
While researching, you might come across lists that claim to know the best time to send emails. That will only work to your detriment. You’ll send bursts of emails in a short timeframe and become inactive for the rest of the day. From your provider’s perspective, it will look like an anomaly, and they can block you. Send messages steadily throughout the day, and keep the number up to 50 in the beginning.
What’s next?
Then comes iteration and improvement. If you’ve never done cold outreach before, your first campaign will probably be bad. But the second one will be better, and the third one will be even better. You’ll learn from your mistakes, improve, and eventually reach the stage you want to be. Remember to enjoy the process along the way!
