If your retail email still goes out on a shared address, inbox providers are judging your campaigns alongside mail from other brands. Their complaints, list quality, and sending volume all count on that address. That means part of your sender reputation is tied to activity outside your control.
A dedicated IP gives your program an address of its own, so your list habits and sending schedule are what count. That cuts both ways: clean lists and steady sending work in your favor, and complaints or sudden spikes work against you. You get more direct ownership of your sender reputation, not a guaranteed spot in the inbox.
The Maropost email and SMS marketing platform (Marketing Cloud) can put that sending on a dedicated IP, so the reputation you earn is tied to your own list quality, engagement, and sending habits.
Key takeaways
Most retail brands start on a shared address, and that can work well when sending volume is relatively low or inconsistent. As your list grows and retail campaigns go out more often, more of your results are tied to a reputation you share with other senders. At that point, many retailers want their own sending reputation to reflect their own practices rather than the behavior of other programs on the same address.
The Maropost email and SMS marketing platform (Marketing Cloud) offers both shared sending and a dedicated IP for retail email.
Once your retail program is sending at higher volume on a regular schedule, you may want sender reputation to reflect that program alone. GleeFull Supplements, a Canadian supplements brand selling on Shopify, could not test what its own sending would do for deliverability until it added a dedicated IP in Maropost Marketing Cloud beside the email program it already ran. On its strongest campaigns over four months, that IP carried unique open rates of 45–55% on sends of 105,000–137,000 recipients and $4,000–$4,500 in attributed revenue each, with open rates steady enough that the team took them as a sign of reliable inbox placement. A dedicated IP puts your campaigns on an address of their own. Your list quality, complaint rates, and sending schedule become what builds the reputation.
If you send smaller or irregular retail campaigns, shared sending can keep serving you well. The same goes if you aren't ready to take on more direct ownership of your reputation. The question to ask is whether you want your own habits to carry it.
Wanting your own IP and being ready for one are different things. Being a retailer doesn't qualify you, and neither does running big campaigns.
There's no universal send volume that makes you ready. Your volume and sending pattern help inform the decision, but readiness comes down to how you run the program. Treat this as a self-check, not an eligibility rule. Whether a dedicated IP is available is confirmed for each program.
Review these signs of readiness:
If that checklist sounds like your program, do this groundwork before you switch. Once you're on your own IP, gaps here count more directly against your reputation.
Email people who explicitly subscribed. Purchased, rented, and appended addresses don't count. Neither does an address that's simply stored, marked active, or sitting in a list or segment.
Remove invalid addresses, process unsubscribes, and apply suppression so your next campaigns aren't still reaching people who shouldn't get them.
Maropost Marketing Cloud can keep a listed contact off later mail with a suppression list, and it can keep that scope separate by brand. It can also add contacts to the non-brand Do Not Mail (DNM) list after:
A hard bounce is an invalid or nonexistent address. Maropost Marketing Cloud can put those addresses on a global DNM list so later campaigns skip them. Branded DNM lists work separately from the non-brand list. Most soft bounces are not treated as a permanent rejection, so automatic adds do not replace a review of who should still hear from you.
Not every contact needs every send. Maropost Marketing Cloud can store contacts on lists, group them into segments that refresh when a campaign or journey uses them, and send a campaign to lists, segments, or tables while holding selected lists, segments, or journeys out of that send.
It also has an "Include all active contacts" option. That option can pull in active contacts who are not on a list, including unsubscribed and transactional contacts, while still excluding DNM contacts. Being active, on a list, or in a segment doesn't prove someone consented.
Plan content your subscribers will find useful, on a calendar they can anticipate. Maropost Marketing Cloud can schedule the sends. It will not choose the cadence.
If you've run a high-volume email campaign, this list will feel familiar: confirm consent, clean the list, apply suppression, choose the right audience, and plan the content. The same steps get you ready for one big send or for steadier bulk email.
A new dedicated IP starts without a sending history. Warming it up builds that history through your own mail, after the address is assigned. Maropost Marketing Cloud recommends a warm-up for a new sender, and for a program that is moving to a new domain or IP.
Warm it up in this order:
Hold your biggest promotional sends until the warm-up is done. Sudden jumps in volume can look suspicious to ISPs, so if you can, start well ahead of your peak season. This is a warm-up of your own subscribed mail. It isn't a cold-email tool or an automated warmup service.
You decide when to adjust, based on what the reports show. Maropost Marketing Cloud does not warm the IP for you, and how long it takes varies a lot.
Once you're warmed up, a steady calendar helps keep your volume steady too. Give each send a job:
Predictable doesn't mean everyone gets everything. Use segments so each campaign reaches the people it's meant for. The right mix depends on your calendar and on what your team can keep up.
Maropost Marketing Cloud can schedule campaigns, including recurring sends, and recurring reports can show each occurrence. Segment counts refresh when a segment is in use, including when a campaign or journey sends to it or references it. Those tools can run the plan you choose. They will not set the cadence, and being in a segment doesn't mean someone consented.
On a dedicated IP, your permission practices, list quality, complaints, and volume habits count more directly toward your email IP reputation than they did on shared sending. Protecting it is ongoing work:
Maropost Marketing Cloud can handle part of that hygiene with suppression and Do Not Mail lists. Most soft bounces aren't treated as a permanent rejection. A full mailbox can be added to the Do Not Mail list after 10 consecutive unsuccessful deliveries. One brand's DNM list does not cover other brands.
For authentication, Maropost Marketing Cloud can verify a sending domain with SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and a Custom Return Path. Those checks apply on any IP, and they will not place mail in the inbox on their own.
Once you're on your own IP, your reports show how each send performed. They won't tell you whether the IP change itself caused a result.
Maropost Marketing Cloud campaign reports can show delivery, bounces, opens, clicks, and ISP performance. The dashboard can also show complaints, unsubscribes, delivered mail, soft and hard bounces, and revenue from orders. A web funnel widget is available when web tracking is on.
Read these signals together:
When a number moves, look at what changed in your audience, content, cadence, or send. Don't credit or blame the dedicated IP on its own. You'll judge volume consistency from your own sending plan, since it isn't a named metric in these reports. None of these figures is a universal benchmark.
When you are ready, moving to a dedicated IP doesn't mean starting over. Your campaigns, list hygiene, and sending schedule carry over, and they then shape the reputation of an address that is yours.
Maropost Marketing Cloud offers two IP types. Shared IPs are managed by the postmaster and deliverability team across accounts in a cluster. Those addresses do not appear in the UI. The team handles them in an internal admin portal and adjusts them to each account's requirements.
A dedicated IP is the one you opt into. Your campaigns then send from the IP or range selected for the account, which gives more direct control over the sending and the configuration. It isn't included on every account, and it doesn't switch on automatically.
A Maropost Customer Success Manager, or the deliverability team at postmaster@maropost.com, can confirm whether a dedicated IP is the right setup.
Once the account has opted in, two pieces of setup apply:
Contacts, lists, segments, campaigns, suppression, and reporting stay in Maropost Marketing Cloud when the IP changes. Sending habits then matter more because they are what the reputation on that IP reflects.
A dedicated IP works best as one part of a program you're already running carefully. You still need people who chose to subscribe, a calendar without long gaps and sudden spikes, and practices your team can maintain as volume rises. There's no "mature program" label to earn first. Readiness comes down to how you run yours.
The Maropost email and SMS marketing platform (Marketing Cloud) can keep that day-to-day work in one place:
Your dedicated IP sits inside that work. Permission, a calendar your team can keep, and someone reading the reports are still what your reputation depends on.
A dedicated IP is not a reward for hitting a specific list size, and it is not a shortcut to the inbox.
It becomes valuable when your program is sending consistently enough to build a reputation of its own. At that point, that reputation reflects your list quality, engagement, and sending habits rather than activity from other brands on a shared IP.
For programs that send infrequently or have highly variable volume, shared sending is often still the better fit. For programs running regular campaigns at scale, a dedicated IP offers more ownership over the reputation that influences deliverability.