Help, Help, I’m Being Suppressed (and I Feel Fine)

Getting the right message to the right person at the right time is a goal for the more advanced email marketer. One of the tools used to better enable this is what is called a suppression list. I wrote a couple of years ago (my, how time flies) about how to use FeedBlitz’s suppression list capabilities.

By way of a quick recap, a suppression list allows you to exclude specified email addresses from a mailing. Suppression lists keep mailings focused and avoid getting the right message to the wrong person at the wrong time, for whatever that reason might be. Not getting an email you didn’t want? That’s awesome.

We’ve recently made some significant improvements to FeedBlitz’s suppression list features, available via the “Publisher Tools” section of the left sidebar navigation. In brief:

  • A suppression list can now be used to unsubscribe readers permanently from a list (a mass unsubscribe, or anti-import, in a sense);
  • A suppression list can be created from readers who have unsubscribed from a FeedBlitz mailing list;
  • A suppression list can be created from active readers to a mailing list;
  • Suppression lists can now be exported.

Unsubscribing readers permanently via a suppression list (as opposed to temporarily skipping them during an “email blast”) is great if you have multiple mailing platforms, say FeedBlitz and an e-commerce or CRM / sales automation system. If someone unsubscribes from the other platform, you shouldn’t mail them from FeedBlitz either. You can always do a search from the dashboard for an individual reader and unsubscribe them manually from the results, but for large sites with many lists and systems this is labor intensive and impractical. Instead, grab the list of unsubscribes from your third party service, import them into a FeedBlitz suppression list, and then use that list to drop those readers from your Feedblitz mailings by unsubscribing them permanently. Fast, effective, efficient.

The ability to create a suppression list from unsubscribed readers to your FeedBlitz lists, coupled with the new export facility, allows you to perform the same operation, but in reverse. Now you can easily get a file of unsubscribed readers from FeedBlitz, export it, and then import it into your CRM service to unsubscribe them from that platform’s mailings. Bottom line: You can now keep your unsubscribes easily synced between FeedBlitz and any other service.

Creating a suppression list from active readers allows you to exlcude them from a mailing sent to another list they might also be on. For example, say they’ve already signed up for a webcast you’re running, and are on the webcast registrants list. You don’t want to mail them again when you remind your main list that they should be signing up for the webcast, because that would be really annoying! What you do then is this: Create a suppression list from the active subscribers on the webcast registrants mailing list, then send your “sign up for my webcast” newsflash to the main list, applying the suppression list you just created. Now you avoid emailing registrants to do something that you know they’ve already done. Neat, huh?

Finally, the list audit trail has been made more useful too. Now you can see more clearly which lists the suppression list was used with, and how.

Suppression lists, when used well, allow you to better target your email marketing and synchronize lists across multiple systems. So go ahead, suppress someone from a mailing today! They’ll appreciate it, even though they won’t ever know, because they’ll never get the email that you didn’t send.

P.S. And for those of you who got the Monty Python “Holy Grail” reference (and, well, for those of you who didn’t, because I’m an equal opportunity Monty Python fan after all), this:

You’re welcome.