Top 10 of the Best Email Warm Up tools in 2022

Email warmup has been trending lately in the email industry. When you start diving into email outreach best practices, you will likely be advised to warm up your email account to increase your email deliverability, in other words: increase your chances to end up in the primary inbox folder.

More and more companies are offering email warmup tools and it’s becoming hard to pick one. We’ve written this guide to help you understand what email warmup really is, how to do it properly and pick the right warmup tool (should you actually need one).

Here’s what you’ll learn in this guide:

what is warming up an email?
why use an email warm up service? (and do you need one?)
who are the best email warmup tools?
how to warm up your email for free?

1. What is warming up an email?

Email warm up is the process of gaining the trust of an email provider over time.

Think of it like a work-out session: before lifting heavy weights or running a long distance, you will prepare your body with low-intensity exercises for 5 to 10 minutes. It’s the same for your email account.

Email service providers such as Gmail, Outlook or Yahoo have implemented strong spam filters. They will check your emails for spam words, filter out anything that seems unsolicited and ensure that your email activity looks normal. If you start sending hundreds of emails from a brand new email account, you will end up in spam pretty quickly.

Email activity

Thus, it’s a best practice to warm up your email account before starting to send a lot of emails, to make sure your emails are well received by your recipients.

Now, you may wonder what email warmup means in concrete words?

Email warmup consists in:

Sending a limited amount of emails per day
Increasing the number of emails you send and receive progressively
Keeping your email activity steady and avoid big bumps or long pauses
Having real conversations that make sense, with real people: replying to emails, exchanging attachments, calendar invitations...
Marking emails as not spam, opening the emails, marking them as important
In other words, using your mailbox like a real human!

Warming up your email helps build your email address reputation. As your email and domain build trust, spam filters will consider your account as trustworthy. That way, your emails won’t end up in spam.

Note: Email warmup is also sometimes called IP warmup. To dive into technical details, when you send emails you can use a dedicated IP address. It’s a feature commonly offered by email marketing platforms. When using a dedicated IP, your emails are sent from a single domain that is not shared with other users. It might sound counterintutive, but dedicated IPs are not necessarly better for email deliverabilty, unless you warm up your IP address using an IP warm up service. Indeed, shared IPs might have a better IP reputation as they are older and more reliable than a newly created IP that is not warmed up.

2. Should you use an email warm up service?

There are two ways to warm up your email account. Either you can do it manually or use a dedicated email warmup service that will do the job for you.

Email warmup: the manual way

It is possible to warm up your email manually, but it is a difficult process that will take time.

You’ll need to send emails repeatedly each day and make sure that people you contact respond to you. That’s because getting a high reply-rate is one of the key factors to gain email reputation.

But you won’t gain much reputation if you regularly send emails from let’s say your professional email address to your personal one (and vice-versa). Your reputation score depends on multiple criteria. The reply-rate, which is just one factor amongst many others, takes into account how many different email addresses you get replies from. Worst, most advanced algorithms, also take into account the reputation of the email address that replies to you.

Think of it a little bit like the Pagerank algorithms in SEO. The best ranked websites that link to your own website, send you more domain reputation than spammy websites.

Therefore, manual email warming takes time and many efforts. That’s why so many warmup solutions have taken the leap. And given the quality of the automated inbox warming options available, warming your account manually isn’t the greatest use of your time. Email warmup: using an email warmup service

Otherwise, you can use an email warmup service to do this process automatically.

Email warm up tools will connect to your email inbox and do the warm up for you over several weeks. Their service ensures that your email activity will be consistent with high engagement rates.

How do email warmup tools work behind the scenes?

Email warm up tools use different methods for warming emails.

Some email warmup services will make your address interact with other members from their user base, that’s how Lemwarm or GMass work for example. Your account will be sending emails to other users and will reply to their incoming emails. It might cause some privacy issues as you may not want your address to be interacting with other real users from your email warmup service.

Other services have built a network of email addresses entirely dedicated to the purpose of warming up emails (such as Mailwarm or Warmbox). Of course, this has also disadvantages because this network isn’t constituted of email addresses used by real people. It’s only a computer generated network and you can’t know for sure that anti-spam filters won’t be able to catch this method.

When it comes to the actual content email warm up tools send from your inbox, it varies depending on the service you use. Some warm up tools use human and unique email copy in each of your warming emails. Others will stuff the warming emails with random words that may look less natural (even though these warm up tools promise that it will still be enough to trick anti-spam filters).

Do I need to warmup my email?

If you’re really serious about email deliverability, then using an email warm up service might be worth trying. Why? It will help you warm up your account faster. That’s useful if you have several inboxes for email outreach and want to test ideas in quick manner. In other cases, email warmup can also help you recover from a bad sender reputation.

Still, keep in mind that an email warmup tool is not the panacea for all your email deliverability issues.

You will achieve great results, just by making sure you actually follow our essential email deliverability guidelines.

3. Top 10 of the best email warm up tools

We have tested for you all the email warm up software available online and picked the 10 best cold email warm up services in 2022. We ranked them according to several factors, including:

Email Warm Up method: do they make your account interact with other users from their database, a network of computer generated mailboxes or a mix of both?
Email Warm Up focused: are these companies focused on email warmup or do they just offer warm up service to appeal customers?
Warm Up Features: what differentiating functionalities do these tools offer?
Pricing & Free trial: how much do email warmup tools cost and do they offer a free trial?
Customer reviews, from trusted platforms such as Capterra or G2
User experience: are these warm up tools easy to navigate and understand?
Privacy: do these companies emphasize the protection of your data?

Without further ado, here are the 10 best email warmup solutions:

Conclusion

In conclusion, email warm up services can be interesting to boost your deliverability or to recover a bad sender reputation, especially if you’re really serious about cold emailing. Like everything in email marketing, take some time to run your own tests, increase the volume when you’re confident enough with the results, and use a trusted email marketing platform, like Mailmeteor, to send your emails!

PS: Most email warm up tools will recommend you to never stop warming your inbox to maintain a high deliverability. That’s maybe the downside of relying on such warm up tools. Indeed, while it’s certainly helpful to warm up an email account automatically, always keep in mind that email warmup tools’ business models are to keep you as a customer for the longest time possible.