Every day, marketers stand at multiple crossroads and make some difficult choices: choosing between blue and red for their backgrounds, A/B testing different CTAs, trying social media posts at different times, and so on. One such decision is choosing between a dedicated IP and shared IP for email marketing.
To help you make the decision, we spoke to some email deliverability experts at Zoho—Lucky and Avinash—and put together answers to some of marketers' burning questions about dedicated IP and shared IP in email marketing.
IP address, dedicated IP, and shared IP
An Internet Protocol (IP) address is a unique address that serves as an identifier for any given device accessing the Internet. When marketing teams run email campaigns, they use email marketing tools to create, send, and analyze campaigns. These emails originate from an IP address assigned by the email marketing platform.
"Typically, the campaigns from multiple senders originate from the same server and carry the same IP address," says Lucky Kannan, Engineering Manager of Zoho's Email Deliverability team. "An IP address shared by multiple email senders is known as a shared IP."
"Sometimes," he adds, "businesses request that email marketing platforms assign exclusive IP addresses so that no other sender can run campaigns using this IP address. IPs like these are known as dedicated IPs."
How do Gmail and Yahoo Mail treat emails from different IPs?
Before you choose between dedicated and shared IPs, you should know how each type of IP affects your emails so you can determine whether it suits your needs. Avinash, a Technical Support Lead specializing in solving dedicated IP-related problems, tells us that not every user needs a dedicated IP, and that the IP type has its own impact on email deliverability.
"Users often ask us if email inbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo Mail treat emails coming from a dedicated IP and shared IP differently," Avinash says. "The answer to that is complicated. Gmail and Yahoo Mail do treat emails from IPs differently, but it's primarily based on the sender's reputation."
How does sender reputation vary between the two IP types?
"When you have a dedicated IP, you build and control your own reputation," Avinash says. "If you have a positive history, your deliverability increases, but negative practices are solely your responsibility. On the other hand, shared IPs pool the reputation of multiple senders, so your deliverability can be affected by others' sending habits—for better or worse. It's also hard to build a consistent sender reputation when using a shared IP."
Benefits of dedicated and shared IPs
Both shared and dedicated IP have their own advantages.
"When you use a dedicated IP, you have control over your reputation," Lucky says. "As a high-volume email sender, you have your own domain imprint in the IP, and there's no way for the reputation to be influenced by another sender."
He notes that it's also easier to identify and solve IP related issues with dedicated IPs, and you don't get blacklisted so easily once you've built a reputation with one.
"However," he adds, "if you're a small sender, you probably don't reach a consistently high enough email volume to justify a dedicated IP. So it's difficult to build and maintain your own reputation, and in this case, it makes more practical sense to use a shared IP."
As a small sender, you can take advantage of the reputation built by other shared IP users; you don't have to worry about building and maintaining a reputation or warming up your IP. Dedicated IPs also come at an added cost—something not all small senders can get onboard with.
Note: Dedicated IPs are free with Marketing Automation's Enterprise plan.
Dedicated IPs: More effort for better rewards
Reputable email marketing platforms typically give you the option to buy a dedicated IP, but they also evaluate your needs first to see if your email sending patterns warrant one.
A dedicated IP doesn't magically guarantee higher inbox placement rates, according to Lucky, who also notes that businesses still have to put in the effort to warm up their IPs, monitor their reputations, and keep their contact lists clean to avoid spam traps. He recommends starting slow. "Don't start by emailing your entire audience at once. First, send emails to your most engaged audience members—the ones who are more likely to open, click, and reply. Then," he said, "slowly increase your sending volume while you're monitoring your reputation."
Look before you leap to a dedicated IP
Users often think a dedicated IP equals higher deliverability, and sometimes miss what goes into making a dedicated IP work. Avinash assists Marketing Automation customers achieve greater success with their dedicated IPs, and lists some common mistakes he sees users make with them:
- Not taking enough time to warm up dedicated IPs
- Sending high-volume campaigns with new IPs
- Not monitoring their sender reputations
- Not maintaining proper email list hygiene
- Repeatedly emailing unengaged recipients
- Ignoring email authentication practices like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
"Use tools like Google Postmaster, Sender Score, and SNDS to check your IP score," Lucky says. "Your score indicates the quality and reliability of your IP address, and is built through your email sending practice."
If one's score goes down, it means they need to revisit their sending patterns, list hygiene, and email authentication protocols.
Final verdict: Dedicated IP or shared IP?
If you send more than 100,000 emails per month and want to control your sender reputation to ensure you hit fewer spam filters and achieve a higher inbox placement, go for a dedicated IP.
✅If you're a small sender with low-volume campaigns or a new user without an established sender reputation, start with a shared IP to benefit from the IP's existing reputation.
✅Carefully weigh your sending volume, budget, desired control, campaign plans, marketing resource availability, and technical expertise to determine which IP aligns best with your organization's needs.
Want to start your email marketing journey with a dedicated IP address? Begin here.
Comments