An email ramp-up schedule is a day-by-day plan for gradually increasing your sending volume so mailbox providers can build trust in your domain and IP. You start with a small number of sends (typically around 50), roughly double each day as long as inbox placement trends positively, and hold volume steady whenever metrics dip. Using InboxAlly seed emails during ramp-up generates engagement signals that let you scale faster than a traditional warm-up.
For the broader warm-up strategy — including what to send, who to target, and how to monitor progress week by week — see Email Warm-Up Timeline: Week-by-Week Schedule.
The volume of emails are increased (usually doubled) each day so long as the inbox placement continues to trend positively. If placement begins to decline, best practice is to maintain your previous day’s volume so long as your delivery metrics are under-performing. For example, if you expect to send 10,000 emails in a day, start with the initial 50 emails on your first day and increase volume day-over-day until you reach your desired volume.
The engagement boost from your InboxAlly seeds will allow you to ramp up faster and more successfully than a traditional ramp up.
How to use Seed Emails to ramp up sending on a domain or IP?
We will provide some examples for ramping up different volumes of emails. When using seed emails, you have two options:
- Use a two-stage ramp up (recommended)
- Use a hybrid only ramp up
Two Stage ramp up of a new IP or Domain
If you are not already sending, we suggest a two-stage ramp up with 100% synthetic traffic for the first week and then mixing-in your real traffic the second week.
- Create an email, or several variants, as well as subject lines that will be used during the ramp up cycle. Run these emails through a spam tester to ensure that the content of the email does not accidentally raise any concerns with spam filters.
- Send the scheduled amount of seed emails for that day. If you have the capability through your sending platform, throttle the sending and send during the typical daytime hours of the majority of your recipients.
- Each day, monitor the inbox placement in the InboxAlly platform and ensure the trend shows an inboxing improvement.
- If inboxing declines for a given day or does not clearly show an improvement, maintain current send volume for the subsequent day(s) until the placement shows an uptick. Depending on your prior IP reputation, it is not uncommon that you may need to hold your volume constant at some occasions on the schedule.
- If there is a positive trend in deliverability, progress to the next step of the schedule. Continue progressing with the send target each day until you are sending using all of your seed emails. For example, if you have 1,000 seeds on a Premium Plan, once you reach the day where you send 1,000 seed emails out, each day thereafter you will continue at that same level of 1,000 seed emails.
- Begin mixing in your real emails over the next 7 days until you reach the desired final volume.
- To ensure the best inboxing on an ongoing basis, continue sending your full volume daily along with the seed emails. We usually recommend that the seed emails make up at least 5% of your total volume (with a minimum of 50 seed emails per ESP per sender). However with some experimentation, you might be able to get by with less.
Only double send volume when inbox placement shows day-over-day improvement
Example ramp up schedules (two-stage approach)
How many emails do you want to send per month?
Sending 100,000 emails/month requires scaling to 4,000 emails/day. The recommended number of seeds and starting sends is as follows.
| Seeds Recommended | Seed Ratio | Day 1 Volume |
|---|---|---|
| 200 | 5% | 20 |
Send to your seed emails only for the first 6 days using the following schedule. Monitor inbox placement and if inboxing declines for a given day or does not clearly show an improvement, maintain current send volume for the subsequent day(s) until the placement shows an uptick and then continue with the schedule.
Synthetic Sending (Seeds Emails only)
| Day Number | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Send Volume | 20 | 40 | 80 | 150 | 175 | 200 |
Begin mixing in your real emails with your seed emails using the following schedule. Monitor inbox placement and if inboxing declines for a given day or does not clearly show an improvement, maintain current send volume for the subsequent day(s) until the placement shows an uptick and then continue with the schedule.
Hybrid Sending (Seeds + Real Emails)
| Day Number | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Send Volume | 300 | 400 | 600 | 1000 | 1800 | 3400 | 4200 |
| Seed Emails | 200 | 200 | 200 | 200 | 200 | 200 | 200 |
| Real Emails | 100 | 200 | 400 | 800 | 1600 | 3200 | 4000 |
Sending 500,000 emails/month requires scaling to 20,000 emails/day. The recommended number of seeds and starting sends is as follows.
| Seeds Recommended | Seed Ratio | Day 1 Volume |
|---|---|---|
| 1000 | 5% | 50 |
Send to your seed emails only for the first 6 days using the following schedule. Monitor inbox placement and if inboxing declines for a given day or does not clearly show an improvement, maintain current send volume for the subsequent day(s) until the placement shows an uptick and then continue with the schedule.
Synthetic Sending (Seeds Emails only)
| Day Number | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Send Volume | 50 | 100 | 200 | 400 | 800 | 1000 |
Begin mixing in your real emails with your seed emails using the following schedule. Monitor inbox placement and if inboxing declines for a given day or does not clearly show an improvement, maintain current send volume for the subsequent day(s) until the placement shows an uptick and then continue with the schedule.
Hybrid Sending (Seeds + Real Emails)
| Day Number | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Send Volume | 1500 | 2000 | 3000 | 5000 | 9000 | 17000 | 21000 |
| Seed Emails | 1000 | 1000 | 1000 | 1000 | 1000 | 1000 | 1000 |
| Real Emails | 500 | 1000 | 2000 | 4000 | 8000 | 16000 | 20000 |
Sending 1,000,000 emails/month requires scaling to 40,000 emails/day. The recommended number of seeds and starting sends is as follows.
| Seeds Recommended | Seed Ratio | Day 1 Volume |
|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 5% | 100 |
Send to your seed emails only for the first 6 days using the following schedule. Monitor inbox placement and if inboxing declines for a given day or does not clearly show an improvement, maintain current send volume for the subsequent day(s) until the placement shows an uptick and then continue with the schedule.
Synthetic Sending (Seeds Emails only)
| Day Number | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Send Volume | 100 | 200 | 400 | 800 | 1600 | 2000 |
Begin mixing in your real emails with your seed emails using the following schedule. Monitor inbox placement and if inboxing declines for a given day or does not clearly show an improvement, maintain current send volume for the subsequent day(s) until the placement shows an uptick and then continue with the schedule.
Hybrid Sending (Seeds + Real Emails)
| Day Number | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Send Volume | 3000 | 4000 | 6000 | 10000 | 18000 | 32000 | 42000 |
| Seed Emails | 2000 | 2000 | 2000 | 2000 | 2000 | 2000 | 2000 |
| Real Emails | 1000 | 2000 | 4000 | 8000 | 16000 | 32000 | 40000 |
Sending 5,000,000 emails/month requires scaling to 200,000 emails/day. The recommended number of seeds and starting sends is as follows.
| Seeds Recommended | Seed Ratio | Day 1 Volume |
|---|---|---|
| 10,000 | 5% | 250 |
Send to your seed emails only for the first 6 days using the following schedule. Monitor inbox placement and if inboxing declines for a given day or does not clearly show an improvement, maintain current send volume for the subsequent day(s) until the placement shows an uptick and then continue with the schedule.
Synthetic Sending (Seeds Emails only)
| Day Number | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Send Volume | 250 | 500 | 1000 | 2000 | 4000 | 8000 | 10000 |
Begin mixing in your real emails with your seed emails using the following schedule. Monitor inbox placement and if inboxing declines for a given day or does not clearly show an improvement, maintain current send volume for the subsequent day(s) until the placement shows an uptick and then continue with the schedule.
Hybrid Sending (Seeds + Real Emails)
| Day Number | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Send Volume | 11000 | 12000 | 3000 | 5000 | 9000 | 17000 | 21000 | 210000 |
| Seed Emails | 10000 | 10000 | 10000 | 10000 | 10000 | 10000 | 10000 | 10000 |
| Real Emails | 1500 | 3000 | 6000 | 12000 | 24000 | 48000 | 96000 | 200000 |
Pro Tip
Each day, 6 hours before you wish to send to your real emails, send to the seed emails first using the same subject, body text and from email that you will send to your real emails.
Hybrid ramp up of a new IP or Domain
If you are organically growing your traffic or unable to dedicate the time for a two stage ramp up, you can mix-in the seeds to ramp up your IP or domain while sending your real email volume. Simply estimate the final daily send volume and ensure that you have enough seeds to cover 5% of that volume. During the first week of ramp up, scale to 100% seed usage. By the end of the second week of ramp up, you should be able to scale to your full volume.
- Create an email, or several variants, as well as subject lines that will be used during the ramp up cycle. Run these emails through a spam tester to ensure that the content of the email does not accidentally raise any concerns with spam filters.
- Send the scheduled amount of seed emails for that day. If you have the capability through your sending platform, throttle the sending and send during the typical daytime hours of the majority of your recipients.
- Each day, monitor the inbox placement in the InboxAlly platform and ensure the trend shows an inboxing improvement.
- If inboxing declines for a given day or does not clearly show an improvement, maintain current send volume for the subsequent day(s) until the placement shows an uptick. You may also consider holding your real email volume constant and only scaling the seed emails until inboxing shows an improvement. Depending on your prior IP reputation, it is not uncommon that you may need to hold your volume constant at some occasions on the schedule.
- When there is a positive trend in deliverability, progress to the next step of the schedule. Continue progressing with the send target each day until you are sending using all of your seed emails. For example, if you have our Premium Plan, which gives you 1,000 seeds, once you reach the day when you send 1,000 seed emails out, each day thereafter you will continue at that same level of 1,000 seed emails while adding to and increasing your real email send volume.
- To ensure the best inboxing on an ongoing basis, continue sending your full volume daily along with the seed emails. We usually recommend that the seed emails make up 5% of your total volume (with a minimum of 50 seed emails per ESP per sender). However with some experimentation, you might be able to get by with less.
Example ramp up schedule for 200,000 daily emails (hybrid approach)
| Day Number | Seed Email % | Seed Emails | Real Emails |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2% | 200 | 50 |
| 2 | 4% | 400 | 100 |
| 3 | 6% | 600 | 500 |
| 4 | 12% | 1200 | 1000 |
| 5 | 25% | 2500 | 2000 |
| 6 | 50% | 5000 | 4000 |
| 7 | 100% | 10000 | 8000 |
| 8 | 100% | 10000 | 15000 |
| 9 | 100% | 10000 | 25000 |
| 10 | 100% | 10000 | 35000 |
| 11 | 100% | 10000 | 50000 |
| 12 | 100% | 10000 | 75000 |
| 13 | 100% | 10000 | 100000 |
| 14 | 100% | 10000 | 150000 |
| 15 | 100% | 10000 | 200000 |
What to do if your ramp up does not scale
By following the example schedules above, you should be able to scale your daily sends to the volume you need. There are many factors in email deliverability and sometimes things do not always go as planned. If you have any challenges in maintaining the level of inboxing you desire, we recommend speaking to one of our deliverability experts for specific help in achieving your inboxing goals. Please reach out to us to schedule some time for a call. Some of the daily KPIs that we will ask for are the following:
- Number of emails sent
- Open rate
- Spam complaints
- Click through rates
If you want to learn more in-depth about email deliverability best practices, check out our other blog post.