How to warm-up your sending domain using sequence numbers?

The warm-up process is meant for gradually send emails one day at a time, instead of massively sending within a single day. This process is recommended for new sending domains and it helps in maintaining your reputation. It also increases the chances of delivering your emails to the contacts' inbox. Just one step closer to avoiding the spam folder and email firewalls. 

Now let's see how to automate the warm-up process in Loopify. 

Note: First, make sure you've cleaned your email list, by removing the contacts that unsubscribed or are inactive users.

In our example, we'll have 1700 contacts, and we'll warm-up our domain in 4 days. So the first day we'll send 100 emails, the second day 200, and so forth. This is a good practice for your new domain because if you have thousands of contacts and need to send many emails at once, it would be very aggressive to all email clients and can ruin your reputation. To avoid any bad domain reputation: 

• Go to the Contacts app.
• Create a sequence-number field - the number should start from 1. You can add a 'to' number if you know the exact number of your contacts (this is optional). Leaving the 'to' option empty means to infinity!
• Once you create your sequence filed, create a new flow. 
  • Add a New Entry block. 
  • Connect the New Entry block with an Update contact block and set the action to 'update contact field' and select the sequence-number field we just created. 
  • Connect the Update Contact block to a Contact match block, the connection should be onDone. Connect this Update Contact block to as many Contact Match blocks as you need, depending on the number of contacts. In our example, we'll use 4 blocks, because our warm-up will last for 4 days (which is enough for 1700 contacts). Add the blocks and connect them with a connection type 'No' 
    
    In the first Contact Match, choose 'The contact matches a segment', and then create a new campaign segment. We now need a smart segment to check and find only the first 100 contacts. To do this, switch the toggle to create a new smart segment:
    1) YourSequenceField  ➝ is less than or equal to ➝ 100
    Save this smart segment.
    2) Apply the same steps to the second Contact match block but this time the smart segment should find and send to the second wave of contacts (101 to 300). The smart segment should look like this:
    Your sequence field ➝ is less than or equal to ➝ 300   
    3) Now continue to the third contact match block, but this time we look for the contacts from 301 to 700. This means the third smart segment should be:
    Your sequence field ➝ is less than or equal to ➝ 700   
    
    And so on. See the warm-up plan below and create the segments, based on the table 👇
    
    
  • Once you are done setting up the segments, we need to add the waiting days i.e. to set up the email sending to be once per day. Add a Wait block after each Contact match block and connect them with a connection type 'Yes' ('yes' meaning the smart segment conditions are passed). 
    Set the first Wait block with a couple of minutes of delay. Meaning when you'll go live with the flow, the first email will be sent after a few minutes. The second wait block should be with 1 day of delay, the third with 2 days of delay, and so on. 
  • When you finish with the Wait blocks just add an Email block and choose the Email you want to send to your contacts. Connect all Wait blocks with the Email block.  

All done! You can go live with the Flow. When we add the 1700 contacts to the New Entry block that we added, each will be assigned a unique sequence number starting from 1. Based on the smart segment, the first 100 contacts will be sent an email immediately, the second wave od 200 contacts will be sent an email the next day, and so on. Our job is done, the smart segments and wait blocks will now do their job. 

We have another way of warming-up the domain that doesn't involve sequence-numbers, which you can also check out. 

The method that you use to warm-up the domain doesn't really matter as long as you warm up the domain! ✌