Email Deliverability

Choosing between shared and dedicated IP addresses

The reputation of the IP address your marketing emails are sent from has a major impact in terms of deliverability. If your IP address has a poor reputation, your emails are at greater risk of being filtered as spam by some email platforms. When it comes to email marketing, you have a choice between dedicated and shared IP addresses.

Both types of IP addresses are proven to be very effective in relation to sending and delivering emails. The decision comes down to how each type could benefit you in relation to campaigns you send and the control you require.

Dedicated IP addresses

What is a dedicated IP address?

A dedicated IP address is used by just one sender. As you’ll be the only one sending using the address, a dedicated IP offers the ultimate level of control.

Advantages of dedicated IP addresses

Dedicated means the IP addresses are yours and you are in full control. No matter what other senders do, they cannot impact upon the delivery of your emails. Dedicated IP benefits include:

  • Take more control of sender reputation
  • Other senders cannot impact on the deliverability of your email campaigns
  • Investigating deliverability issues is much easier
  • Separate transactional and campaign email delivery
  • Warming additional IP addresses becomes easier

Shared IP addresses

What is a shared IP address?

A shared IP address means that other senders will also be using the same IP address. This could be, for example, a collection of different companies.

Advantages of shared IP addresses

Still a great option and shared IP addresses offer everything needed for 99% of those that send less than 200k emails each month.

  • Low volume senders benefit from existing IP address reputation
  • Infrequent senders don’t need to be concerned with warming IP addresses
  • Low / no cost

Never ‘share’ domains

Shared IP addresses are completely different to the domains used for sending and tracking clicks. Our advice is to never share domains with anyone else and the best approach is to setup custom domains that match your branding.

Regardless of whether you use shared or dedicated IP addresses, custom sending and click tracking domains are an effective way of building sender reputation.

How many IP addresses do you need?

Good question, take a look at this other post for a not so short answer to that.

How to make a decision

Most senders start out with shared IP addresses and then move into dedicated as the frequency, volume and importance of email campaigns grows.

For a large percentage of senders shared IP addresses will always be sufficient but if you want to rule out any kind of external impact on the delivery of your emails then dedicated IP addresses is the way forward.

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