Do I need a dedicated IP for cold outreach?

The dedicated vs shared IP question depends on volume, goals, and risk tolerance.

Dedicated IP advantages: Your reputation is entirely your own. Other senders' behavior doesn't affect you. You have full control and visibility into reputation factors.

Dedicated IP challenges: You need sufficient volume to build and maintain reputation (typically thousands of emails monthly). New dedicated IPs start with no reputation and require careful warmup. Cold email's inherently challenging engagement makes reputation building harder.

Shared IP considerations: Cold email tools often use shared IP pools. This spreads risk across many senders but also means others' behavior affects you. Quality providers maintain pool hygiene; low-quality providers create toxic shared environments.

Practical guidance: Most cold email senders lack the volume for dedicated IPs to make sense. Focus on domain reputation, which matters more for cold email deliverability than IP reputation in most modern filtering systems.

A dedicated berth costs more and requires you to maintain it yourself. Sometimes the common dock serves just fine.