Deliverability and Email Sending Best Practices for New Accounts

Switching to new marketing automation or email marketing tool is a big deal. It is a bit like changing your domain name. You need to devise a thorough strategy and establish your sender's reputation gradually. 

Following the suggestions in this article can help you build your email sending reputation and improve your deliverability.

Most common mistakes new users make

It's natural to see lower open rates if you're moving from a different provider. This will almost always happen when moving to any email provider. 

Pro tip: Low open rates are especially common if you haven't been sending emails from your own domain name. In other words, if you haven't verified your domain name with your previous email provider, you haven't been building your own email sending reputation. In that case, switching to Encharge and verifying your domain means that you are starting with a new domain without much reputation.

It's important to understand that your sending behavior and practices need to be much more conservative and diligently measured when you start to use a new tool. Avoiding the mistakes below will help you re-establish your reputation and get your deliverability to a normal state.

Important: Encharge also has our own built-in email warm-up/throttling process. Read more about it here.

Sending too fast to too many contacts

Some email clients and ISPs (Internet Service Providers) have strict limits on how many emails you send per day. For instance, Outlook allows new senders to send no more than a thousand emails per day. Sending tens of thousands of emails to Outlook recipients will severely hurt your sending reputation. Start slow and ramp up your sending gradually.

Re-engaging old contacts

Another common mistake is trying to re-engage inactive contacts and large old lists. At Encharge, we do not allow this, as it often leads to a high number of bounces and spam reports. You can read more on the topic here.

Sending to un-subscribed contacts

It's critical that you transfer your contact data correctly to Encharge to ensure that you're not sending emails to any previously unsubscribed contacts.

Warm up your email sending

Important: Note that all new Encharge accounts go through a required automated email warm-up process. You can read more about it here. However, if you want to improve your deliverability further and reduce the chances of being marked by our system, you can apply the tips from this section.

One of the best ways to minimize issues with your email deliverability is to warm up your email sending. Email warm-up is the process of gradually increasing the number of contacts that you send emails to in order to build (or re-establish) your email sending reputation.

Below is the safe email sending schedule that we recommend to all new Encharge users:

After the first 10 days, you can gradually increase the total email volume by 25-50% per day.

We recommend that you initially send only to your most engaged contacts — those that have recently opened, clicked, or purchased in the past 30 days. Yes, this does mean sending fewer emails in the first month, but this is very important for establishing a long-term reputation.

Note that if you have less than 20,000 people in your account, Encharge does not limit the number of emails you can send on a daily or monthly basis. However, an unusually high number of spam reports or very low email engagement metrics might result in your account being paused or suspended by our team. This is why we recommend that you warm up your email sending gradually.

Pro tip: Read our blog post about the 9 critical steps to take to improve your email deliverability.