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Warm Up Your Domain

Warming up your domain is a safety measure to help your emails reach inboxes reliably. Gradually increasing your sending volume builds a positive reputation with email clients and reduces the risk of deliverability issues.

Warming up a domain is a one-time process. Once you’ve built a good reputation, you can maintain higher sending volumes as long as you follow best practices.

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Domains vs IP Addresses

Your sender reputation is based on (i) your domain and (ii) your IP address.

  • Domain is tied to your brand and sending practices. It’s what email clients use to judge whether your emails are trustworthy.
  • IP address is managed by Brew. We maintain high-quality shared IPs for all customers. For enterprise customers, we offer dedicated IP addresses upon request (see more below).

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How to Warm Up Your Domain

1

Determine your starting point

  • New domain: If you’ve never sent emails from your domain, start with a low volume and ramp up gradually.
  • Existing domain with good sending history: If you’ve sent emails before and followed best practices, you can start at a higher volume, but still avoid sudden spikes.
  • Existing domain with poor sending history: We recommend switching to a new domain or subdomain and following the new domain warm-up process (no cold emails, ever).
2

Gradually ramp up

Start with your most engaged contacts first—those who are likely to open, click, and interact with your emails. This helps build a positive reputation quickly. For a new domain, use this schedule:

DayEmails per dayEmails per hour
1Up to 150
2Up to 250
3Up to 400
4Up to 70050 Maximum
5Up to 1,00075 Maximum
6Up to 1,500100 Maximum
7Up to 2,000150 Maximum

For an existing domain with good history, you can ramp up faster:

DayEmails per dayEmails per hour
1Up to 1,000100 Maximum
2Up to 2,500300 Maximum
3Up to 5,000600 Maximum
4Up to 5,000800 Maximum
5Up to 7,5001,000 Maximum
6Up to 7,5001,500 Maximum
7Up to 10,0002,000 Maximum

Adjust based on your audience size and engagement. If you see high bounce or spam rates, slow down and review your list quality.

3

Monitor engagement and deliverability

As you gradually increase your sending volume, pay close attention to:

  • Open rates: Are recipients opening your emails?
  • Click rates: Are they engaging with your content?
  • Bounces: Are there any delivery failures?
  • Spam complaints: Is anyone marking your emails as spam?

Brew’s Ask AI feature provides all these metrics. If you notice declining open rates or increasing bounces, slow down your volume increase until metrics improve.

Improve reputation with self-engagement: Send a test email to yourself, open it, and reply to it. This action signals to email providers that your content is valuable and engaging, which can positively impact your sender reputation and deliverability.

4

Maintain best practices

  • Use double opt-in for all sign-ups to ensure your list is clean and engaged
  • Regularly remove bounces and unengaged contacts—see our Audience Hygiene guide
  • Keep your content valuable and relevant to maintain high engagement rates
  • Avoid spam trigger words and misleading subject lines

Encourage replies to enhance reputation: Email clients view replies as a strong positive signal that your content is valuable. Brew’s AI will sometimes add questions or reply prompts to your emails (like “What do you think?” or “Any feedback?”) to encourage responses and help with your domain reputation. Make sure you monitor and respond to these replies to maintain the engagement loop.

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Monitor Your Sender Reputation

As you warm up your domain, it’s essential to monitor how email providers and security services view your sending reputation. Unlike a credit score, there’s no single universal reputation score for email senders - different providers maintain their own systems.

These free tools provide valuable insights into your sending reputation across different platforms:

For best results, check these tools regularly throughout your domain warm-up process and whenever you make significant changes to your email volume or content strategy. Addressing potential reputation issues early prevents more serious deliverability problems later.

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