What is an Email Suppression List?
Suppression Lists have been around for nearly 20 years. This tool allows businesses to greatly improve their sending in terms of delivery and rapport. The implementation of Suppression Lists was partially enforced by the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 which requires senders of commercial or promotional emails to provide a functional unsubscription option.
To simplify, a Suppression List represents a list of addresses that should not receive emails from a sender. Otherwise, the domain is at risk of being blacklisted by powerful Internet Service Providers (ISP), such as Google.
Suppression Lists can be one of the most effective tools to improve your senders’ reputation, which directly benefits your business.
How to work with Suppression Lists?
Suppression Lists’ functionality is fairly simple. Most emails reach your businesses’ Suppression List automatically when:
- A client unsubscribes from your emailing services;
- A client is unable to receive your emails;
- A client reports your emails as spam.
We’ll elaborate on these further down the article. For now, it is worth noting that most Suppression Lists get populated automatically, and there are manual management options as well. Here’s how it goes.
Once an email campaign begins, the system compares the recipient addresses to those present in your Suppression List. The addresses in the list are suppressed during the campaign, but you can manually type an address to add to your Suppression List.
Email Types in Suppression Lists
These are the emails that would reach your Suppression List either automatically or manually. Check the specifics of each type below.
Unsubscribed
Unsubscribed emails are common in Suppression Lists. These are the recipients who choose not to receive your emails.
They are typically added automatically if the unsubscribe function performs properly. Sometimes the clients will request the company to unsubscribe them from the mailing list, after which their addresses must instantaneously and manually be added to the Suppression List.
Unwanted
Unwanted emails could be spam complaints or reports toward the content that you have sent to the recipients. This could happen automatically when a system detects your email as spam due to its erroneous wording or contents. Or, it could be manual – i.e., reported by a recipient.
With an automatic spam report, the email could be changed and adapted to the standards of the ISP. But if your email was manually reported as spam, you must not email those recipients. Sending out emails to them puts your domain or IP address at a risk of being deny-listed, which is detrimental to your sending reputation.
Invalid
These are the email addresses that have a Hard Bounce status on them, which happens for various reasons. The email address simply doesn’t exist, the recipient’s inbox is full, or the domain is no longer active. Or, there is some sort of trouble on the recipient’s server
Blocked
In other words – bounced. These emails can either be identified as soft or hard bounces. An email bounces when the address returns the email back to the sender. This could either mean that the address is incorrect or the server is inactive.
A soft bounce is a temporary failure of email delivery, while a hard bounce is permanent. Ideally, bounced emails are automatically added to the Suppression List to avoid further sending. This is healthy for your deliverability statistics, and it convinces your ISPs that you take care of your contact list and are a trustworthy sender.
Why are Suppression Lists important?
Suppression Lists are mainly used so businesses comply with the CAN-SPAM Act and ensure the recipients have an option to unsubscribe. In doing so, the senders warrant a more satisfactory experience for the recipients and a higher deliverability rate for themselves.
With that in mind, utilizing Suppression Lists could guarantee a greatly improved deliverability. They’re also useful to control the sending frequency and content. All that allows you to have greater control over your sending and helps keep the clients engaged.
To learn more about suppression lists visit Mailtrap Blog!