Why Email Warm-up Services Fail in iGaming

Warm-up Services vs. Brand’s Organic “warm-up”. What Works and What Doesn't

Summary Box

If you're starting new email marketing, it's healthier for your deliverability to use your own traffic with organic growth rather than a warm-up service.

Preliminary warm-up using specialized services is a common practice in the gambling industry. However, we at SpinCity advocate avoiding it. Here's why.

Warm-up Services (Current Common Practice)

1. Warms only on corporate domain emails - Email warm-up services work on corporate domain emails (like @company.com), not on free email providers like Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail. Filters work differently.

2. Ineffective for Yahoo/Hotmail - Warm-up approaches has little efficiencyl for Yahoo and Hotmail addresses

3. Generic, irrelevant content (mostly) - Most warm-up services use unrelated content about SEO, marketing agencies, etc. Only the most expensive plans allow you to use your own casino templates and texts for warm-up

4. Based on fake conversations between personas - The warm-up system creates artificial back-and-forth email conversations. This doesn't match real brand-to-customer communication patterns, which are typically one-way announcements, promotions, and updates - not conversations

5. Warms on contacts irrelevant to your database - You're building sending reputation by emailing addresses that aren't even in your actual customer database

6. Switching content/addresses IS actual spam behavior - When you change from warm-up content to real casino content, switch from warm-up leads to real leads, and change from business emails to Gmail addresses - this looks like spammer behavior and raises spam flags with email providers

7. Daily limits make it expensive at scale - Warm-up services have daily email limits. If you need to send many thousands of emails per day, the warm-up costs become prohibitively expensive to match your actual sending volume

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Brand’s Organic “warm-up”

1. Organic daily traffic growth - Natural, gradual increase in daily email volume to contacts who are actually interested in your content

2. All providers included - Sends to all email providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, corporate domains), which creates a healthy, natural sending pattern

3. Casino-branded content from day one - Uses actual casino content and your brand messaging - the same content you'll continue sending in regular campaigns

4. Click-based engagement, not fake conversations - System builds reputation through real clicks and engagement, not artificial reply conversations

5. Your own database with varied communication - Uses your actual contact list that responds to different types of communication and content

The Real-World Complexity

Based on dozens of projects we've been involved in, the reality is more complex, including factors such as CEO opinions on the matter. In many cases, we've also used our own bulletproof, time-proven warm-up schedule adjusted per ISP—customized for Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo. This approach has proven to deliver much better results in high-volume environments.

Contact us to get a FREE paper on our know-how high-deliverability warm-up plan.