# Step 5 - Warmup Schedule {% stepper %} {% step %} ### **💡** Goals * Challenge your campaigns categorization (transactional vs marketing messages). * Sort your campaigns and automations per engagement and volume. {% endstep %} {% step %} ### 📌 **Deliverables** Sort your campaigns and automations per engagement and volume. {% endstep %} {% endstepper %} ## Best Practices to Schedule a Warmup Here are several best practices you should consider before scheduling your warmup and selecting the automations you want to migrate first:

Avoid Tight Schedules

During the warmup phase, delivery stability can be unpredictable. Inbox providers may react variably to volume increases from unfamiliar senders—they might accept all your emails, delay some, or even block your subdomain or sending IP. Therefore, the **warmup process often requires adjustments** based on the response from each inbox provider. Some emails, such as transactional messages (e.g., password resets), are critical for your business. We recommend **adding an additional 2-week buffer period**. This allows you to address any issues with providers proactively and reset if necessary.

Find the Best Moment to Start Your Warmup

Some moments of the weeks and of the year are far from ideal. Avoid starting a warmup: * **When no one is available** to monitor the delivery of your emails and to ask for a mitigation. * When inbox providers likely cannot answer tickets (e.g., during the weekend). * **When your recipients don't read their emails** (e.g., during the weekend, depending on your business) or when they are not interested by your emails. * When your recipients are already receiving more emails than usual (e.g., Black Friday, Christmas, etc.), as this would decrease the amount of opens and clicks for your emails.

Sending Permanence Is Key

Be sure you maintain good sending permanence during the whole process: * **Don't stop sending emails during the weekend**. You should send emails every day * If you are warming up a subdomain that will send newsletters, focus on emails that are not time-sensitive (e.g., with offers that don't expire, etc.). This is important because you will be sending the same newsletter to different batches of users across several days or weeks

Migrate Campaigns & Automations Based on Engagement and Volume

Most inbox providers consider recipient engagement a key factor in determining sender reputation. This includes both positive and negative interactions from recipients.

The warmup phase is crucial for building a positive sender reputation. Here is a recommended approach: * **First 2 weeks**: Send emails only to new subscribers and your most engaged recipients (e.g., those who opened or clicked on an email in the last 30 days) * **Until the 4th week**: Expand your email sends to include recipients who have opened or clicked on an email in the last 60 days * **By the 6th week**: Gradually begin sending emails to users who haven't engaged in 90 days, starting with small batches of emails to mitigate any potential negative impact on your domain reputation

Challenge Your Marketing/Transactional Categorization

Some automations and campaigns, such as welcome emails and inactivity reminders, might not be ideal for initial sends during a warmup phase, and shouldn't be considered as "transactional" emails: * **Welcome emails**: Including these emails in your initial sends might not resonate well with unengaged users * **Inactivity reminders**: These users already do not open your emails, and you are likely not legally required to send them To maximize positive interactions during the warmup, prioritize migrating automations that yield the highest engagement and reassess emails that may be incorrectly categorized as transactional messages.

## Scheduling The Migration of Automations The biggest challenge here lies in aligning your average daily email volume per automation with the gradual increase required during the warmup timeline. In order to **select the best automations** to migrate first and **prioritize** them, you need to **consider two key criteria**:

Volume Criteria

Automations don't usually have predictable volumes of daily sent emails. The volume of sent emails is dependent on the activity in your app or your website (e.g., cart abandonment emails, account creation emails, etc.). As a consequence, finding the right automation to respect the email volume limit set at every stage of the warmup is a complex task. Here are some tips to navigate this: * **Flexibility**: The warmup timeline can be adaptable. Minor variations (e.g., 600 vs 500 emails) are acceptable, but significant deviations should be avoided. * **Prioritize high-performing automations**: Focus on migrating automations with the highest engagement first. * **Refine targeting**: If daily email volume limits are difficult to meet with specific automations, consider using additional targeting conditions in Batch (e.g., exclude specific countries or languages) to limit recipient pools.

Engagement Criteria

Prioritize migrating high-engagement automations targeting new or engaged users during the warmup phase. Examples of ideal emails for initial sends: * **Account-related alerts** (e.g., account creation confirmation, password reset). Ensure the targeted email addresses are valid to prevent hard bounces that could harm your new subdomain's reputation. * **Order-related** (e.g., order confirmation, delivery date). These emails typically have high engagement and minimize the risk of facing issues during the warmup. Leave win-back automations and abandoned cart reminders for later stages. These emails often have lower engagement and could negatively impact your sender reputation.

It's now time to **leverage all the work you have done in the previous steps** of our methodology. You will need to use: * **Campaigns & automations performance review table** ([see step 1](https://doc.batch.com/guides-and-best-practices/email-deliverability/domain-and-ip-warm-up/step-1-performance-assessment)): Lists automations with average daily sent emails and performance metrics. * **Warmup target table** ([see step 4](https://doc.batch.com/guides-and-best-practices/email-deliverability/domain-and-ip-warm-up/step-4-estimate-your-warmup-target)): Defines the daily email sending quota for your transactional and marketing automation subdomains. Combine these tables to create your migration schedule, a crucial tool for tracking progress. Here is an example including columns for tracking performance after migration. Risky automations and automations targeting less active subscribers are always migrated in the final stages of the warmup.

📌 Example of Automations Migration Schedule

* **Transactional subdomain**: `service.domain.com` * **Warm-up goal**: 1400 emails/day * **Estimated migration time**: 3 days

Stage #	Emails sent/day	Bounce rate	Open rate	Click rate	Unsubscribe rate
Stage 1	200	-%	-%	-%	-%
Password reset	100	-%	-%	-%	-%
New login	50	-%	-%	-%	-%
Invite sent	50	-%	-%	-%	-%
Stage 2	400	-%	-%	-%	-%
Validated order	400	-%	-%	-%	-%
Stage 3	800	-%	-%	-%	-%
Delivery in progress	600	-%	-%	-%	-%
Registration confirmation	200	-%	-%	-%	-%
Cumulated total	1400

## Scheduling The Migration of Newsletters Email campaigns are easier to migrate than automations. Migrating email campaigns to Batch is simplified by: * **Predictable email volume**: Unlike automations triggered by user activity, newsletter subscriber lists have a clear size, making it easier to plan the migration. * **Predictable schedule**: Newsletters typically follow a set sending schedule (e.g. weekly), offering more flexibility for migration compared to real-time automations. ### → Recommended Approach The objective of a newsletters warmup is to gradually increase daily newsletter sends to reach your warm-up goal while maintaining a positive sender reputation. Batch recommends the following approach: * **Segment by engagement**: Organize your subscriber list with the most engaged subscribers at the beginning. This could involve sorting by recent opens, clicks, or other engagement metrics. * **Create a content calendar**: Plan a series of thematically linked newsletters with varying content to maintain subscriber interest throughout the warm-up. * **Schedule sends**: Distribute your newsletter series across the warm-up timeline, sending to segmented batches based on engagement and increasing the volume gradually. This approach offers several benefits: * I**mproved engagement**: Sending fresh content over the warm-up fosters interest and encourages continued engagement. * **Reduced risk of fatigue**: Repetitive content can lead to unsubscribes. A varied series keeps users interested. Let's explore how to create a migration schedule for your newsletter warm-up using this approach.

📌 Example of migration schedule

* **Newsletters subdomain**: `news.domain.com` * **Warm-up goal**: 650K emails/campaign * Number of newsletters to be sent in batches, before being able to address all your users with a single campaign: 4 campaigns | Group # | Emails sent/day | Bounce rate | Open rate | Click rate | Unsubscribe rate | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --------------- | ----------- | --------- | ---------- | ---------------- | | **First newsletter** | | | | | | | Campaign 1 - Group 1 | 200 | -% | -% | -% | -% | | Campaign 1 - Group 2 | 500 | -% | -% | -% | -% | | Campaign 1 - Group 3 | 1K | -% | -% | -% | -% | | Campaign 1 - Group 4 | 2K | -% | -% | -% | -% | | Campaign 1 - Group 5 | 5K | -% | -% | -% | -% | | Campaign 1 - Group 6 | 10K | -% | -% | -% | -% | | Campaign 1 - Group 7 | 20K | -% | -% | -% | -% | | Campaign 1 - Group 8 | 40K | -% | -% | -% | -% | | Campaign 1 - Group 9 | 50K | -% | -% | -% | -% | | Campaign 1 - Group 10 | 75K | -% | -% | -% | -% | | Campaign 1 - Group 11 | 100K | -% | -% | -% | -% | | Campaign 1 - Group 12 | 150K | -% | -% | -% | -% | | Campaign 1 - Group 13 | 200K | -% | -% | -% | -% | | Cumulated total | 650K | | | | | | **Second newsletter** | | | | | | | Campaign 2 - Group 1 | 250K | -% | -% | -% | -% | | Campaign 2 - Group 2 | 325K | -% | -% | -% | -% | | Campaign 2 - Group 3 | 75K | -% | -% | -% | -% | | Cumulated total | 650K | | | | | | Second newsletter | | | | | | | Campaign 3 - Group 1 | 400K | -% | -% | -% | -% | | Campaign 3 - Group 2 | 250K | -% | -% | -% | -% | | Cumulated total | 650K | | | | | | **Third newsletter** | | | | | | | Campaign 4 - Group 1 | 500K | -% | -% | -% | -% | | Campaign 4 - Group 2 | 150K | -% | -% | -% | -% | | Cumulated total | 650K | | | | | | **Fourth newsletter - End of warmup** | | | | | | | Campaign 5 | 650K | -% | -% | -% | -% | | Cumulated total | 650K | | | | |

### → Prepare Your Subscribers Batches To gradually increase daily newsletter sends while maintaining engagement, **segment your subscriber list by engagement level**: 1. **Export subscribers**: Extract your subscriber data from your current email service provider. 2. **Sort by Engagement**: Order the list with the most engaged subscribers (recent opens, clicks, etc.) at the beginning. 3. **Create warmup segments**: Divide your list into batches based on the number of emails planned for each warm-up stage. 4. **Save Segments in Batch**: Choose one of these methods 1. Audiences (recommended): Create separate audiences for each warm-up stage by uploading CSV files through Batch settings or using the [Audience API](https://doc.batch.com/api/audience/create/). Using audiences is the preferred approach for its simplicity and ease of implementation. 2. Attributes based targeting: Alternatively, you can attach a value to certain profiles (e.g. a value "stage 2" in an attribute called "newsletters\_warmup") using the [Profile API](https://doc.batch.com/api/profile/update/). You will be able to target all the profiles matching the value "stage 2" in the "newsletters\_warmup" attribute.

{% hint style="warning" %} Using Audiences is a better option and is easier to implement, as opposed to profiles attributes that are persistant and require to call an API. {% endhint %} ## Next step You are almost ready to go, the last preparation steps consists in reviewing your email templates: {% content-ref url="step-6-templates-review" %} [step-6-templates-review](https://doc.batch.com/guides-and-best-practices/email-deliverability/domain-and-ip-warm-up/step-6-templates-review) {% endcontent-ref %}