How to Choose Between a Dedicated or Shared IP for Email Marketing
Choosing the right answer for you relies upon a variety of factors. The initial step to deciding whether you go for a dedicated or shared IP is by understanding the differences. How about we begin with definitions:
- Shared IP: A shared IP is one that is used by more than one sender, i.e. a pool of companies.
- Dedicated IP: A dedicated IP is one that is used by a single sender. The sender must purchase and set up the dedicated IP with their email marketing vendor.

Let’s look into the factors that we need to understand before choosing a dedicated or shared IP.
1.Cost
This part of the choice is direct. Shared IPs are normally more affordable than dedicated IPs because your email marketing merchant can spread the expense of a shared IP across more clients. Organizations picking a dedicated IP likewise normally need to pay for initial setup expenses or recurring costs. Yet, you’re presumably not settling on a choice in view of cost alone, so we should continue on toward the next factor that will influence your choice.
2. Maintenance
With a dedicated IP, you want to make sure you’re sending sufficient email to keep a quality reputation with ISPs. (We’ll discuss reputation as an element for your next decision.) If you settle on a dedicated IP and you either don’t send a lot of emails, or you don’t send email consistently, then it very well may be hard to secure yourself as a trustworthy, without spam-free sender. This adversely influences your deliverability; ISPs and webmail services search for a good measure of steady volume before they permit you to arrive at their users’ inboxes.
In the case of a shared IP, however, this is not a problem — your email service provider (ESP) can pool the emails of multiple senders, and thus maintain the IP’s reputation so you don’t have to worry about maintaining the proper sending volume.
3. Reputation
As you already are aware, your sender’s reputation is everything when it comes to deliverability. If you are sending from an email server with a perfect reputation, your emails will reach the inbox of your subscribers. And as we noted previously, your email volume is one factor that goes into the decision to place your emails in a recipient’s inbox. The other contributing factors pertain to list cleanliness, which is determined by metrics like hard bounce rate, spamtrap hits, and SPAM complaint rate.
Senders on a shared IP are lumped together from a reputation viewpoint. The reputation of the IP you’re using is determined by the email practices of everyone who uses that IP. Consequently, ESPs are many times proactive about list tidiness by laying out import rules, and commonly screen their servers for senders utilizing poor or black-hat email marketing strategies that could hurt deliverability for everybody.
You may think, “if I go with my own dedicated IP, I won’t have to be concerned about the bad behavior of other senders.” That is valid – – however, this implies you should be totally legit with yourself about your own email practices. On the off chance that you’re not totally sure about the neatness of your list, it’s possible that you can really profit from the good routines of your neighbors on a shared IP. I’m not supporting that you test your ESP’s limit for terrible practices, rather bringing up that you are more responsible for your activities when you utilize a dedicated IP.
What to Do Once You Decide on Shared vs. Dedicated IP
So suppose you’ve settled on a choice. What are the following stages?
In the event that you will go with a shared IP, ensure you ask your ESP these two questions:
1) What are your rules for importing subscribers?: These rules are important for you to know — not only because your IP neighbors have to abide by them, but also because you have to, too!
2) What are the acceptance rates of your shared IPs?: You can follow this up by asking for their Return Path Sender Score, the trusted standard for email deliverability. To give you a sense of what is normal, a recent study from Return Path reported that for servers with a Sender Score of 91+ (i.e. legitimate servers), only 88% of messages actually ended up in the inbox.
On the off chance that you go the other way by being prepared for a dedicated IP, talk with your ESP about their offers and be ready to warm up any new IP addresses. Warming up an IP address is a necessary move toward earning a great reputation. The thought is that you need to steadily increase the volume of emails sent, as opposed to impacting out an enormous volume excessively fast. As a new IP address, ISPs will not recognize you as a decent sender immediately, and in this manner could botch your new sending-out as malicious or spam, influencing your deliverability.
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