What is a domain?

What is domain warming?

Why domain warming matters

1. Low deliverability: Your emails will consistently land in spam folders, rendering all of your campaign efforts useless.
   
2. Higher bounce rates: Since your sender reputation hasn't been established yet, mailbox providers may reject your emails, which may cause excessive hard or soft bounces and signal poor sending hygiene.
   
3. Reputation damage: Once your domain/IP is flagged as a potential spammer, it's very difficult and time-consuming to repair that bad reputation.
   
4. Blacklisting: In severe cases, your sending domain could be placed on an industry-wide blacklist, halting your email efforts entirely.
   
5. Lower engagement: When emails don't reach inboxes, few people see or interact with them, which means fewer opens, clicks, conversions, and lower overall campaign performance.
   

How to warm up your sender domain using Zoho Campaigns: A use case

1. Step 1: Morris has to authenticate his sender domain under Settings → Domain Authentication using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to prove legitimacy and security.
   
2. Step 2: Instead of targeting all 20,000 contacts at once, Morris can group his contacts into different segments, categorizing them based on most engaged and active subscribers (those who frequently open and click emails), moderately engaged, and so on.
   
3. Step 3: He can then send his campaigns to small batches of these contacts, and then gradually increase the number of recipients. He can try sending the campaigns based on recipients' time zones or optimal open times to increase his chances that recipients will notice and open his emails.
   
4. Step 4: For the next two to four weeks, Morris must slowly increase his daily sending volume after closely monitoring his open rates, bounce rates, and spam complaints under Campaign Reports.
   
5. Step 5: When the engagement metrics start looking healthy and consistent, Morris can scale up and send emails to his entire audience, because by now ESPs will have recognized his domain as a trusted sender with a healthy reputation and good inbox reach.
   

Wrapping it up