Private IP and subdomain delegation

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John Gaukroger
Web Business Development Mgr at Joe Browns Ltd

12 November 2007 17:28pm

Hi there, I'm considering moving to a private IP address and branded subdomain for our promotional e-mails.

Has anyone had any experience of the positive effects that doing this might have had on their deliverability rates and ROI?

Many thanks
Sean Duffy
Principal Email Marketing Consultant at Emailcenter UK

12 November 2007 19:08pm

Branded sub-domains will help your recipients identify it is from you. AOL recipients for example only see the from name so if they see a yourcompanyname@yoursupplier.com they will less likely to trust it.
As for a dedicated IP I would be careful. If you are not sending that often a dedicated IP will have a low reputation with the likes of Hotmail. You will usually be better off with a shared IP as long as this is of good reputation!
What we tend to do is offer a mix of both - a dedicated IP is used for corporate domains and a shared IP is used for the likes of Hotmail giving you the best of both worlds.
Sean Duffy
www.emailcenteruk.com
Marc Munier Gold
Commercial Director at Pure360

13 November 2007 12:09pm

The only reason I would suggest a dedicated IP would be if you were considering using Goodmail or something like that as they require a dedicated IP. When you say branded subdomain do you mean news@email.joebrowns.co.uk? or news@joebrowns.someemailprovider.com?
If it is the latter there is little point in having a dedicated IP, sure the first thing the big three look at is IP. But if someemailprovider.com gets listed on a blacklist (or any of their clients on the same setup) you will still suffer poor deliverbility.
Dedicated IP's do mean that you are the only one who will effect the delivery rates BUT if all you are sending is "promotional" mailings, then the reputation of that IP will not last long. If however you put all your mailings through it you will have a much better chance of maintaining delivery rates. The reason being that hotmail (and the others) work out the complaint rate as a % of total volume so if you are sending say 100 promotional messages and 10 complain - 10% but if you also send all your newsletters and transactional mailings making to the total 300 - your complaint rate is then 3%. Which is much less likely to cause an issue.
Hope this goes someway to answering a very interesting question, happy to chat more off the forum if needed.
Marc Munier
marc.munier@pure360.com
On 19:08:44 12 November 2007 SeanDuffy wrote:
Branded sub-domains will help your recipients identify it is from you. AOL recipients for example only see the from name so if they see a yourcompanyname@yoursupplier.com they will less likely to trust it.
As for a dedicated IP I would be careful. If you are not sending that often a dedicated IP will have a low reputation with the likes of Hotmail. You will usually be better off with a shared IP as long as this is of good reputation!

What we tend to do is offer a mix of both - a dedicated IP is used for corporate domains and a shared IP is used for the likes of Hotmail giving you the best of both worlds.

Sean Duffy
www.emailcenteruk.com
John Gaukroger
Web Business Development Mgr at Joe Browns Ltd

13 November 2007 12:20pm

Thanks for the feedback Sean
On 19:08:44 12 November 2007 SeanDuffy wrote:
Branded sub-domains will help your recipients identify it is from you. AOL recipients for example only see the from name so if they see a yourcompanyname@yoursupplier.com they will less likely to trust it.
As for a dedicated IP I would be careful. If you are not sending that often a dedicated IP will have a low reputation with the likes of Hotmail. You will usually be better off with a shared IP as long as this is of good reputation!

What we tend to do is offer a mix of both - a dedicated IP is used for corporate domains and a shared IP is used for the likes of Hotmail giving you the best of both worlds.

Sean Duffy
www.emailcenteruk.com
Sean Duffy
Principal Email Marketing Consultant at Emailcenter UK

13 November 2007 12:23pm

The main problem with dedicated IP's should not be complaint rates but the frequency of email sent through it. The likes of Hotmail do not like IP addresses that do nothing for a long period of time (say a week) and then see a big volume go through. In their eyes you look like a spammer as this is exactly the way a spammer works. They get a new clean IP, hammer some spam through it until it gets blocked and then wait for the blocks to be removed before sending again. What you will likely see on a dedicated IP would be a few thousand of your Hotmails delivered and then the rest rejected all because Hotmail has not seen enough CONSISTENT volume of email.
However a dedicated IP will help for corporate domains which may still make up 50% of a B2C list as the filters tend to work in a different way.
On another note make sure you are not charged an arm and a leg for setting any of this up. It should only take the ESP 5-10 minutes to set-up a branded sub-domain and change any of their config files so if they say it is going to cost several hundred pounds or more tell them where to go!
Sean
On 12:09:48 13 November 2007 MarcMunier wrote:
The only reason I would suggest a dedicated IP would be if you were considering using Goodmail or something like that as they require a dedicated IP. When you say branded subdomain do you mean news@email.joebrowns.co.uk? or news@joebrowns.someemailprovider.com?
If it is the latter there is little point in having a dedicated IP, sure the first thing the big three look at is IP. But if someemailprovider.com gets listed on a blacklist (or any of their clients on the same setup) you will still suffer poor deliverbility.

Dedicated IP's do mean that you are the only one who will effect the delivery rates BUT if all you are sending is "promotional" mailings, then the reputation of that IP will not last long. If however you put all your mailings through it you will have a much better chance of maintaining delivery rates. The reason being that hotmail (and the others) work out the complaint rate as a % of total volume so if you are sending say 100 promotional messages and 10 complain - 10% but if you also send all your newsletters and transactional mailings making to the total 300 - your complaint rate is then 3%. Which is much less likely to cause an issue.

Hope this goes someway to answering a very interesting question, happy to chat more off the forum if needed.

Marc Munier
marc.munier@pure360.com

On 19:08:44 12 November 2007 SeanDuffy wrote:

Branded sub-domains will help your recipients identify it is from you. AOL recipients for example only see the from name so if they see a yourcompanyname@yoursupplier.com they will less likely to trust it.
As for a dedicated IP I would be careful. If you are not sending that often a dedicated IP will have a low reputation with the likes of Hotmail. You will usually be better off with a shared IP as long as this is of good reputation!

What we tend to do is offer a mix of both - a dedicated IP is used for corporate domains and a shared IP is used for the likes of Hotmail giving you the best of both worlds.

Sean Duffy
www.emailcenteruk.com
Ahmad Khan Enterprise
Account Manager at Cheetahmail

14 November 2007 10:02am

Branding: It all comes down to branding, customers want to know that the email they are receiving is coming from who its supposed to, which again is another reson why most clients decide to go with sub-domain and private IP as it shows that the email is actually coming from them.

Clients want to make sure the customer knows 100% the email is coming from them and not anyone else, therefore wish to show no association with another vendor as the customer may think its not genuine or just spam.

Dedicated private domain: Shared domains are good for a certain time period but all clients should really aim to get onto there own sub-domain and private IP. Reason being if another client starts sending emails to very bad data the reputation of that shared domain will be affected and because it is a shared domain it will affect anyone else on that domain also. Being on your own private IP means you alone are responsible for the reputation of your own domain.
Ahmad Khan
Cheetahmail
Marc Munier Gold
Commercial Director at Pure360

14 November 2007 10:42am

I have to disagree with Sean on his last point.
Brand new IP's struggle to deliver emails into the inbox, you need to be very sure as to what the history is of the dedicated IP you are given. If it is new you will have to (as Sean pointed out) show a consistent sending pattern and slowly increase it over a period of time, this will effect your ability to get your marketing messages out.
We offer dedicated IP's, but we do charge. The reason being that we "galvanise" IP's prior to handing them over to the client. This means that they are already used to getting a decent quantity of emails before the client starts to use them. This takes time (at least 3 months) and so we charge in the region of £1500 per IP, anyone who is not charging is either giving you a new IP or getting it back elsewhere.
And on the point Ahmad made....
NO ESP worth its salt should allow very bad data on the system, as I have previously pointed out it doesn't matter if you have a dedicated IP. Even if you have a private domain and a dedicated IP, another customer on the same Subnet who gets blocked on Spamhause (which is a hell of a lot harder to get off than a hotmail block) you will still get blocked.
The point is you need to AVOID this happening at all, your ESP should be monitoring the data that is being uploaded into the system AND all the sends that are going out to see if there are any indications of problems - We have automated systems in place that do this so we can offer clients the benefits of shared IP's while mitigating any risks.
It is very frustrating that ESP's are still harping on about dedicated IP's when they should really be asking ALL their clients what kind of data they have, and working with them to ensure that they make the most of it.
Rant over happy Wednesday
On 10:02:09 14 November 2007 AhmadKhan wrote:

Branding: It all comes down to branding, customers want to know that the email they are receiving is coming from who its supposed to, which again is another reson why most clients decide to go with sub-domain and private IP as it shows that the email is actually coming from them.

Clients want to make sure the customer knows 100% the email is coming from them and not anyone else, therefore wish to show no association with another vendor as the customer may think its not genuine or just spam.

Dedicated private domain: Shared domains are good for a certain time period but all clients should really aim to get onto there own sub-domain and private IP. Reason being if another client starts sending emails to very bad data the reputation of that shared domain will be affected and because it is a shared domain it will affect anyone else on that domain also. Being on your own private IP means you alone are responsible for the reputation of your own domain.
Ahmad Khan
Cheetahmail
Sean Duffy
Principal Email Marketing Consultant at Emailcenter UK

14 November 2007 11:08am

I think you mis-understood my last point Marc - I was talking about the charge made for setting up a custom sub-domain, not IP address. There are some people in the industry which charge £2,000 to set this up and it is literally 10 minutes work! Bedded in IP addresses are very valuable so it is more likely an ESP will charge for that although many will hide the cost within the overall package.
You are right on the quality of data that an ESP sends to as well. I am sure you have seen the same as us that our competitors which have a lot of list owners and brokers as part of their client base are the ones that tend to have the worst deliverability rates (even if they claim otherwise in the pitches!) because this is right on the line of spam that is being sent.
But it is true each sender will have their own optimum set-up but many ESP's have sales staff that do not have the ability to understand the topic area enough to be able to advise the client accordingly! Too many ESP sales staff I have met seem to lead on the pitch that they have whitelisted IP addresses and thats that so you will get everything delivered into the inbox even if you are sending borderline spam.
My point on the dedicated IP's is Hotmail in particular will never set a volume threshold for someone that sends a newsletter to 250,000 once a month that will allow that many emails through in one go. They even say you should split your send down into a few daily batches. For this type of sender a shared "good" IP is the only option as they will never get a good enough reputation on a dedicated IP.
On 10:42:29 14 November 2007 MarcMunier wrote:
I have to disagree with Sean on his last point.
Brand new IP's struggle to deliver emails into the inbox, you need to be very sure as to what the history is of the dedicated IP you are given. If it is new you will have to (as Sean pointed out) show a consistent sending pattern and slowly increase it over a period of time, this will effect your ability to get your marketing messages out.

We offer dedicated IP's, but we do charge. The reason being that we "galvanise" IP's prior to handing them over to the client. This means that they are already used to getting a decent quantity of emails before the client starts to use them. This takes time (at least 3 months) and so we charge in the region of £1500 per IP, anyone who is not charging is either giving you a new IP or getting it back elsewhere.

And on the point Ahmad made....

NO ESP worth its salt should allow very bad data on the system, as I have previously pointed out it doesn't matter if you have a dedicated IP. Even if you have a private domain and a dedicated IP, another customer on the same Subnet who gets blocked on Spamhause (which is a hell of a lot harder to get off than a hotmail block) you will still get blocked.

The point is you need to AVOID this happening at all, your ESP should be monitoring the data that is being uploaded into the system AND all the sends that are going out to see if there are any indications of problems - We have automated systems in place that do this so we can offer clients the benefits of shared IP's while mitigating any risks.

It is very frustrating that ESP's are still harping on about dedicated IP's when they should really be asking ALL their clients what kind of data they have, and working with them to ensure that they make the most of it.

Rant over happy Wednesday

On 10:02:09 14 November 2007 AhmadKhan wrote:

Branding: It all comes down to branding, customers want to know that the email they are receiving is coming from who its supposed to, which again is another reson why most clients decide to go with sub-domain and private IP as it shows that the email is actually coming from them.

Clients want to make sure the customer knows 100% the email is coming from them and not anyone else, therefore wish to show no association with another vendor as the customer may think its not genuine or just spam.

Dedicated private domain: Shared domains are good for a certain time period but all clients should really aim to get onto there own sub-domain and private IP. Reason being if another client starts sending emails to very bad data the reputation of that shared domain will be affected and because it is a shared domain it will affect anyone else on that domain also. Being on your own private IP means you alone are responsible for the reputation of your own domain.
Ahmad Khan
Cheetahmail
Marc Munier Gold
Commercial Director at Pure360

14 November 2007 13:24pm

Sean
You are right I misunderstood what you were saying, creating a subdomain is £100 from Pure I know who you are talking about that charges £2k - SHOCKING.
You are so right about the sales people at some ESP's when asked if they whitelist they just spout that they take Hotmail out for coffee once a week, instead of actually understanding what the deliverbility issues a particular customer is going to have.
On the borderline spammers, it is a case of balance too many lead generation companies have sprung up recently who add no value to the people on the list.
It used to be quid pro quo, you sign you, we send you "offers" email but we also give you some news or industry specific information, this slowed the churn of the email lists but also meant that they had some decent mailings to mix in with the rubbish. Now it's just gimmie your email and I'll spam you till you leave, these are the same people that it takes a WEEK to unsubscribe from. They give legitimate email marketers a bad name and make our lives considerably harder.
On a more positive note its really refreshing to hear your points - just a shame you are a competitor! :-)
Marc
marc.munier@pure360.com
On 11:08:56 14 November 2007 SeanDuffy wrote:
I think you mis-understood my last point Marc - I was talking about the charge made for setting up a custom sub-domain, not IP address. There are some people in the industry which charge £2,000 to set this up and it is literally 10 minutes work! Bedded in IP addresses are very valuable so it is more likely an ESP will charge for that although many will hide the cost within the overall package.
You are right on the quality of data that an ESP sends to as well. I am sure you have seen the same as us that our competitors which have a lot of list owners and brokers as part of their client base are the ones that tend to have the worst deliverability rates (even if they claim otherwise in the pitches!) because this is right on the line of spam that is being sent.

But it is true each sender will have their own optimum set-up but many ESP's have sales staff that do not have the ability to understand the topic area enough to be able to advise the client accordingly! Too many ESP sales staff I have met seem to lead on the pitch that they have whitelisted IP addresses and thats that so you will get everything delivered into the inbox even if you are sending borderline spam.

My point on the dedicated IP's is Hotmail in particular will never set a volume threshold for someone that sends a newsletter to 250,000 once a month that will allow that many emails through in one go. They even say you should split your send down into a few daily batches. For this type of sender a shared "good" IP is the only option as they will never get a good enough reputation on a dedicated IP.

On 10:42:29 14 November 2007 MarcMunier wrote:

I have to disagree with Sean on his last point.
Brand new IP's struggle to deliver emails into the inbox, you need to be very sure as to what the history is of the dedicated IP you are given. If it is new you will have to (as Sean pointed out) show a consistent sending pattern and slowly increase it over a period of time, this will effect your ability to get your marketing messages out.

We offer dedicated IP's, but we do charge. The reason being that we "galvanise" IP's prior to handing them over to the client. This means that they are already used to getting a decent quantity of emails before the client starts to use them. This takes time (at least 3 months) and so we charge in the region of £1500 per IP, anyone who is not charging is either giving you a new IP or getting it back elsewhere.

And on the point Ahmad made....

NO ESP worth its salt should allow very bad data on the system, as I have previously pointed out it doesn't matter if you have a dedicated IP. Even if you have a private domain and a dedicated IP, another customer on the same Subnet who gets blocked on Spamhause (which is a hell of a lot harder to get off than a hotmail block) you will still get blocked.

The point is you need to AVOID this happening at all, your ESP should be monitoring the data that is being uploaded into the system AND all the sends that are going out to see if there are any indications of problems - We have automated systems in place that do this so we can offer clients the benefits of shared IP's while mitigating any risks.

It is very frustrating that ESP's are still harping on about dedicated IP's when they should really be asking ALL their clients what kind of data they have, and working with them to ensure that they make the most of it.

Rant over happy Wednesday

On 10:02:09 14 November 2007 AhmadKhan wrote:

Branding: It all comes down to branding, customers want to know that the email they are receiving is coming from who its supposed to, which again is another reson why most clients decide to go with sub-domain and private IP as it shows that the email is actually coming from them.

Clients want to make sure the customer knows 100% the email is coming from them and not anyone else, therefore wish to show no association with another vendor as the customer may think its not genuine or just spam.

Dedicated private domain: Shared domains are good for a certain time period but all clients should really aim to get onto there own sub-domain and private IP. Reason being if another client starts sending emails to very bad data the reputation of that shared domain will be affected and because it is a shared domain it will affect anyone else on that domain also. Being on your own private IP means you alone are responsible for the reputation of your own domain.
Ahmad Khan
Cheetahmail
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15 November 2007 01:54am

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