You craft compelling cold emails and launch a campaign, only to see your emails landing in the spam folders. Sound familiar?

Ensuring your cold emails land right in the recipient's inbox rather than their spam folder can feel like a Herculean task, especially when you're reaching out to them for the first time. 

21% of legitimate emails worldwide never reach the inbox, instead getting flagged as spam or simply going missing. This is especially concerning, given Google's latest updates to its spam policies. Now more than ever, it's crucial to warm up your domain and email accounts before you kick off your outreach campaign. 

But what exactly does 'email warmup' mean? 

• Why is it so important? 
• Which are the best tools to use for this process? 
• And how does Smartlead fit into all of this?

In this blog post, we'll delve into these questions, providing you with insider hacks to accelerate your 'email warmup' process. Also we’ll check out the top 9 best email warmup tools for cold outreach in 2024 with detailed reviews.

What Does Email Warmup Mean?

Email warm-up is a strategic process of establishing and enhancing trust with Email Service Providers (ESPs) by sending system-generated (automated) or manually crafted emails from a new inbox.

In the world of email marketing, 'email warmup' is like a pre-game stretch. It's all about preparing your domain like a runner limbers up before a race to ensure that your emails hit the inbox and not the spam folder. So how does this work? Let's break it down.

Imagine you just set up a new email account or domain. The first thing you do is start firing off hundreds or thousands of emails. But wait! This sudden flurry of activity might raise red flags with Internet Service Providers (ISPs). They might see your account as potential spam, pushing your emails into the dreaded spam folder. That's where email warmup comes in.

Email warmup is like making small talk at a party before diving into deep conversations. You start by sending a few emails, then gradually increase the volume. This slow and steady approach shows ISPs that you're a legitimate sender, improving your reputation and ensuring your emails land in the inbox.

Now, you could do this manually, but let's be real – who has the time? Plus, it can be tricky getting the pace just right. That's where email warmup tools come into play. These AI-powered wizards mimic human-like conversations, sending out emails at a natural, gradual pace. This process, known as domain warmup or mail warmup, effectively convinces ISPs that your domain is trustworthy, boosting your email deliverability rates.

Why Perform Email Warmup?

Now that we understand what email warmup is, you might be wondering why you should even bother with this process. The answer lies in the benefits it brings to your email marketing efforts. Here are five critical reasons you should be warming up your emails:

• Boost Email Deliverability Rates: Warming up your emails can significantly improve email deliverability rates. It's a way of showing ISPs that you're not a spammer but a legitimate sender who respects the rules of the game. This can dramatically increase the chances of your emails landing in the recipient's inbox rather than their spam folder.
• Protects Your Domain: Your domain's reputation is crucial. A poor reputation can have serious consequences, including emails being blocked or landing in spam. By warming up your domain, you're taking steps to protect it and maintain a good standing with ISPs.
• Boost Your Open Rate: When your emails land in the right place (the inbox!), they're more likely to be opened. A higher open rate can lead to better engagement, conversions, and, ultimately, a successful email marketing campaign.
• Protects Your Sender Reputation: In the world of email marketing, your sender reputation is like your credit score. A good score means ISPs trust you, and your emails are more likely to reach the inbox. Email warmup helps to build and maintain this reputation.
• Expands Your Sending Limit: Most email providers impose a daily sending limit. By warming up your account, you can gradually increase this limit, allowing for larger email campaigns.

9 Best Email Warm-up Tools for Your Cold Outreach in 2024

So, you're convinced about the importance of warming up your emails. But how do you actually go about it? The good news is there are a variety of email warmup tools that can help you with this task.

Here are the 9 best email warm-up tools for cold outreach in 2024

1. Smartlead

Smartlead is a comprehensive cold emailing tool for omnichannel outreach. With its unlimited mailboxes and automated email warmups, this sales engagement tool ensures your emails always land in your prospects’ inboxes.

It offers auto-rotating email accounts, so you don’t need to worry about daily sending limits and sender reputation. Smartlead lets you automate your entire sales flow with cold emails, and follow-up emails. You get a full whitelabel experience at Smartlead. Moreover, its useful integrations and the master inbox for managing all conversations makes it an all-in-one cold outreach tool.

Notable Features

Smartlead for Deliverability and Lead Gen Process

• Smartlead offers unique IP servers for every campaign it sends out.
• This outreach tool offers unlimited warmups so your deliverability is optimum.
• Smartlead improves a high sender reputation with natural (human-like) AI conversations. It also protects your reputation by auto-moving emails from spam folders to the primary inbox. This tool uses unique identifiers to cloak all warmup emails from being recognized by automation parsers.
• Moreover, it offers Smart-Adjust, which defends your live campaigns against low reply rates.
• You can automate your lead generation process with Smartlead’s powerful cold emailing API infrastructure, which allows you to auto-create and manage campaigns.

Smartlead for Cold Email Automation

• Smartlead offers unlimited sender accounts for its users. You can create campaigns and auto-rotate mailboxes in one click.
• It lets you create omnichannel outreach comprising cold emails, follow-up emails, and LinkedIn interactions. Also, you can scale your outreach across WhatsApp, Twitter, etc.
• You can set up custom-conditional email sending triggers and create sub sequences based on lead behavior.

Smartlead for Sales Engagement Automation

• Smartlead presents a master inbox to maintain and reply to all conversations from one dashboard.
• You can track email open rates, click-throughs, and reply rates to measure what works and implement necessary changes.
• SDRs can save hundreds of hours with Smartlead’s auto mailbox rotation. This tool also offers a full whitelabel experience.

Pricing

• Basic Plan: $39 per month
• Pro Plan: $94 per month
• Custom Plan (formerly Expert Plan): Starting at $174 per month

2. Warmup Inbox

Warmup Inbox offers a complete email warmup solution with IP rotation, reputation monitoring, and automated email sequences. This software builds positive engagement patterns with ISPs (Internet Service Providers) by replicating real user engagement such as opening emails and clicking.

You can gradually increase the number of emails sent and engagement levels to build trust and credibility as a legitimate sender with ESPs. Warmup Inbox offers real-time notifications, deliverability reports, and real-time analytics to keep you updated about the progress of your warmup campaigns. With a user-friendly interface, Warmup Inbox offers you seamless integrations with email service providers.

Notable Features

• Outlook, Gmail, and SMTP integration
• Domain age tracking
• Blacklist monitoring
• Full sending control
• Inbox health scores
• Real-time notifications & analytics
• Sender Reputation Calculator

Pricing

• Basic: $15 per month per inbox; paid yearly
• Pro: $29 per month per inbox; paid yearly
• Max: $79 month per inbox; paid yearly

3. Lemwarm by Lemlist

A product of the cold emailing tool Lemlist, Lemwarm is specifically created for email warmups. It gradually increases the sending volume, replicating human-like email-sending patterns. This natural sending pattern helps you bypass spam filters deployed by ESPs and land directly in your prospects’ inboxes.

If you are sending emails from multiple email accounts or have a team to send multiple campaigns at a time, you can warmup all your email addresses and monitor the deliverability progress in one place. Moreover, Lemwarm offers integrations with Gmail and Office 365.

Notable features

• Conversation threads
• Control daily sending limits
• Detailed reports
• Gmail and Office 365 integrations
• Detailed reports
• 25 years+ domain range
• Real-time email address and human-like conversations
• Auto-remove from spam

Pricing

No free trial is available.

• Smart: $490 per year
• Essential: $290 per year

4. Folderly

Folderly is an all-in-one email deliverability platform that improves email deliverability for any ESP. This AI-based platform helps fix domain reputation so your emails land directly in your recipient's inbox.

Like Warmup Inbox, Folderly also replicates human-like sending behaviors to stay spam-compliant and boasts a 99.9% inbox placement. Moreover, Folderly also offers all its features with its 7-day free trial.

Notable Features

• Integration with the most popular ESPs
• Deliverability tests
• Spam checker tool
• Email deliverability audit
• Template analysis

Pricing

$96 per mailbox per month; offers a 7-day free trial

5. InboxWarm by OutreachBin

With positive interactions with your emails, InboxWarm by OutreachBin offers exclusive email warmup features. InboxWarm moves spam emails to inbox and replies to emails to increase your sender reputation to ensure inbox delivery.

OutreachBin’s algorithm works on a peer-to-peer network for email warmups. It means that your warmup emails are sent to recipients who are also warming up their email addresses, and you automatically become a part of the vast network. Moreover, InboxWarm by OutreachBin offers integrations with Gmail, SMTP, and Outlook.

Notable Features

• Peer-to-peer network for warmups
• Connects with Gmail, SMTP, Outlook, and other popular inboxes
• Auto-remove from spam
• Warm-up metrics

Pricing

• 3 months: $39.99 per month for one email account
• 6 months: $24.99 per month for one email account
• 12 months: $19.97 per month for one email account

6. Mailreach

Mailreach is another excellent email warmup tool in 2024. It helps you build a sender reputation by maintaining interactions with over 20K+ real business accounts. Also, the warmup infrastructure lets you communicate with higher reputation inboxes and maintain natural human-like communications to improve deliverability.

Mailreach verifies your inbox’s DNS configuration and it makes sure your email addresses don’t land on blacklists. This tool offers integrations with Google Workspace, Office 365, SendGrid, MailGun, and custom SMTP. Moreover, Mailreach offers an inbuilt spam checker for your outreach emails.  

Notable Features

• 30k+ high-reputation inboxes network
• Automatic spam tests
• Reputation view by inbox provider
• API
• Overview with scores per domain
• Easy to manage hundreds of inboxes

Pricing

• Starter: $25 per email account per month
• Scale: $19.5 per email account per month

7. Snov.io

The last one on our list, Snov.io, is an all-in-one email warmup, lead generation, and outreach platform. It offers deliverability monitoring for your inboxes and fully automated email warmups. The hyper-intelligent AI creates human-like conversations for better inbox placement and improved email open rates. You can set up SMTP easily in Snov.io and the major email service providers.

Notable Features

• Fully automated email warmups
• Easy set-up and user-friendly interface
• Hyper-intelligent AI to craft realistic same-thread conversations
• Placement insights and warmup progress status

Pricing

• Trial: $0 per month
• Starter: $30 per month
• Pro: $75 per month
• Managed Service: Starts at $3999 per month

8. Warmbox

Warmbox stands out as a standalone email warming strategy service, offering an exceptional user interface and user experience. The tool offers the flexibility of communicating automatically as humans. You also get detailed analytics and reporting to track the progress of your emails.

Notable Features

• Leverages the power of GPT-4
• Utilizes a complex and proprietary algorithm
• Can seamlessly integrate with popular email services like Gmail, Outlook, etc.
• Ongoing Spam Score Monitoring

Pricing

• Solo: $15 per month
• Start-up: $69 per month
• Growth: $139 per month
• Team: Customizable pricing plan

9. Mailwarm

Mailwarm is a straightforward and comprehensive email warming solution designed to enhance the quantity and quality of your email activity for improved inbox placement. It also offers dashboard monitoring for real-time insights and control over your daily warm-up activity.

Notable Features

• Engagement with +1000 Mailwarm Email Addresses
• Customizable Send and Reply Schedule
• Quick Setup in Two Minutes
• Compatible with Multiple Inboxes

Pricing

Mailwarm does not offer a free trial period.

• Starter: $69 per month
• Growth: $159 per month
• Scale: $479 per month

We have assessed a few additional tools as well to check out the best email warmup tools. These tools use sophisticated techniques to mimic human-like interactions in your email account, gradually increasing the pace of sending emails to help you achieve optimal email deliverability. Let's take a closer look at five of the additional top email warm up tools in the market:

Warmy.io

‍Warmy.io acts as a silent partner in your email marketing efforts, interacting with your emails and sending positive signals to email providers.

Pros:

• Automated Interactions: Warmy.io automates the process of email interactions, which can save a significant amount of time and effort.
• Positive Reputation Building: The tool helps build your reputation by simulating genuine email activity, ensuring your emails don't land in the spam folder.

Cons:

• Limited Customization: Warmy.io offers fewer customization options compared to some other tools on the market.
• Pricing: While Warmy.io offers a free trial, some users might find the pricing plans slightly expensive.

‍‍

TrulyInbox

‍TrulyInbox takes a comprehensive approach to email warmup, gradually increasing your sending volume while ensuring positive engagement with your emails.

Pros:

• Comprehensive Approach: TrulyInbox covers all aspects of email warm-up, making it a one-stop solution.
• User-friendly Interface: The tool is easy to use, even for beginners, with a clean and intuitive interface.

‍Cons:

• Lack of Advanced Features: Some users might find the lack of advanced features limiting.
• Support: Some users have reported slow response times from customer support.

Lemwarm

‍A feature of Lemlist, Lemwarm automates your email warmup process, sending out emails to a list of monitored inboxes.

Pros:

• Automation: Lemwarm takes care of the entire warmup process, allowing you to focus on other aspects of your campaign.
• Part of Lemlist: Being part of Lemlist, you get access to a range of other email marketing tools and features.

Cons:

• Limited Standalone Use: As it's part of Lemlist, you might not get as much value from it if you're only interested in the email warmup feature.
• Pricing: Lemwarm is not available as a standalone product, which means you need to invest in the entire Lemlist suite.

Woodpecker

‍Woodpecker offers a free warmup feature that gradually increases your email-sending volume over time by simulating real-life email-sending patterns.

Pros:

• Free Feature: Woodpecker's warmup feature comes free with the tool, making it an excellent option for those on a budget.
• Realistic Sending Patterns: The tool effectively mimics real-life email sending patterns, helping improve your sender reputation.

Cons:

• Limited Warmup Control: Some users might find the warmup feature a bit basic, with less control over the process compared to other tools.
• Dependent on Woodpecker: If you don't use Woodpecker for your email campaigns, the warmup feature might not be as beneficial.

How Does Smartlead Top the List of Best Email Warmup Tools?

If you’re searching for an effective email warmup solution backed by AI, you can try Smartlead.

The email warmup tool ensures optimal inbox delivery by emulating human-like conversations, enhancing your sender reputation. The standout feature is the unlimited AI warmups, which can efficiently scale your outreach to reach multiple inboxes simultaneously.

Smartlead's innovative feature also includes warming up your campaign copy, increasing primary inbox placement, and boosting open rates for a successful email campaign.

Notable Features

• Powered by AI
• Self-adjusting warmup infrastructure
• Rapid warm up setup in 3 clicks
• Human-like patterns for superior inbox placement
• Slow ramp-up strategy to ensure natural email account transition
• Multiple email accounts warmup at once

How To Warm Up Emails Using Smartlead

If you've been wondering how to warm up emails effectively, Smartlead is a tool worth considering. This powerful email warmup service leverages advanced AI technology to ensure your messages always land in your recipients' inboxes, not their spam folders.

Smartlead operates by auto-emulating human-like conversations with its AI warmups. This means it sends and replies to emails in a way that mimics human behaviour, which can dramatically improve your sender's reputation with ISPs. The AI-driven system also self-adjusts your warmup infrastructure to defend your email deliverability, ensuring you don't fall foul of spam filters.

One of the standout features of Smartlead is its unlimited AI warmups. This means you can warm up multiple inboxes simultaneously, allowing you to scale your outreach campaign effectively. Whether you're sending out dozens or thousands of emails, Smartlead can handle the load.

But Smartlead doesn't stop there. It also offers a feature to warm up your campaign copy. By sending out your actual email content as part of the warmup process, Smartlead helps drive primary inbox placement. This can significantly boost your open rates and overall campaign success.

In short, Smartlead stands out as one of the best email warmup tools on the market. With its advanced AI capabilities and unlimited warmups, it's a robust solution for anyone looking to improve their email deliverability and campaign performance.

Conclusion 

Warming up your emails is a crucial step in any successful email marketing campaign. It helps ensure your messages reach the intended recipient and don't end up in the dreaded spam folder. 

Among the various tools available, Smartlead stands out as one of the best email warmup tools on the market. With its advanced AI capabilities, unlimited warmups, and innovative features, it's designed to take your cold email outreach to the next level. So why wait? 

Sign up for a free trial of Smartlead today and experience the difference it can make in your email marketing efforts. Remember, the first step towards better deliverability starts with a warm inbox. Let Smartlead guide you along the way.

Frequently Asked Questions‍

• Why is email warmup necessary for cold outreach?

Email warmup is crucial for establishing a positive sender reputation with email service providers. It helps build trust gradually, reducing the likelihood of your emails being marked as spam and increasing the chances of reaching the recipient's inbox.

• Can I perform an email warmup manually without using a tool?

While it's possible to conduct manual email warmup, using dedicated tools offers automation, scheduling, and tracking features that significantly streamline the process. These tools are designed to optimize the warmup sequence for better results.

• What is the recommended duration for an email warmup process?

The recommended duration for an email warmup process can vary, but it generally ranges between 2 weeks to 3 months. The exact timeframe depends on several factors, including your email volume and engagement rate. It's always best to start slow and gradually increase email sending over time.

• Do I need to warm up every email address or just new ones?

Not necessarily. You typically need to warm up new email accounts or existing ones that haven't been used for a while. If an email account is regularly used and has a good sender reputation, additional warming isn't usually required.

• What are the common mistakes to avoid during email warmup?

One of the most common mistakes is rushing the process. Email warmup should be gradual. Another mistake is sending emails to unverified or non-existent addresses, which can harm your sender's reputation. It's crucial to clean your email list before starting the warmup process.

• Can email warmup help improve open rates and engagement?

Absolutely! A well-executed email warmup process can significantly improve your email deliverability, which in turn boosts your open rates and engagement. By warming up your emails, you're essentially building trust with ISPs, increasing the chances your emails will land in the recipient's inbox.

• Is there a difference between warming up a personal email address and a business email address?

While the process is similar, the main difference lies in the volume of emails sent. Business email addresses often send a higher volume of emails compared to personal ones; hence, they might require a longer warmup period.

• Are there any risks or downsides to email warmup?

The only real risk is if the process isn't done correctly. For example, sending too many emails too quickly can trigger spam filters. However, if done correctly, email warmup can significantly improve your email deliverability and campaign success.

Always remember that email warmup is an ongoing process - it doesn't stop once your emails start hitting the inbox. Regular engagement with your email list is crucial to maintain a healthy sender reputation.