How to Improve Your Email Deliverability Using a Dedicated IP
An often overlooked aspect of email marketing is actually having the email hit the inbox and not the spam box. It’s not as simple as loading up your favourite email marketing software and clicking “send”.
Using a Dedicated Sending IP
If you’re serious about your email marketing efforts it’s worth splashing out on a dedicated sending IP to use for sending, much like your home internet IP address it’s a unique address for you.
Why use a Dedicated Sending IP
Noisy neighbours, blasting music, shouting, non-stop parties, and questionable behaviour. No I’m not describing your previous neighbour from hell rather drawing a parallel.
You see, let’s say 50 people all use the same IP address to send email from. A shared IP which is normal across all major sending providers like Sendgrid, Mailchimp et al.
Now one of those people buys their email list from one of those spammy marketing firms that offers customers lists. Uh oh.
Chances are users will mark the email as spam or the ESP (Email Service Provider) will. When that happens at scale the IP address can be blacklisted.
When an IP is blacklisted for sending spam emails it can be very difficult to clean. Often resulting in a new IP needed to be used in the meantime to ensure deliverability.
How Many Spam Emails will Result in an IP Address Getting Blacklisted
As you can imagine ESPs aren’t giving out this information freely, after all no one is going to say “hey, you can send 1,000 spam emails and then we’ll block you”.
However, overall it’s likely less than you think. I’ve personally seen sending IPs blocked for a sub 0.30% spam rate.
I’ve also seen quotas as high as 2%, typically these are when sending to email lists of 1,000+ people.
Sending volume and previous sending reputation of the IP does play a role on how quickly the ESP will block you yet rightly so limits are on the low-side.
Implementing a Dedicated Sending IP
The majority of players in the market like Sendgrid allow you to buy a dedicated IP for sending your emails.
Although avoid the common mistake of buying a dedicated IP and then sending a huge marketing campaign.
Remember sending volume plays a role in how the ESP views your campaigns, and if you are a genuine sender or not.
That’s why you need to warm up your sending IP.
What is Warming a Dedicated Email Sending IP
In simple terms it’s sending low volume emails and carefully cultivating your email list over a number of weeks gradually increasing volume.
Let’s say you have a list of 25,000 subscribers. You’ll want to send out to no more than 10% of your list on your first send.
So you send to 2,500 subscribers, check your bounces and remove both your hard bounces (most email systems do this automatically) and importantly your soft bounces, remember we want to be squeaky clean and increase your sending reputation as fast as possible.
Over the course of a couple of weeks, increase your count per send and keep cleaning your email list.
By the end of a couple of weeks you should be ready to send your first email blast to your entire list.
Wrapping Up
A dedicated sending IP can be the best thing for your email deliverability but it’s important you warm up the IP address first and regularly clean your email marketing list.