When you add a new dedicated IP address to your account, you need to warm it up.

You will need to warm up your brand new cold IP(s) over a period of 4- 6 weeks by gradually adding email volume to the new IP address(es).

It is important to warm up your IP(s) so you can build a good sending reputation and improve your chances of getting your email into your subscriber's inboxes.

Warming up an IP address means that you start sending low volumes of email on your dedicated IP and then systematically increase your email volume over a period of time. This gives ISPs the opportunity to recognize, identify, and evaluate your sending practices.

There's no guarantee that you will not have some deliverability challenges at first, but using these best practices will help set you up for long-term success.

Before starting the warming up, make sure you are ready:

1. First of all, clean up your contacts list before sending a campaign by removing invalid, misspelled, and “catch-all” addresses — this is likely to increase your open rate.
2. Set up SPF, DKIM  and Tracking signatures.
3. Configure the PTR and reverse DNS records (Note! Setting custom rDNS is available with the PRO pricing plans only!).
4. Monitor all reports regarding bounce errors.

Given all of these needs, the IP warm up process should start small. Let's say you have 20,000 contacts in your database. When warming your IP(s), your sends might look something like this:

A basic example of a long-term warm up process (the numbers below are a conservative approach aimed to establish the best possible reputation. If you are seeing good results with the current schedule you can increase the volume by 10-20%):