What is a dedicated IP address in email marketing and why to buy one?

If you take seriously your email marketing campaigns and want to step up the game and ensure your email reputation is protected, you should consider buying a dedicated IP address, but lots of questions arise: why, how, and when?

In this post, I'm sharing the framework on when we recommend our clients get a dedicated IP address and important steps to warm up your dedicated IP before you start using it so you can protect your email reputation.

A dedicated IP address is like having your own passport on the internet, is a unique address that identifies you among other businesses. This identification is not shared with anyone else. In the context of email marketing, a dedicated IP address is used exclusively by one sender or organization to send their email campaigns.

A shared IP address is an address used by multiple individuals or entities to send their email campaigns. In the context of email marketing, it means that several businesses or senders share the same IP address to send their marketing emails. The number of businesses is unknown and depends on the email service provider.

Most of the newsletters and email software out there just put you in a shared IP pool with other businesses. They typically do this at first to save them money and effort and help you get started faster with an IP that is being used frequently.

However, this has big issues in the long term. If any of the companies in that shared pool start sending crappy emails, commit fraud, or have a bad list quality, your IP could end up being blacklisted and your email reputation will be screwed. When migrating many clients to ZooTools Email, some of those customers were using blacklisted IPs and protect their sending reputation because of this.

Most of the email services or blogging platforms give the wrong advice… You shouldn’t decide to get an IP address based on the number of subscribers, but based on the frequency of emails and the number of campaigns you plan on sending.

• ✅ Buy an IP if... You are going to start sending one email every day or multiple times per week, you'll set up transactional emails and in general you are planning to send frequent and consistent emails.

• ❌ Do not buy a dedicated IP if... You only send email campaigns once a month and very infrequently. If this is you, please, reconsider your email strategy because consistency and frequency are critical.

At Zootools, we recommend getting a dedicated IP address if you send emails very often (for example one email every day or once or more emails a week) and with a reasonably large audience (e.g.: over 40-90k subscribers). But there can be exceptions, so please reach out to us or book a growth call to study your case.

Right in your ZooTools account you can buy a dedicated IP address. If you have questions, email us and we'll analyze your situation.