In the world of email marketing, the subscriber list is the lifeblood of the business, and it is crucial to protect the list as best that you can. One way that this can be accomplished is to establish what is referred to as a suppression list.
Quite simply, this is a list of subscribers that you never get included in any of your email campaigns. There is normally only one of these such lists per member account.
There are many reasons why you would want this kind of list as part of your email marketing business. However, the primary reason is to help protect your online reputation. Another reason is to help avoid unsubscribes from your subscriber list because you accidentally sent emails to some people who don’t want them.
For this article, we’ll discuss the different types of Suppression Lists that you can set up for your email system. The aim is to help provide you the right amount of information to make it easier for you to decide which would help your situation the best. To do this, we came up with a list of the seven types of Suppression lists and a brief description of each of them.
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7 Kinds of email Suppression Lists
- The Unengaged Suppression List
- A Nonqualified Lead Suppression List
- A Lifecycle Suppression List
- The Geographic Suppression List
- The Persona Suppression List
- The Evangelist Suppression List
- The Unsubscribed Suppression List
1. The Unengaged Suppression List
This type of Suppression list is fairly easy to make for your subscriber list. All you have to is use the tools that are built into your email system. This allows you to review some of the key reports that are likely telling you based on some of your subscriber lists.
These unengaged subscribers will likely not open any of your previous emails, stop visiting your company websites. It is actually normal for an email marketer to encounter a number as high as 20% disengaged subscribers.
The point is, the quicker you can roll these unengaged subscribers, the quicker you can work one-on-one with specialized email conversations.
2. A Nonqualified Lead Suppression List
When it comes to listing building, you must know your target audience. With that being said, having a special list to put leads that you don’t want to send certain types of emails to is very important, especially when you are trying to nurture and build relationships with your leads.
Nonqualified leads, or the ones that you know you will not send out, can easily drive down your open rates, click-through rates and lower your website traffic as well. So, having a Nonqualified Lead Suppression List will save you a whole of time and wasted energy.
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3. A Lifecycle Suppression List
A Lifecycle Suppression List is a perfect option to use if you have an email marketing list that is very diversely constructed. With this, you can operate with a wide range of different types of leads without sending the same email content to all of them.
So, you can do a lot of segregation of lists by keeping certain leads from receiving messages that were not really meant for them. In addition, this type of list makes it easier to keep all of your leads organized as your business gets older and you have a much more diverse list.
4. The Geographic Suppression List
A Geographic Suppression List is beneficial if your business has attracted leads from many different geographic areas and you intend to market to each of the areas differently. This list can be segmented in many different ways to make it really easy for you to set up the best list.
A Geographic Suppression list can also be used to help with language-specific email messaging so that your emails don’t end up in an inbox of a person who does not speak that language.
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5. The Persona Suppression List
Using a Persona Suppression List can also be useful when you might not want a certain email message to go out to all of your leads based on the persona of the list.
This works well for a list made of general leads, and you want to send out a targeted email. That way, you are not wasting your efforts on people you are certain won’t open it or use the call to action link inside the email. And, this can be useful when you have a catchall list, and you are trying to send a targeted email that will not fit everyone.
6. The Evangelist Suppression List
This type of list is designed for leads that do not ever buy or use the services that you are promoting, even though they religiously open your email and even click on your call to action in each email that you send to them.
These kinds of leads can still be beneficial, but you would not want to spend a whole lot of time including them in new product launches or things that you are heavily promoting to boost your bottom line.
You can use these types of leads as brand ambassadors for your business. They surely help you to spread the word about your offerings even though they themselves will not buy from you.
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7. The Unsubscribed Suppression List
This is an important list that guarantees you’re not in violation of Can-Spam laws. These were designed to prevent people from receiving unwanted advertising emails.
The laws require that an email contains a disclaimer and a way to opt-out or unsubscribe from a specific mailing list at any time. So, you would definitely want to keep an eye out at this metric of your email service so that you can remove anyone that clicks the unsubscribe button.
The Bottom Line
Lead generation and list building go hand in hand. So, the more tools that you have in your Email Marketing toolbox, the better off you are. A Lead Suppression List can be handy for you as it helps you best organize your lists and better use your time when sending out your email campaigns.