Upon starting to work with a new Email Service Provider (ESP) for your email campaigns, you should request private IP address
to be assigned to your account. While others in the industry will disagree with me stating that shared IPs are the way to go because reputation is shared and spread out, I can tell you from experience that shared IPs can do more hard then good in the long term. If managed correctly, private IP addresses will have impeccable reputation that is envied by others.
The reason some recommend to go with a shared IP is because email campaigns can start right away without having to ramp up and warm dedicated IP addresses. The reason that is argued is because they have already been used and are ready to go but in reality if one of the client of the Email Service Provider starts to play games and sending SPAM email then the reputation of the IP that your organization shared with that client is effected and so is your email campaign deliverability and it will happen at the worst possible time.
While it is true that the reputable ESPs will monitor their clients to make sure they follow best practices, having a dedicated IP for your large email subscriber list is protecting you from retribution due to the behavior of other organizations.
A few months back a client was referred to me because they wanted to move to a new ESP due to features that were not available with their old provider but at the same time didn’t want their campaigns to slow down.
The client thought they should use a shared IP that was suggested by the ESP but I advised them that this is not the way to go especially if they are planning to grow their list and future campaign schedule. It took some convincing particularly when they heard that the process of warming up their new IP address will take two to four weeks but by the time I was done explaining the benefits, they knew there was no other way to do this. The reasons why we suggested to the client to use a dedicated IP address are
• It is assigned and utilized entirely to and by your company. No one else can use the IP address and therefore no one else can have an effect the reputation that is built over time with ISP which means deliverability of email newsletters to the intending recipients.
• Dedicated IPs addresses are static which means that they never change. This is great news for those who commit to email marketing best practices because the IP address does not change and the reputation of the IP that belongs to the organization that is using it remains in goods standings.
• It’s very easy for a company to track what is sent since they can track the volume of emails that are sent through a specific IP.
• If the company’s subscriber base is big enough that they will be sending a large amount of email campaigns email week, a dedicated Ip address will give the company the scalability they need to manage all their email campaigns.
In a future post I will cover the process of how to ramp and warm up a dedicated IP for email delivery so that all emails sent from these new IPs will be accepted and delivered to the intended mail subscribers. It takes a bit of time but time worth spending to get the trust of Internet Service Providers and inbox delivery.
