A lot of marketers thinks that having their account setup on shared IP infrastructure at their ESP (Email Service Provider) would actually boost their chances to get to their recipients inbox.
The reality is much more complicated, a shared IP pool hosting tens or even hundreds of clients is subject to variation in terms of delivery/deliverability depending of the performance and quality of the related senders.
Building a good sending reputation can take months but losing it can be very fast. One day you could have the best ever deliverability and the next day you’ll struggle delivering your emails simply because a sender sent a very low quality or dodgy campaign hence impacting the reputation of all others setup on the same IP pool.
The question you should ask yourself is whether you are ready or not to put the future of your business at stake by choosing the easy path of being setup on a shared IP pool?
If you believe in the quality of your data (subscribers) and program, then ask to be setup on a dedicated IP address, you’ll have full control over your deliverability to ISPs/Webmails. This will also make it much easier to troubleshoot your deliverability issues.
You’ll certainly tell me that going for a dedicated IP setup will require a warm-up plan and I’ll say yes, a warm-up is required in order to get the most of your dedicated IP address. It will in fact take at least couple of weeks to build a good sending reputation but once your sending reputation is established, it will be easy to maintain it by simply following best practices.
Another thing about dedicated IPs, ISPs and blacklists tend to be more flexible with requests to delist IP addresses or mitigate reputation when the related IP address is fully dedicated to a specific sender.