Most users in this scenario have two conflicting problems:
  • You have a large audience that you have never or rarely contacted before
  • Your domain has little to no history of sending emails
This means:
  • Users don’t expect email communication from you as they haven’t received it in the past
  • Platforms (Gmail, Outlook, etc) don’t have a sending history from you so your domain reputation is nonexistent
It’s really important to handle this well, so follow these steps or contact support@cocoonmail.com with any questions.

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Warming up your list

We want to build your domain reputation and start emailing your best users at the same time. 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.

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Setting up an Onboarding Loop

First, we’ll 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 domain reputation). You should let this Loop run for a few days while your domain 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 >50% at this point.

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Engaging Your Most Active Users

After your Loop has run for a few days, you can begin to backfill your audience in Cocoonmail 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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Importing and Contacting Existing Users

After you import the most engaged users 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. I 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

If you follow 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. With any questions, just ping support@cocoonmail.com