Understanding and Managing your Suppressions List - Email

Introduction

This article explores how to understand and manage your suppressions list in email marketing. Whether you're new to email campaigns or an experienced marketer, knowing how to handle your suppressions list is crucial. From understanding why emails are suppressed to effectively managing your list, this guide will help you optimize your email marketing strategies.

Unsubscribe Vs. Suppressions

Unsubscribe: When the recipient of an email, opts out from receiving future emails, the action is referred to as ‘unsubscribing’. Typically, this is done by clicking on the unsubscribe link. 

Suppressions: To keep the domain reputation healthy, the sender ‘suppresses’ sending of an email to a certain list of email ids. This is because the intended recipient may have unsubscribed previously, marked previous email as spam, blocked the sender email address or the email have bounced due to incorrect or invalid email address. 

Such instances are automatically added to the suppressions list to maintain high deliverability and healthy domain reputation. 

Types of Suppressions

1. Block- The recipient's email server rejects the message for a reason related to the message, not the recipient address. This may be due to your Sending IP, or the message content. Since these are message-specific issues, future messages to these addresses are not suppressed.

2. Bounce- The recipient’s email server rejects the message, or sends the message back to the sender , due to an issue with the recipient address. 

• Soft Bounce: This is a temporary issue such as the recipient’s inbox is full or a connection timeout.
• Hard Bounce: This is a permanent delivery error caused by an invalid email address (e.g. an invalid email, destination server unavailable).

3. Invalid -The recipient address does not exist at the mail server you sent to.
4. Spam - The recipient marks your email as spam.
5. Unsubscribe- When a user unsubscribes from everything you might email them.

Once an email address is added to the above mentioned suppression list, future emails might not be delivered. In order to send any email to such ids, it is important to remove them from the suppression list. 
It is suggested to remove any email id which is present in any of the suppressions list in case a transactional* email has to be sent.

How to Remove Email IDs from the Suppressions List?

Please follow the following steps to remove email ids from the suppressions list. 

Step 1 : Click on ‘Marketing’ and then go to ‘Suppressions'. 

Step 2 : Click on the list you intend to check the suppressed email id in.

Step 3 : Click on the ‘Search’ icon and enter the suppressed email id in the search box.

Step 4: Select the email id by clicking on the checkbox icon.

Step 5 : Click on the 'Delete' icon against the email id to remove from the suppressions list.

Step 6 : Confirm your selection by clicking on ‘Yes’

Confirmation message is displayed once the email id is removed from the suppressions list.

Note: To maintain your domain reputation healthy, it is strongly advised to remove any email id from suppressions list in case a transactional* email has to be sent. 

Transactional* : Transactional Email includes email  with OTP,  Verification Links, Login Credentials,  Admit Cards, Offer Letter, Transaction Receipt, Payment Confirmation etc.

Note: If using Pepipost (Netcore) as the vendor, we might not have access to the suppressions list. We need to check this in the admin panel or request access from the institute.