[elliotkillick]

How did you justify paying $6,000/year for a dedicated IP address? SES will provide you with the same thing for $25/month (https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/#Amazon_SES_Pricing). I noticed your statistics didn't include SES. To me, mystery surrounding reliable email deliverability is primarily a tactic some vendors use to entice non-technical people into relying on their proprietary email marketing solution.

[jfil]

The reason we are paying $6k/year for something that normally costa $20 is that we've been with this Marketing Automation provider fir many years, and a lot of our internal training/documentation/integrations are tailored to them. The $6k price tag is not a big enough fraction of our contract to justify switching. And, importantly, all of the other enterpriae-scale marketing automation vendors play this exact same game (the main competitor is owned by Oracle...). We're getting screwed, but I chose to lose this battle in order to reach my greater objectives :-)

The reasons why the stats don't include SES is because the target audience for this article is fairly narrow: it is people at orgs that pay for "Marketing Automation" software. That software has capabilities beyond just email sending, and is used for marketing (hence different deliverability challengea than those at SES, which has a broad customer base and can be used for transactional/alerting emails)

Yes, "deliverability" is often used as something vendors use to spook people. It only matters at scale (like >10,000 people per mailing). And many vendors dont actually know what theyre doing.

I'll be glad to answer more questions on this thread or through email (its in my profile)