IP Warming
IP Warming is a complicated, yet crucial part of Email Marketing. Your IP health determines how many of your emails land (or don’t land) in your users’ inboxes. Thankfully, there’s a few cool features in Braze that can help you streamline your IP Warmup process. Let’s get right to it!
Step 1: Naming Convention & Tags
For all your Braze Campaigns/Canvases, it’s a good idea to establish a naming convention, if you haven’t already. Especially for IP Warming, it’ll be helpful to keep track of which IP Day # it is. This step isn’t completely necessary, but strongly recommended.
Tags are also another important part of your Braze process, except for IP Warming, they’re actually a bit more important than the naming convention. Also, you may have to go through multiple IP Warmups; maybe you have a monthly newsletter or multiple promotions throughout the year. It’s important to add a unique tag for each time you go through IP Warmup.
For every IP Warmup, I would add 2 tags:
A tag called IP Warming
Another tag that’s specific to this IP Warmup, nested under the IP Warming tag
I’ll explain the reason for these in a later step.
Step 2: Build Your Email
Whenever you go through IP Warmup, you want to send your most engaging content to your users. Your goal is to build a good reputation with the Inbox Service Providers (ISPs) by sending emails that’ll lead to a high CTR.
One thing to note is that you do not need to create a new email for each day of IP Warming. You definitely can (and should) send the same email throughout the entire IP Warming period.
Step 3: Re-Eligibility OFF
Schedule your first launch date, and make sure that the checkbox below is unchecked. No one needs to receive the same email twice.
Step 4: Audience Filter
There’s a very important Audience Filter that you’ll have to add, and this is where our tag from earlier comes in handy. Add your IP Warmup recipient Segment, then additionally, look for a filter called “Received Message from Campaign or Canvas with Tag”.
Choose that filter, switch the “Has” to “Has not”, and choose the nested tag that we chose from Step 1.
Here’s why this filter is important:
Of course, on Day 1, no one will have received this campaign, so no one will be filtered out. However, on subsequent days, when we target the same audience segment, we want to make sure that users who have already received the IP Warmup campaign on previous days do not receive another email from the same campaign. That’s what this filter and the tag system allow us to do.
Step 5: Audience Volume
There’s a very good Braze Documentation here that includes a table for how many emails you should send on which day of IP Warming. If you’re building your Email Marketing from scratch and aren’t sending any emails today, then you should start from Day 1 which is 50 emails. If you already have some Lifecycle Automations in place and send, let’s say, 5000 emails/day (Day 5 on the chart) on average, then you can start from Day 6 at 10000 emails.
If you’re not sure how many emails your dashboard is sending per day, submit a Braze Support ticket and ask them to schedule a daily Looker Deliverability Report. The daily emails can get annoying, so I strongly recommend setting an inbox filter so that the report skips the inbox and gets archived. This way, you don’t need to be alerted every day, but you always have your email metrics when you need it.
Step 6: Launch Day 1
There’s a few other things that are optional, like adjusting the Control Group, setting your Conversion Event, etc., but we’ve covered all the necessary parts of IP Warming setup. You can launch Day 1, closely monitor your results, and get ready to duplicate and repeat!
Step 7: Duplicate Day 1 & Edit
For all the subsequent days of IP Warming, we’re going to duplicate our Day 1 Campaign.
And the only things we need to remember to change are:
The Campaign title (1. Compose Messages page)
The Launch Date (2. Schedule Delivery page)
Audience Volume (3. Target Audiences page)
By duplicating the exact same Campaign each day, we already have the right tags set, re-eligibility setting figured out, and the correct audience filters added.
That’s it! You’ve successfully (re)learned how to go through IP Warming in Braze!
Why did we add the tag “IP Warming”?
I knew you were waiting for me to explain this part. Check out how my dashboard looks after we launched our first IP Warming Campaigns.
Now, Braze has a very cool nested tag structure that allows you to make folders and subfolders for your tags. Because of our tagging setup, all IP Warming Campaigns are neatly tucked into a single tag called IP Warming, sub-categorized by the specific campaign name. For teams that have to go through IP Warming very regularly, imagine having a new top-level tag folder for every IP Warming campaign. That would be a nightmare and would make your tagging system very messy, very quickly! This is why I suggest everyone to have a top-level tag called IP Warming that can house all your future specific IP Warming campaign tags.
Conclusion
IP Warming is a tedious process, but if you want to maximize the deliverability and landing rate of your emails to your users’ inboxes, then it’s a non-negotiable! A healthy deliverability ultimately decreases your CPM and provides a better user experience for your Email Marketing Program.
Thank you!
Thank you for reading, and please reach out with any questions!
allan@fornowmarketing.com
