Recommended IP & Domain Configurations for Custom Email Platforms

When setting up your own email marketing system, there are so many questions regarding IP’s and domains. Where to find them? How many do you need? How do you set them up? The list goes on. We have some suggestions that may help.

First, how many IP’s do you need to send email? Ideally, you’d want to match the volume of your IP’s so that it is appropriately proportional to the size of your email list. For example, you don’t need thousands of IP’s, capable of delivering millions of messages per hour, if your list is only a few hundred thousands records. On the contrary, if you have tens of millions of email records, a small volume of IP’s would not be enough. Matching the IP quantity with the list volume will help minimize your costs and maximize your revenue potential and outbound mail volume.

Lets do the math. If we will assume Hotmail permits 2500 email messages per hour, per IP address. If you want to send 1 million messages per hour, you would need 400 IP’s. Furthermore, if your entire database consists of approximately 1 million records, 400 IP’s would be far too many because you wouldn’t want to email your full database 24 times a day. You would make a lot of people angry, and see a high number of complaints and unsubscribes.

How many IP’s should you configure per domain? In other words, how many domains would you need to purchase and how many sub domains would you need to configure? Once again, the size of your database should dictate the quantity of IP’s and domains you should use. Smaller volume mailers operating on fewer IP’s, such as a /27, which is approximately 30 mailing IP’s, may consider a lower IP to domain ratio, even one IP per domain. But higher volume mailers with potentially thousands of IP’s would not find a 1:1 ratio affordable. Even with large IP arrays, we recommend a minimum of 1 domain per /24 (approximately 254 mailing IP’s and subdomains).

The most difficult question is where to find them and unfortunately these types of quality IP providers are a valuable resource and hard to find if you’re new to the industry. We recommend you do extensive research into prospective IP providers.

Recommended IP & Domain Configurations for Custom Email Platforms

Click here to see why Data MCP is a great email marketing platform