Is a shared IP secretly harming your deliverability?

Your email revenue has been stuck for months. 

You’ve tested just about every element of your email content and donation pages. Nothing’s moving.

When the numbers go sideways, the instinct is to workshop the copy. 

But sit with this possibility for a minute: the creative might be fine, and your audience cares, but your emails just aren’t getting through.

The Humane Society of Utah hit this wall. Here’s what they discovered they actually needed to fix.

The diagnosis came first
HSU worked with RKD Group to skip a content audit and instead ran an email hygiene review.

They found the creative was working fine. The emails were getting filtered. 

Their platform had bucketed its IP into a poorly performing shared pool, so inbox placement was weak across the board.

The rebuild
HSU migrated to Mailchimp, which provided them with a dedicated IP address instead of a shared one. 

Before the switch, they ran the list through BriteVerify to remove invalid addresses. 

Importing a messy list onto a brand-new IP is a quick way to damage your reputation before the first send goes out.

Then came the warm-up: a staggered onboarding with a welcome series for new subscribers and a reactivation series for the half of the file that had gone quiet. 

The earliest sends went to the most engaged segments first, which gave the new IP a strong reputation signal out of the gate.

The results
From January through July 2023, HSU raised more email revenue than it had in all of 2022. 

By year’s end, they’d nearly doubled their 2022 total. Email went from barely breaking even to a reliable revenue driver. 

For a program that had basically written off email as a channel, that shift mattered as much as the dollar figure.

How to apply this to your program
If your email revenue has plateaued and creative tests aren’t moving the numbers, work backward before you rework the copy.

Start with where your emails are actually landing. A seed test across Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook will show you whether you’re making it to the inbox at all, or getting filtered to spam. 

Examine engagement honestly. Pull your opens and clicks for the last 3-6 months and sort by last engagement date. 

If a big chunk of your “inactive” segment went quiet all at once — say, everyone who last engaged in the same 30-day window — that might be a deliverability signal, not a disinterest signal. 

Those subscribers probably stopped seeing your emails before they stopped caring.

The bottom line
Flat email revenue is a visibility problem disguised as a creative problem more often than we like to admit.

Before you rewrite everything, check whether your emails are even being seen. 

Check our events list for more or reply to this email to submit one for consideration.

‘Til next time!
Sara