The Role of Dedicated IP in Email Marketing

For all sizes of companies, email is an important channel for their marketing efforts. When this channel is adequately used, it can help businesses drive more traffic, and generate clicks and conversions. To achieve all the desired outcomes, email campaigns should have good deliverability rates. In email marketing deliverability is mostly affected by the senders’ reputation and sender score. There are various components that influence the sender score like complaints, volume, external reputation, unknown users, spam trap hits, the number of accepted and rejected emails, acceptance rate, and unknown user rate. Based on these components your IP reputation and the sender score is calculated. Having good IP and domain reputation is critical because these have a massive impact on deliverability rates. 

When starting email marketing campaigns, companies can either use shared IPs or dedicated IPs. If a company decides to use shared IPs in its email marketing campaigns, its IP reputation is based on the actions of other companies that use the same IPs. While using shared IPs, a company doesn’t have much control over IP reputation, and deliverability rates. Also, using shared IPs means that your emails will be sent by the email sender provider for you, but not by you. If you are a high-volume sender, the best option for you is dedicated IP. In this article, we will explain the importance of dedicated IP, and the best practices for using dedicated IP in email marketing campaigns. But, first, we should define what is a dedicated IP. 

What Is Dedicated IP?

IP (Internet Protocol) address is a special numeric identifier and is mostly used for identifying websites that are hosted on servers. A dedicated IP address refers to assigning a single IP address for a domain and website via a specific server. A dedicated IP address is unique to your domain and website and can’t be used by other domains and websites. Simply, when you use a dedicated IP address for hosting your website, users can reach your website just by typing a dedicated IP address into their browsers’ addresses bar.

Using dedicated IP for your email marketing campaigns can be quite beneficial. Also, dedicated IPs improve website speed, security for your business, and email marketing campaigns. But, you should purchase dedicated IPs from reputable and reliable providers. In this regard, fixed IP by Nordlayer would be a great choice for your company as it will enable robust security within your network perimeter and improve the efficiency of your email marketing campaigns.     

Why Using Dedicated IP in Email Marketing Is Important? 

Using dedicated IP in email marketing campaigns is really important because it grants companies greater control over IP reputation, deliverability, and open rates, and provides better security. When you use dedicated IP in email marketing campaigns, your sender score and IP reputation solely depend on your actions, and deliverability and open rates are up to your efforts and your emails won’t be affected by others’ bad IPs reputation. Let’s say you are following email marketing best practices and accomplished a good IP reputation and sender score, then your emails will have high deliverability and open rates, and your emails won’t be directed to spam folders. 

Also, with dedicated IP, you can prevent your dedicated IP from blocklisting. That’s mainly because you won’t use your email marketing campaigns for malicious purposes and your ISP will consider you as a trustworthy sender and won’t blocklist your IP address. So, your emails will be directed to users’ inboxes.  

While using dedicated IPs, your emails will be sent through your company email address which can contribute to your emails’ credibility. Also, being certified for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) can improve your security and trustworthiness. When you have an SSL certificate users consider your website secure and they are more likely to engage with the emails that are sent by your company.  

Best Practices for Using Dedicated IPs in Email Marketing Campaigns

1- Warm Up Your Dedicated IP

When you set up your dedicated IP for your email marketing campaigns, your IP reputation will be neutral. Before sending a high volume of emails you need to warm up your dedicated IP in order to get good deliverability rates in the long run. Warming up refers to sending small amounts of emails and increasing the number of emails over a certain time period like a month. During this time, your dedicated IP will be known by your ISP, and it will be more permissive with your emails. When you increase the volume of your emails over time, your ISP will recognize and trust you, once that happens your emails will more likely end up in your recipients’ inboxes. 

2- Improve Your Dedicated IP Reputation

To improve your dedicated IP reputation, you must pay attention to a few components that affect IP reputation such as complaints, hard bounce rates, spam trap hits, acceptance rates, and unknown user rates. You should always try to keep complaints at a minimum. If you are receiving too many complaints, your sender score and IP reputation will be lower. Also, you should keep hard bounce rates at a minimum as well. Hard bounce refers to sending messages to invalid email addresses, your hard bounce rates should be kept at a minimum. Another important component for your dedicated IP reputation is spam trap hits. ISPs reclaim an abandoned email address or create fresh email addresses for spam traps. You should never send messages to these spam trap email addresses. When you send emails to these addresses, your IP reputation will be negatively affected, and you will face a lower sender score and IP reputation. By validating your contact list, you can avoid spam trap hits and lower your hard bounce and unknown user rates. 

3- Monitor The Health of Your Dedicated IP and Its Reputation 

To maintain high deliverability and open rates, you should always monitor the health of your dedicated IP and its reputation. Regularly, you should check out your hard bounce rates, complaints, acceptance rates, the number of rejected messages, volume, unknown user rates, etc. Also, your email marketing efforts should be consistent. In email marketing consistency is the key to high deliverability. That’s why you need to be consistent in the number of emails that are sent a day, a week, or a month and you should always continue sending emails because when you send emails for a week and stop for the following week, this will negatively affect your sender score and reputation. 

Last Words

Email is an important channel for businesses’ marketing efforts. In this channel, the type of IP address plays a critical role in deliverability and open rates. Using dedicated IPs in email marketing campaigns and applying email marketing best practices can help businesses achieve desired outcomes. Dedicated IPs grant businesses greater control over IP reputation, and enable better security, and improved website speed.