Set up and execute an IP warm-up plan

Welcome! In this video, you will learn what IP warming is and how to set up and execute IP warming with Adobe Journey Optimizer. When you start sending marketing emails from a new IP address, there’s a risk of being flagged as spam. Internet service providers, such as Google, Yahoo, and others, take precautions to protect their network from malicious and unwanted traffic when they detect an unfamiliar IP and sending domain. ISPs carefully examine the sending volume, send frequency, complaints and bounce rates generated from these mailings. These are all checked closely because they are indicators of reputation of the sender, be it good or bad. Think of it this way. It is like letting a stranger in your home. Would you have reservations about someone you have never met enter your home? The answer, most likely, is yes. You would want to get to know this person and their motives. Do they mean harm? Are they a threat? ISPs do the same. This process of examining these data points cannot be achieved in a day or two. Reputation is built over time. This is where IP warming comes in. It is a process used to establish a positive reputation with a new IP address. During IP warming, the volume of emails being sent to various ISPs is gradually increased. There are different approaches, such as increasing the daily volume or segmenting recipients. The activity of creating a plan is typically performed with the help of a deliverability consultant who prepares a well-thought-through plan based on the industry domain use case, region, ISP, and various other factors. Let’s take a look at an example plan. This is a fairly complex plan. It has 17 runs with, as you can see, an incremental warm-up over the 17 days it runs. The runs are each divided across six phases, and each phase will need to have one campaign, one creative, assigned to it. The runs will run across multiple ISPs, and for Gmail, for example, it will reach a target volume of 70,330 emails per day. You can also see that the different ISPs have different starting levels. This is based on the knowledge that the expert has with regards to how ISPs react, as they react differently to the different volumes they are confronted with. Where we can implement the plan in Journey Optimizer, we all need to make sure that we have the creatives available for each phase of the IP warm-up. So let me move into Journey Optimizer and go to the campaigns. So in our case, we have six different phases with six different campaigns, which I have already prepared. Now let me show you how you can enable a campaign for IP warm-up. So you create the email campaign as usual. Then in the properties section, make sure to use the same email service that you will be using during the IP warm-up. Now under Schedule, Action Triggers, you will find the IP warm-up plan activation option. enable the slider to the right to activate the campaign for use in IP warm-up plans. That way, the schedule is no longer managed within the campaign, but through the IP warm-up plan. Next, you will need to activate the campaign to make it available in IP warm-up plans. I will do that for all of my campaigns. Now that all my campaigns are active, I can create the warm-up plan. We find the IP warm-up plans under Administration, Channels, Email Configuration, and then under the IP warm-up plans. If you do not see this entry here or you do not see the Administration section of the left navigation at all, reach out to your administrator and make sure that you have the rights to manage IP warm-up plans. Now if we go into the IP warm-up plans, I can create my new IP warm-up plan and I will give it a name. The next thing is important here. You need to select the email configuration and this is basically the channel service. You need to be sure to have selected the same channel service that you apply to the campaigns that you’re planning to use during your IP warm-up. So I’m going to select that. Next you will need to upload your plan. We already have a plan prepared, but if you don’t have a plan prepared yet, this is where you can download the template file so that you have the correct structure as well as view a sample. I’m going to upload our pre-prepared plan. Now that my plan was uploaded successfully, I can click the create button and what happens now is that the plan we had in Excel is put into the Journey Optimizer user interface. So you can see here we have our six phases. Let me pull up the Excel file here. So we have our six phases with the different runs and here if I go down again, I have my phase one for example with the nine different runs, then my phase two with two different runs and so on. Now you also see here that our target has been applied from the Excel table. So all my different ISPs are here. So I have Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft, Adobe, Roadrunner and others and you also have the information about the overall target across all ISPs per run. If you want to add additional internet service providers, you can do this by adding them to the custom domain group tab in the CSV template with the relevant domains of course. You see here we already added Adobe and Roadrunner in addition to the out of the box ISPs. Now let’s add another European one, DMX. I’ll add three domains as well. Now I just have to add the NinoLane with the warmup data to the plan. Save the file as CSV. And now I can re-upload the plan in Journey Optimizer. And here we go, the new ISP is now available for warmup. Now I will select which campaign to use in phase one. You can do that by clicking the button at the top of each phase section and of course I will have to apply a campaign to each phase. Now here you will only see the campaigns that have been activated for IP warmup plans for each of my phases and in this case I will apply my IP warming phase one campaign to my plan. As a reminder the campaign not only defines the creative that’s going to be used but also the overall audience that will be targeted. Once the campaign has been applied you can start to execute the plan. For this you will need to schedule the runs. So on the first day you will simply run the campaign. Let’s say we want to run it on Monday at 9am. Then you can activate the run. Once the run is active the target audience that is defined by the campaign will automatically be capped and the segments will be created in accordance to the numbers allocated for each internet service provider for this run. The campaign will be triggered at the scheduled time and once the run has finished you will be able to see a report. You will need to monitor the IP warmup performance and if you see things are not going as expected for example bounces or errors or the span rate is high you can modify or you should modify your warmup plan. So let’s take a look at a live warmup plan. Here we have a plan which is live and in each completed run you have a view report button. This allows you to analyze your phase. Now let’s take a look at the report for run one and you can see how many profiles were targeted how many actually qualified how many emails were actually sent and how many were delivered. You also see the email delivery status and you can access the campaign report if you click on that button. So here you can see the campaign report where you can really double click into the details of the campaign performance. Based on the data that you see in the reports you will want to modify your warmup plan. Once a run started you cannot modify this run. What you can do is this phase for example has started you can duplicate complete runs. The other option that you have is if a phase is already activated you can go ahead and split the run into a new phase. What will happen you see here we have eight phases right now we’re in phase three. So if I split the run into a new phase the run number four to nine will be moved into a new phase. So there will be an additional phase that will be moved in here. So if I split the phase and now you can see we had our phase three and now runs four to nine has been added to a new phase. So that’s our new phase with the six runs. If you split the existing phase you can for example apply a new campaign if the content was not resonating or you can exclude domain groups. For example if Gmail is not accepting your emails you could exclude this domain group. Other options to fine-tune each phase or plan are for example you can exclude profiles that have already been targeted through specific campaigns. For example if you run a similar campaign already you want to make sure that those profiles that have already received the communication do not receive it again. All profiles can be excluded that entered or have run through a specific journey as well and of course all profiles that were targeted in previous runs are automatically excluded. Now you should understand how you can execute and fine-tune your IP warm-up with Adobe Journey Optimizer. Thank you for watching.