Experienced marketers know that smart volume management is part of the sender reputation management, especially for high volume senders. If your list is smaller than 5000 emails, then this isn’t something you need to worry about and as long as you build your list overtime and increase sending volume gradually. Also, if you or your organization is a sender with an established reputation and a history of high volume sending, the volume isn’t as big of an issue as campaign engagement and future deliverability.
You need to carefully manage your sending volumes in order to build up your sender reputation if you are:
- Just starting out with bulk campaigns for yourself or a client, or
- Haven’t engaged your list of 5k+ subscribers in the recent months
- Switching your sender domain, email address, and/or provider, possibly due to a “burnt” reputation in the past.
Why not blast a single email campaign to your entire list? Because if this volume of sending isn’t typical for your sender identity it will look suspicious to a mailbox provider (aka ISPs) because big changes in sending volume may indicate that a list hasn’t been grown organically (naturally), bur rather rented, purchased, or harvested via other means, and this can have a negative impact on email deliverability and inbox placement. So what should you do? Start by sending low daily volumes and build up volume over time – the idea is to send less than 1k emails per day per provider when you are just starting out, and ideally start with high quality messaging and high engagement subscriber segments.
High engagement on your early bulk campaigns will aid your sender reputation score and improve inbox placement rates on future campaigns.
There are a many different ways you can break down your list:
- Segment your list based on a field like “Date Signed Up”, “Order Date”, or similar date or number based fields that indicate subscriber recency or loyalty, and start sending initial campaigns to your recently engaged or your most loyal customers.
- Based on demographics like age or gender, or a number-based field like “Member ID” with “greater/less than” condition.
- Based on past campaign engagement, e.g. anyone who “opened” any campaign in the last 14-21 days.
- Segment your list based on location. If you customize campaign send time based on subscriber local time you can get better engagement. The best time to send on week days is usually 6-10am local time.
- If bulk of the emails on your B2B list are not major providers, you can actually send a large campaign by simply segmenting out the top providers using an email domain check, e.g. if “domain is” or “domain is not”. See example in the screenshot below.
Segmenting based on email domain in BigMailer
Depending on your list size, you may choose to use and combine several of the methods listed above, and that’s perfectly fine. There is no one size fits all approach to building your domain reputation – you know your list best and can figure out the best strategy for yourself.
It may be frustrating to not be able to send to your entire list and put in all the extra effort, but the effort is worth it and will pay off via better long term deliverability, inbox placement, and most importantly your subscriber engagement with your email campaigns as a result.
