Dedicated IPs are great to build and maintain your own IP and domain Reputation, as well as to control more of your own deliverability destiny in email marketing ecosystem. However it doesn’t mean that the best way to get good deliverability is just to have your own dedicated IPs. Do not assume that all your deliverability problems will disappear once you get it. Generally you should ask the most important question: should I get a dedicated IP?
Getting a dedicated IP gives marketers the ownership of which direction the IP will take … either positive or negative. First, let’s have a look at the main Pros and Cons of Dedicated IPs.
Pros
- A dedicated IP address allows you to totally control your own sending destiny as an email marketer.
- Your Sending Reputation will be affected only by your own decisions. If you have excellent sending and data management practices, you’ll be on the safe side.
- It can considerably increase your delivery rates – if warmed properly and maintaining a consistent sending management plan.
- A dedicated IP is useful if you frequently must request whitelisting of your IP. Many high security industries look for dedicated IPs; so if you’re selling to a high security industry of any kind, dedicated IPs can help you get through specific filters.
Cons
- Dedicated IPs are not foreseen for low volume. If you are sending less than 200,000 emails per month, it’s going to be hard to maintain a good, trustworthy reputation with ISPs.
- The IP address must be warmed up. When you get a new dedicated IP address, it will be “cold,” you’ll need to warm it with your company’s sending practices to establish and maintain a good reputation with ISPs. Check out SmartSender’s IP warmup Schedule for more info.
- Higher cost for dedicated IPs. It costs email service providers a lot of money to procure and maintain IPs for customer use, and so they protect the revenue they get for dedicated IPs.
Here’s the good news: with modern filters dedicated IPs are not critical for good delivery. Reputation is not solely based on the connecting IP address.
Google, in particular, has made it very clear that they use a matrix of domain and IP reputation. If domains need to be warmed up, that means Google is able to separate out mail from the same IP using different domains. OATH, too, focuses a lot on content and domains, rather than IP addresses.
