IP strategy

I’m not going to re-hash the whole discussion around should email senders be on dedicated IP or shared IPs, what’s best for deliverability, and all that jazz — it’s been done before (and in wonderful detail, by my Kickbox colleague Jennifer Nespola Lantz).But I did want to call out — in its own post — something that merits reinforcing:If you don’t send big volume, you probably shouldn’t be on dedicated sending IP addresses.What constitutes big volume? Ask ten different people and you’ll get five different answers. The most common guidance (and my guidance) is that you should be sending at least 100,000 email messages a month to keep a dedicated IP address “alive.” More is better, but if you don’t send anywhere near 100,000 messages per month, you’re likely to experience spam folder delivery at the big three (Microsoft, Yahoo and Gmail–ESPECIALLY Microsoft) just because you’re not sending enough volume…

It all starts with how much volume do you have — do you send more than enough emails per month to provide ISPs with enough data to decide upon a reputation for your sending IP address? Traditional guidance is that if you don’t, you need to send from a shared IP environment. If you do, you can send from a dedicated IP environment (and most often should). But there’s more to it than that, and my Kickbox colleague Jennifer Nespola Lantz walks you through it all over on the Kickbox blog. There is strategy to be had here. Check it out!