Question: We have upgraded our email marketing program (finally!) with a dedicated email server and are sending from a new IP address. One of the reasons we are doing this is because we ended up getting blocked by a lot of ISPs because of what other senders on our old shared server were doing. Is there anything we need to do? Can we just launch this new IP address, or do we need to do anything to make sure we don’t have problems with this address as well?

Answer: Switching to a new IP address has both benefits and challenges for senders. The main benefit is that you are now in complete control of your new IP address’s reputation. This is important because sender reputation is one of the most critical components to manage when working through email delivery challenges.

The problem is that your new IP address has no reputation, positive or negative. Until you start to send emails and establish some baseline metrics, most ISPs won't approve whitelist requests and can throttle or block your messages.

The first step is to make sure you are properly authenticating your email marketing messages. Then, ease into it. Messages may be blocked until the ISPs can confirm your good practices. Start with a slow stream of messages (Hotmail recommends 3,000 - 5,000 a day for the first few days and then a steady increase) and keep it light for at least 10 days.

Then you can start to see how that IP's reputation is being reported in services like Sender Score and through the ISP feedback services like Microsoft's Smart Network Data Services.

One solid tip is to make sure you are sending to your most active members and practicing proper list hygiene by removing invalid addresses immediately and processing unsubscribe requests quickly. Once you have established your good sender reputation (usually takes 2-5 weeks of consistent volume), you should be able to qualify for most ISP whitelist programs.