A suppression list is a list of contacts that are not used for sending email marketing messages and newsletters. A suppression list is a default feature in each email marketing tools and helps comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.
A suppress list is often one single list over a complete email environment. But it is not just unsubscribed email addreses.
Suppresion List Categories
Your suppression List may contain the following categories of contacts:
- Bounce – email address considered undeliverable after three attempts which resulted in soft bounces
- Hard bounce – undeliverable email addresses
- Unsubscribed – unsubscribed contacts
- SPAM – contacts that reported your message as SPAM (gathered from FBL integrations with major ISPs )
- Uploaded – those directly uploaded into a Suppressed list by you (when new customers migrate to us from other ESPs)
In starting with a new email service it’s highly recommended to upload your current suppressed contacts into your Suppressed List. If you do this during migration you avoid sending of unwanted messages.
Removing Contacts from a Suppression List
As an marketer you can move contacts freely across all lists and segments. But often not to remove them from a Suppression List. For your own safety!
Why couldn’t you just move contacts from a suppress list to any active list? Because you have to respect every individual’s decision to subscribe to whatever source of information they want. It also makes it easier to be compliant with CAN SPAM Act. Similarly, uploading a list as “new”, should never be able to overwrite the earlier suppressed email addresses.
In case a contact wants to be removed from a Suppress List back to an active list, they will have to subscribe again. For instance using one of the Web forms you define.
In some cases, when you feel very strongly that a suppressed contact shouldn’t have been suppressed, a support ticket to the vendor will do the trick. Customer service at the ESP may move the contact back to an appropriate list.
Manually unsubscribing contacts and updating your suppression list.
A marketing or business owner may want to manually suppress certain email addresses from getting marketing materials.
Think about unwanted email subscribers like competitors, disgruntled ex-customers, known spammy domains / bots.
Depending on your email marketing tool, you could set up exclusion rules, upload a list or by navigating to that contacts profile page and pressing the “Unsubscribe” button.
