How to warm up an SMTP server

So you just built your SMTP server and decided to start sending emails but you noticed that your emails deliverability is very low even though your email list is valid and all the technical stuff is perfect

If you faced this problem then I have two pieces of news for you, the good one is that this problem can be solved and your emails will land in your customer's inbox, the bad one is that this solution will take some time according to your methods and the number of emails you want to send every day

The solution is simply to warm up your fresh SMTP server and in this article, you will see everything related to this matter so let's start together

What is an SMTP server?

To understand how warming up your SMTP affects your emails deliverability you should know what is the SMTP server you built or you want to build

SMTP or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol helps you to send bulk emails so let's say SMTP is the software you use to send emails over the Internet

When you open your mobile phone or any email client like outlook and write your email then send it to the targeted person or whatever, this email will be sent to SMTP server so there is an SMTP server responsible for delivering your email

This SMTP will receive your email from the email client and will do some indication for example, then if this client can use this server, it will send the email to the target email server

So if you are using Gmail and want to send an email to Yahoo account, the Gmail server will receive your email and authenticate it then will send your email to the target address at Yahoo

 the email will stay inside the Yahoo mail server until the user of the account opens his inbox and sees the message using a protocol like POP or IMAP

How does new SMTP affect your email deliverability

Now you should know that every SMTP server sends emails using a sending IP address so when you build an SMTP server, you get a new sending IP address, and here is the problem, your IP is fresh so it will have less credibility among ISPs

ISP refers to Internet Service Provider like Gmail or Yahoo and every Internet Service Provider has an SMTP server with sending IP address but this IP address is old and strong

To make everything clear let's go to our example and let's say that you decide to send an email from a Gmail email address to your friend that uses a Yahoo email address

What will happen here is that Yahoo will notice that this email is coming from a high authority IP address  so your email will land in your friend's inbox

In another way when you have a new SMTP server with a new sending IP address and you decided to send an email from it then your email will land in the spam section

So when your emails land in the spam section your email, your customer won't notice your emails, and your emails deliverability will go down

The solution here is simply to warm up your SMTP server IP so you build trust and authority between other ISPS and by that, your email will land in their inbox

How to warm up your SMTP server IP?

There are two steps to start warming up your SMTP server and they are really easy but the problem is that the process will take time so keep that in your mind

 Set up DKIM & SPF records

This step comes depending on your requirements but before let's talk about these records 

DKIM is DomainKeys Identified Mail and you can say that it makes sure emails aren't changed while SPF specifies the sending server and now let's see how to set up these records

This is how you set up the SPF records:

Identify mail servers you use to send email from your domain

Make a list of your sending domains

Create your SPF record

Publish it to the DNS

Test and confirm everything is in place

And this is how you set up the DKIM records:

Generate the domain key for your site

Enter the public key into your domain’s DNS records

Set up DKIM signing to include the signature in all outgoing emails

This step sets the basis of your whole build-up strategy, so be careful while creating these records for better email deliverability

How to warm up the SMTP server?

After doing everything we talked about previously, we will come to the last step which is the warming up progress

Here you have to increase the number of your emails sent daily little by little until it reaches all your customers

For example, if you have an email list of 600 people, then you can send 50 emails on the first day, then 100 emails on the second day, and so on until you reach 600 people

Conclusion:

warming up your SMTP server is very important to be successful as an email marketer and to start your email marketing business so we show you how to warm up your SMTP server correctly