Leveraging Your Email Suppression List for Better Audience Targeting

Published in the ReachDynamics Blog on 9/11/18

There have been times during the 40 year history of email marketing when a lot of marketers took a spray-and-pray approach to their campaigns – emailing large groups of people, targeted or not – hoping to connect with the right prospects in the process. Email campaigns were (and still are) inexpensive to send, in most cases, and the incremental cost of adding one more or even thousands more addresses to your list wasn’t significant. Largely due to this cost structure, some marketers focused on a ‘more is better’ approach to campaign planning. After all, the more emails you send, the more responses you generate, and the more sales you drive. Seems pretty simple, right?

But, email marketing was also built on the lessons of the traditional direct marketing industry. Offline direct marketers learned that one of the best ways to drive ROI from direct mail campaigns was through the use of audience targeting and segmentation. When every additional message being sent (a catalog or other printed material) carries a per-piece cost for printing and postage, sending the right content to the right recipient is vital to drive positive ROI.

It didn’t take long for email marketers to begin using advanced audience targeting and list segmentation strategies to optimize campaign performance and move beyond a simple ‘send more, earn more’ mindset. Over the years, marketers have developed advanced targeting tactics, based on a wide variety of data points to deliver highly personalized and relevant content to recipients. Whether it is purchase history, website browsing activity, or other types of behavioral data, marketers have used this wealth of information, along with advanced database analysis tools, to enhance performance – turning audience targeting into a science.

So, you might think there isn’t much left to talk about from an audience targeting standpoint. However, there is one side of the targeting equation that often gets overlooked from a strategic standpoint – suppression files.

When it comes to suppression lists, many companies think they start and stop with the well-known and vitally important opt-out or unsubscribe file. If you are using email marketing in almost any region of the world, you are required to provide recipients with a way to unsubscribe (or Opt-Out) from receiving future email messages. To stay compliant with CAN-SPAM compliance and other regulations, you need to honor those requests, following a time period for processing (which varies by country) and suppress those email addresses from future mailings. For many marketers, this opt-out process and the suppression of those addresses from their mailing lists happens behind the scenes, handled by their email platform automatically. This means that the process is taken care of without the marketer giving it much thought. So, in some cases, marketers really only think about their suppression list if they see their opt-out rate change from one campaign to the next.

Read the entire article at the ReachDynamics blog.