Cheat Sheet: What You Should Know About Dedicated IPs

Yesterday, I got to share some screen time with Anton to share all the things about dedicated IPs and email reputation. But really, we were just excited to share our feline findings from an afternoon well spent down the Google rabbit hole. I mean, isn’t this just puurfect?

But we also talked about the work our reputation team has been up to recently around getting dedicated IPs ready to send email. You can catch the recording of our session – or just keep reading, because I’m going to tell you here what my top takeaways were about using dedicated IPs.

Sharing isn’t caring when you send a lot of email

For the most part, you can benefit a lot from using shared IPs. It’s great in the beginning when you’re just starting out and don’t have the street cred with ESPs. Someone else has basically done the work to make that IP trustworthy… but the flip side is that you also have to deal with other people’s $hi+ and their questionable habits – which honestly aren’t always the best for what you’re trying to achieve. If you’re sending millions of emails, or even hundreds of thousands of emails a month (200k+), that’s when it starts to make sense to build your own IP reputation. Not to mention, when you’re trying to configure SPF to prevent email spoofing…it’s not going to protect you from other senders if you’re all on the same IP. You will need your own IP to prevent sending domain hijacking.

Slow and steady gets you sending faster

Remember how I said street cred is everything with ESPs? With a dedicated IP, it’s all about sending the right volume of email at the right time to keep them from flagging you as a spammer. You want to time it perfectly so that you give yourself the room to increase the volume every 24 hours. Through a lot of trial and error, we worked out the kinks and automated this process – which you should totally check out if manually warming up your IP isn’t something you want to do.

Don’t be that guy…

Dedicated IPs are good when you will consistently send high-volume. If you occasionally send a lot of email, then you could be sending the wrong message. If there’s one thing ESPs hate is sudden bursts in sending…which would get your messages blocked.

You might consider in this case using a shared IP that’s hot and ready to send your messages. Think of it this way: your sending peaks wouldn’t seem so unexpected when ESPs are getting consistent traffic from other senders. Just don’t be a jerk. Your neighbors are also trying to send their messages. If you go over the caps that ESPs have configured to accept a certain volume from your IP address…then nobody is sending any email.