Most users in this scenario face two key challenges:
  • You have a large audience that you haven’t contacted before or rarely have in the past.
  • Your domain has little to no sending history.
As a result:
  • Users are not expecting emails from you, as they haven’t received any in the past.
  • Email clients (Gmail, Outlook, etc.) don’t recognize you, so your sender reputation is nonexistent.
It’s really important to handle this well, so follow these steps or contact chris@loops.so with any questions.

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”Warming Up” Your List

We want to build your sender reputation and start emailing your best users at the same time. Thankfully, this is easier than it sounds. The easiest way to do this is not by contacting your existing list but by contacting users that are just joining your platform for the first time. Why? Because in our experience, as individuals and as the makers of Loops, the most likely time a user will engage with your emails is when they first join your platform.

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Setting Up an Onboarding Loop

So how do we start emailing these new users? Start by setting up a Loop that greets users as soon as they join your platform. These users are the most active and are most likely to respond favorably, positively impacting your business and your sender reputation. You should let this Loop run for a few days while your sender reputation is built up and you have a chance to understand how your users react to the type of emails you’re sending. Ideally, open rates will now be >40% at this point for the first email in your Loop.

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Engaging Your Most Active Users

After your onboarding Loop has run for a few days, you can begin to backfill your audience in Loops by importing a CSV of your existing users or by using our API. While you can (and probably should) import all existing users at this point, we recommend contacting users that signed up over the last seven days prior to the start of the Loop we set up. Depending on audience size, you could also import users from up to three months ago, but our goal here is to make sure we are contacting users that still engage with your platform. Alternatively, instead of importing users by the creation date of their account, you can do it by their last login date if you have that information stored. If you don’t have the information stored, you could start now and import users in a week or two after you have an idea of who your most engaged users are.

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General Recommendation for Importing Contacts

A general recommendation would be to import any contacts who have logged in within the last 90 days and then also set up a Loop to welcome all new users going forward. Then you get transactional sending to any contacts in your audience free of charge as well.

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Expanding to Older Users

After your most engaged users have been contacted and your Loop has continued to send, you should have a good idea of how your users are responding to emails that you send them. You can then begin to expand your audience and import some older users. We recommend sending in batches to limit any potential issues with the domain reputation. If you notice your open rates dipping below average at any point, it’s a good indication that you’ve reached as far back into your audience as you’ll want to go. At that point, it’s a good idea to only contact users that were previously on your list if they reengage on your platform with a login.

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Wrapping Up

By following these steps, you should be able to successfully send emails to your user base without damaging your domain reputation. Remember to always monitor your open rates and engagement levels and adjust your email strategy accordingly. For any questions, just ping chris@loops.so.