In this article, we will discuss the next steps you can take to maintain a successful engagement strategy after completing the email warm-up process. By creating an effective sending schedule and closely monitoring performance as you increase your email sends, you can ensure that your emails are delivered reliably and are both timely and relevant to your audience.

It's important to note that the practices we'll be discussing are meant to be implemented only after you've completed both the warm-up and ramp-up process. 

If you're a new sender using a new domain or have recently switched to a new email service provider (ESP), it's crucial to follow the appropriate steps outlined in our guide on "Mastering Email Domain Reputation: A Guide To Warm-Up And Ramp-Up Process" before proceeding with these next steps.

Building An Email Schedule Based On Engagement

Maintaining an effective sending cadence is crucial even after completing the warm-up and ramp-up process. By aligning your sending schedule with your customers' engagement patterns, you can achieve higher open rates and foster a positive relationship with your subscribers.

To create an informed sending cadence, it's important to segment your subscribers based on their engagement frequency and then establish tracks for daily, weekly, and monthly sending. This enables you to tailor your email strategy to each segment and adjust your sending schedule accordingly. Following a consistent sending pattern also helps to establish your reputation with ISPs, which ultimately improves email deliverability.

On the other hand, irregular or infrequent sending patterns can negatively impact your reputation and cause deliverability issues. This can lead to having to rebuild trust with subscribers and mailbox providers, resulting in additional effort and resources being spent. Therefore, it's crucial to maintain a consistent and informed sending cadence to maximize the effectiveness of your email marketing strategy.

Boosting Engagement With High-Risk Strategies

Automated journeys like winback and sunset journeys are an essential component of any email marketing campaign, and they can help you engage with your subscribers and maintain a clean and active email list. However, during the warming period, using winback and sunset journeys, and re-engagement campaigns can be risky, as they typically have lower engagement rates. Therefore, it is best to wait until the warming and ramp-up process is complete before implementing these.

Instead, during the warm-up process, it is recommended to use welcome and nurture journeys. These types of journeys can help establish a positive relationship with new subscribers and provide them with valuable information about your brand and products. This, in turn, can help build engagement and trust with your subscribers, which is critical for long-term success in email marketing.

Once the warming process is complete, you can start using winback and sunset journeys, and re-engagement campaigns to further engage your audiences and maintain clean email lists. 

The winback journey is a series of emails sent to customers who previously engaged with your brand but have not interacted with you for a certain period of time. The goal of this journey is to re-engage customers and win back their business.

A re-engagement campaign consists of a standalone email designed to re-engage subscribers who have become inactive or disengaged with your brand. Unlike a winback journey, which is triggered by a placed order event and sends a series of emails after a certain amount of time has passed, a re-engagement campaign is a one-time email sent infrequently to those who are unlikely to receive a communication via winback journey, such as subscribers who have purchased a product with a longer lifespan or those who have never placed an order. Its purpose is to encourage subscribers to take action, such as placing an order or confirming their subscription, to stay connected with your brand.

The sunset journey is designed to phase out customers who are no longer engaging with your brand. This journey typically involves a last-ditch effort to win back their business, followed by a decision to delete or suppress anyone who is not responsive. This helps to maintain a clean email list and ensures that you are only tar

geting subscribers who are engaged and interested in your brand.

While automated journeys are a crucial component of email marketing, it is essential to use them strategically and with caution. During the warm-up process, it is best to focus on welcome and nurture journeys, and then once the warming process is complete, you can start implementing winback and sunset journeys, and re-engagement campaigns to further engage your audiences and maintain a clean email list.

Advanced Segmentation

Once you have completed the warming process, you can take advantage of more advanced segmentation strategies to improve your email performance and analytics capabilities. These strategies involve grouping customers into more specific segments based on their behavior, demographics, interests, and other attributes.

To make this process easier, NotifyVisitors provides a range of prebuilt segment templates that you can use as a starting point for your own segmentation efforts. These templates cover a range of use cases, offered in various categories such as engaged contacts, disengaged contacts, store activity, shopping behavior, etc.

You can access these templates by navigating to:

Segments > Create New Segment > Pre-built Segments.

You can also create your own custom segments using NotifyVisitors' intuitive segmentation builder, which allows you to select specific criteria for inclusion or exclusion from each segment. Click here to learn more.

Conducting Regular List Cleaning

Cleaning unengaged or inactive profiles from your email list is essential to maintaining a healthy email list and ensuring that your emails are reaching the right audience. Having a list that contains uninterested people or a high percentage of invalid emails will only hurt your efforts to reach those who actually want to receive your emails.

The process for cleaning your email list involves two steps:

Step 1: Creating a segment of unengaged profiles

The first step is to create a segment of unengaged profiles. This involves segmenting your list based on factors such as those who have not opened or clicked any emails for a certain period of time. The time period can vary depending on your industry and the frequency of your email campaigns. For example, if you send weekly emails, you can consider those who haven't engaged in the past 3-6 months as unengaged.

Step 2: Suppressing or deleting these unengaged profiles

Once you have identified the unengaged profiles in your list, you can choose to either suppress or delete them.

Suppression means that you keep the unengaged profiles in your list but exclude them from future email campaigns. This can be useful if you still want to keep their information in your database for future reference, but don't want to send them emails.

Deleting unengaged profiles, on the other hand, means that you permanently remove them. This can be useful if you want to keep your list clean and focused on engaging subscribers who are interested in your brand.

Cleaning your email list is an important step to maintaining good deliverability and ensuring that your emails are reaching engaged and interested subscribers.

Optimizing Email Through Unsubscribe And Preferences

Including an unsubscribe link that is easy to find in your emails is essential in maintaining a positive relationship with your subscribers. If someone wants to opt-out of marketing from your brand but is unable to find this link, they may mark your email as spam, which can significantly damage your email deliverability. Therefore, it is important to make sure that your unsubscribe link is visible and easy to locate in every email you send.

To reduce unsubscribe rates, it is a good practice to assign a preference page link to your unsubscribe option. This preference page can include multiple unsubscribe options for different campaigns, such as newsletters, discount offers, subscription plans, etc. By providing separate unsubscribe options for each of these campaigns, users can choose which campaigns they want to unsubscribe from and still remain subscribed to the ones they are interested in.

By segmenting users based on these preferences, you can ensure that your email sending takes into consideration the preferences of your recipients. Additionally, you can also provide a frequency preference option on your preference page, allowing your subscribers to choose how often they want to hear from you. This not only helps reduce unsubscribe rates but also helps personalize your content so that it is both relevant and timely for different customers.

Monitoring Email Performance And Deliverability

Once you've started sending emails to your subscribers after the warming period, it's important to monitor the performance of your emails regularly even after your warm up and ramp up process is over. This will help you gauge the engagement level of your audience and maintain good email deliverability.

To monitor your emails performance you can use our email stats function, it includes everything you need to track your performance, including open rate, click rate, bounce rate, total deliveries, total failures, daily graph, and much more. By analyzing these metrics, you can gain insights into how your audience is engaging with your content and identify areas for improvement.

We advise using the following key email metrics for comparison:

› Open rates above 30%                       › Click rates above 1%

› Bounce rate below 1%                       › Unsubscribe rates below 0.1% 

› Spam rates below 0.1%

It's important to compare the performance of your own email campaigns against key ranges for these metrics. This will help you determine whether your performance is improving, declining, or remaining stable. If you notice any negative trends, such as a decline in open or click rates, it's important to take corrective action to address the underlying issues.

Monitoring your email performance and making adjustments to your strategy based on the data you collect will help you maintain strong email deliverability and keep your subscribers engaged and interested in your brand.

Send To Opted-In Customers Only

To maintain good email deliverability, it is essential to ensure that your main newsletter and other similar segments only include individuals who have willingly opted in. It is crucial to separate customers and opted-in subscribers to avoid inadvertently emailing those who never subscribed. 

One way to confirm that opt-in subscribers are genuine is by utilizing our double opt-in email verification feature. It's crucial to avoid emailing recipients who haven't opted in because doing so can result in spam complaints and hurt your email deliverability. To reach out to these contacts, it's recommended to explore alternative marketing channels such as onsite campaigns, SMS, or social media instead of relying on email marketing.

By doing so, you can ensure that your email list remains clean and your campaigns reach your target audience effectively.

Engaging Sending Frequency

Even after successfully completing the warming process, it is essential to continue focusing on engaged sending frequency. During the warm-up phase, it is recommended to divide your daily volume into smaller segments of 10% hourly engagement, which helps establish a positive sender reputation. However, once you have completed the warm-up process, you have the flexibility to adjust the engagement time frame of your email campaigns to suit your specific needs.

By having this flexibility, you can be more inclusive or restrictive with your emails, depending on the level of engagement you want to target. For example, if you want to prioritize sending to your most engaged subscribers, you can set a restrictive engagement timeframe. On the other hand, if you want to target a wider audience, you can be more inclusive with your engagement timeframe.

Focusing on engaged sending after completing the warm-up process helps maintain a positive sender reputation and improves the deliverability of your emails. With NotifyVisitors, you can easily adjust the engagement time frame of your segments and target the right audience.

Conclusion

In conclusion, after successfully completing the email warm-up process, it is crucial to implement best practices to ensure a successful email engagement strategy. Maintaining an effective sending schedule based on email engagement, using higher-risk engagements such as winback and sunset journeys, creating advanced segments, and optimizing email preferences and form content are some of the key practices to adopt. Implementing these practices will enable you to maintain a clean and active email list, engage with subscribers, and improve email deliverability, ultimately resulting in a successful email marketing strategy.