Where is your email being sent from? Is it being sent from a dedicated IP address or are you are sharing an IP address with other senders? The decision of which to choose is an important one! This applies to both those using an email service provider (ESP) and those that are sending from their own in-house system.
Why does it really matter which IP address you send from?
Reputation is extremely important for any organization- and IP address is connected to this. When blacklists are created, both the reputation of IP address and the domain in your sender address are looked at.
What does it mean for an IP address to be dedicated? It means that only email from your organization is being sent from it. The benefit is that your organization has complete control over the information sent and reputation of the IP address. So as long as you stick to the rules and follow email standards and best practices, you are in good hands. This helps you to steer clear of any bad reputation that could put your deliverability at risk.
But as usual, as for most pro’s there is often times a downside. In this case, it happens to be the cost. Most ESPs have an initial set-up fee and monthly maintenance fee for dedicated ISP addresses. This has a direct affect on your ROI. Obviously if you are sending large quantities, this is a minimal cost. But for those sending small amounts of emails, you will notice a difference in your profit margin.
So then, what exactly is a shared IP address? Simple enough- It just means that you are sharing your IP address with other organizations. This means that your reputation can be affected by any of the companies sending from the IP address you are sharing- in both a positive and negative way. So if your IP address neighbors stick to the rules like you, there is not need to worry. But if any of you do something wrong, the IP address could gain a bad reputation, resulting in the blacklisting of all email sent from there.
Lots of customers end up sharing IP addresses unintentionally. This is because many of the low cost ESP’s don’t even offer the option of using a dedicated IP address. It’s simply much cheaper to provide the service when you have several companies using the same IP address. This way the customer gets to save –which is obviously a good thing.
This is a great cost- effective deal, until something might go wrong. If one of the senders gets the IP address blacklisted than it becomes your issue as well. Many of the ESPs try and deal with this by having several IP addresses. They change customers to those IP addresses that have a good or neutral reputation when the other one received a bad reputation.
Although this is a good response, it is used a lot by spammers that keep changing their IP addresses all the time in order to avoid being blacklisted. So this approach might damage the reputation of the domain in your sender address, even though you haven’t done anything wrong.
Why it still might be a good idea for you to share an IP Address.
There is still another positive reason, besides low cost, for low-volume senders to use a shared IP address.
When dealing with reputation you can have a positive, neutral, or negative one. However, to develop any sort of a reputation, a certain amount of emails need to be sent each month. If your IP address is too small, then you might always be stuck with a neutral reputation or basically no reputation at all. While this isn’t necessarily bad- it’s not great either.
When you share your IP Addresses with other companies the ESP can gather enough volume to gain a positive reputation, thus helping your customers’ email to get to the inbox. So this is definitely a plus if everyone using the IP address is adhering to email best practices. It is up to the ESP provider to educate about best practices and carefully examine all the IP addresses to make sure that the customers are adhering to them.
There are the same pro’s and con’s if you are sending from your own in-house system. But if your email marketing and individual email from employees are being sent from the same IP address than you might have to be careful.
All is well if you have a positive reputation. However, if your efforts are blacklisted than all of your emails could potentially be blocked. This could prevent messages from your individual employees from getting to business contacts.
Also, if one of your employees messes up, you could end up with all your email marketing being blocked. An example of this is when a salesperson might accidentally load an unknown email into outlook address book and send it. If there are spam complaints because of this error, it could end up affecting your reputation.
So how should you choose whether to use a shared IP address or a dedicated one? This requires both a certain amount of risk and financial analysis. There really are pros and cons with each. If you have the budget and the money is not an issue, then even as a low volume sender it’s recommended to use a dedicated IP address. When using a shared IP address, make sure to regularly check up on your deliverability.
Most important to remember- always play by the rules and stick to opt-in and email standards and best practices. This is really the best way to protect against deliverability problems.
