Reputation is like fragile glass; it takes immense time to build a good one, and shatters easily. So, lackadaisical email-sending habits can risk your deliverability and prevent you from reaching your target audience’s inbox.
It’ll only get marked as spam if you keep sending them emails even after they have already unsubscribed. Thus, you must delete such email addresses from your list to avoid communicating in the future. But how can you do this? You can add them to an email suppression list.
You may be wondering what exactly a suppression list is and who should be added to it. This article will explain everything you need to know about suppression lists. Read on to know more.
Understanding Suppression Lists
A suppression list contains email addresses that need to be excluded from future communications to remain compliant with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (United States). This requires email senders to provide an option for users to opt out of future emails, such as promotional offers or product launch updates. After unsubscribing, the email addresses are added to a suppression list to prevent future messages from being sent.
The CAN-SPAM Act, signed as a law in 2003 and enforced by the Federal Trade Commission, is the national standard for commercial email marketing in the United States. Its main purpose was to limit misleading, badgering, and false emails and allow recipients to opt-out. The new legislation requires compliance in three major areas:
- unsubscribe process
- content validity
- sending practices
The unsubscribed protocol requires emails to provide a clear mechanism for opting out, process unsubscribe requests within 10 business days, and ensure that necessary suppression policies are for compliance purposes only.
Content Accuracy: The sender information must be accurate, the subject line must be relevant, a legitimate physical address must be included, and the message must be labelled correctly (if it contains adult content).
Sending practices compliance ensures emails include an unsubscribe option, correct headers, and content of real interest.
It promotes ethical email marketing and discourages deceptive practices. Following these guidelines is not only required by law, but many organisations also find them valuable for improving client engagement and increasing email deliverability rates.
Why Do You Need an Email Suppression List?
Maintaining an email suppression list is important for optimising email marketing efforts and ensuring compliance with regulations. Here’s why it’s important:
- Better User Experience: Suppression lists help manage transactional emails efficiently by ensuring the users’ preferences are honoured, leading to better user experiences. Unlike marketing emails, transactional emails usually shouldn’t contain an unsubscribe link (you can’t unsubscribe from a purchase); however, there are some occasions when including that option can improve the experience for users who can opt out of non-essential messages.
- Transparency and Trust: For important emails, like password resets, receipts, etc.—where unsubscribing isn’t even an option—it would be considerate to inform the user exactly why they are receiving these messages and why they can’t unsubscribe. Such transparency builds trust and understanding between you and your customers or prospects.
- Protect Sender Reputation: Mailing to invalid or spam-related email addresses can harm your reputation with ISPs (Internet Service Providers), causing your domain to be flagged. This may affect your ability to reach your target audience. Suppression lists help maintain a clean mailing list and protect your sender’s reputation.
- Improved Deliverability: Using suppression lists to remove inactive, hard-bounced, or spam-complaint email addresses will improve your email deliverability. ISPs favour clean mailing lists, so senders who proactively clean their lists are perceived as reliable by these ISPs. This helps ensure that your emails land in your recipient’s inbox rather than into their spam folders, keeping your communications effective.
- Resource and Cost Efficiency: Suppression lists help save resources and reduce costs. Sending emails to inactive addresses wastes your quota and increases expenses. A growing number of unresponsive recipients affects your budget and lowers overall efficiency. Suppression lists help reduce this waste, allowing you to focus on quality targets, further protecting your sender reputation, improving deliverability and saving money.
ALSO READ: How to Build & Grow an Email List for Your Business
Which Contacts Should Be Added to Your Suppression List?
There are different kinds of user actions related to emails received from brands, like unsubscribing, marking spam, etc. Here are some email address categories that you must include in your subscription list:
- Unsubscribed Emails
In some cases, when a user unsubscribes from receiving promotional or other emails, their email address should immediately be added to a suppression list. This tells your email system to stop communicating with that person.
Are unsubscribe groups the same as suppression lists? Not exactly.
The two complement each other, but they serve different purposes. The unsubscribe group reflects the recipient’s choice to stop receiving emails, while the suppression list ensures that no further emails are sent to those who have unsubscribed.
Without a suppression list, unsubscribing would be ineffective, and mailings would continue to be sent to people who no longer wish to receive them. This increases the likelihood of recipients reporting your emails as spam. So, it’s best to make it easy for recipients to find your unsubscribe link. If they can’t find this unsubscribe button easily, your prospects or customers will likely report these emails as spam.
- Blocked, Invalid, or Bounced Addresses
A suppression list entails more than just unsubscribes; it also contains bounced, blocked, or invalid email IDs. Repetitively mailing them may diminish your delivery rates, so spammers tend to relay the error to the ISPs, implying that you probably don’t care or remember to maintain a live list.
So, it’s better to communicate via email only with valid email addresses that allow or want your emails.
- Reported Spam
The suppression list also contains email addresses that mark your emails as spam. Sending emails to the recipients after they’ve lodged a spam complaint against your emails could cause great damage to your sender’s reputation. It indicates to ISPs (Internet Service Providers) that you are sending unsolicited emails and not listening to your audience, so your IP address or domain could get marked as spam.
Identifying Email Addresses for Suppression
Email Suppression Lists are mostly managed automatically. Email addresses that can harm your sender’s reputation are automatically blocked from receiving any future campaigns.
There may be times when you will need to remove the email ids from the suppression list if they no longer should be on it. Users may have accidentally unsubscribed to your email campaigns or have updated their preferences. It is important to know that suppression list email addresses do not receive transactional emails! One such communication may be necessary for the user, and they might contact your support team to get reinstated in your email services.
You can also manually add users to the Suppression List. This is especially handy when migrating between email service providers. You can automatically transfer the addresses and maintain a healthy deliverability rate by importing a CSV into the suppression list.
ALSO READ: Email Marketing Best Practices You Need to Implement Today
Conclusion
To effectively manage the performance of your email marketing campaigns, you must have a suppression list. These lists automatically allow you to not send emails to recipients who have opted out. They also allow receivers to customise the frequency and content of emails as they like. This excludes recipients who don’t want email communication from you and also preserves a good sender reputation. Take control of your email campaigns with Shiprocket Engage+. Optimise your strategy with features like suppression list management and get better deliverability and engagement.
