By Tom Wozniak, Head of Marketing – published on Business2Community on 4/9/20.

One of the most powerful capabilities of digital marketing is the ability to effectively identify and target audiences with relevant and engaging messaging. Marketers have learned to leverage this ability to create highly effective campaigns that drive engagement, response, and conversions.

However, there’s a lot that goes into developing an effective audience targeting program. One of the challenges is simply finding the best ways to create a set of target audiences. Certainly, there are some tactics that are relatively straightforward. If a consumer has shown interest in a product by visiting a web page, clicking on a related link, etc. You can likely conclude that they may be considering buying the product and are open to receiving marketing messaging related to their interest. However, identifying and then creating an audience within your email or other digital marketing program isn’t always as straightforward as identifying an action or demographic attribute that makes a user identifiable and then adding them to a list for marketing. Sometimes, the easiest way to create an audience, or at least one component of the process involves identifying contacts who you don’t want to include in a campaign.

When this is the case, the most effective approach may not be selecting an audience to target, but suppressing certain members of your audience. This all falls under the umbrella of suppression list management. Email and SMS marketing are two marketing channels that have been making use of suppression lists for many years, both for compliance reasons and for more effective audience targeting. Below are a few examples of how suppression list management can be used to more effectively target audiences.

Opt-Outs

In the Email and SMS channels, marketers have long been familiar with suppressing recipients who opt-out from receiving future messaging. With various regulatory and legal developments in the past few years, this is now a group that marketers focused on other channels have become familiar with as well.

Read the rest of the article at Business2Community.