The OPTIZMO™ Blog

News and tips from the industry leaders in email compliance.

Fellow email marketers, if we’ve learned anything from testing and optimizing subject lines and inbox placement, it is the importance of maintaining healthy sender reputations and even more vital, staying compliant with laws like the CAN-SPAM Act. The key tool that not only helps you avoid the dreaded spam folder but also keeps you compliant is the suppression list.

Let us take you on a tour through the world of email compliance, suppression lists, the unsubscribe link, email opt-outs, and how OPTIZMO can take you from surviving to thriving in the email marketing industry.

The Ins and Outs of a Suppression List: Keeping Your Email Marketing Campaigns in the Green

An email suppression list is a collection of email addresses to be removed from or ‘suppressed’ from an email campaign. An email suppression list can be made up of any group of email addresses that should not be mailed in a given campaign. Among the most common, and important, uses of a suppression list is to ensure that any email recipients who have raised their virtual hands and said, “Hey, no more marketing messages for me!” are suppressed from all future email campaigns via an unsubscribe link.

According to The CAN-SPAM Act, once a recipient has opted out of future messaging, you must honor that request and stop sending them marketing emails. By maintaining and managing a suppression list of opt-ous, businesses ensure that they respect these contacts’ requests and stay compliant with CAN-SPAM. Outside of the vital unsubscribe list, there are a variety of other common uses for a suppression list. Whether it’s suppressing current/past customers, non-responders, or spam complaints, there is a multitude of use cases for mailers to suppress certain recipients and email addresses from a campaign, often in order to optimize performance. 

A Closer Look at Compliance Implications

The CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t just lay down laws – it constructs a framework for sustainable communication with your email recipients. CAN-SPAM also imposes considerable financial penalties on companies found in violation, which can reach up to $51,744, per email found to be in violation. If you’re sending large volumes of emails as many companies are, a significant violation can be potentially catastrophic to your business. Don’t let this happen to you and utilize a suppression list to stay compliant.

For a great overview and more in-depth look at CAN-SPAM compliance, check out this post.

Delving Deeper  into a Suppression List

Many companies also chose to suppress other email addresses from their campaigns. For example, if a campaign is focused on new customer acquisition, then it makes sense to have a suppression list of current customers. Perhaps you have a list you’ve been mailing for years and certain email addresses on the list have never opened an email or engaged with your campaign in any way. You can also create a suppression list of these non-responders, to ensure they are not included in future campaigns. Essentially, any email addresses that you want to ensure are not included in any mailings can be added to these lists.

Now, while we’re all aware that suppression lists are essential, managing them efficiently can feel like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube blindfolded. We have to juggle opt-outs from different campaigns, customer files, blacklists, and any other sets of valid email addresses that you need to ensure are not mailed in a given campaign. Management can be a complicated and heavy lift.

To learn more check out our blog article on Suppression List Management.

Enter OPTIZMO: Your One-Stop Solution for Email Suppression List Management

Managing multiple email lists and partners is a daunting task, and that’s where we come in. OPTIZMO streamlines Email Suppression List Management, helping you stay compliant and keeping your email campaigns in the green. Perhaps the only truly independent suppression list management system, OPTIZMO is entirely neutral and unaffiliated with any mailer, network, or other technology platform. This allows us to focus on delivering the most robust email compliance solutions in the industry and make them available to every client, with no potential conflicts of interest.

Whether you need to move data throughout an entire ecosystem of channel partners or simply for internal, cross-departmental sharing of suppression lists and customer files, OPTIZMO saves you time, saves you money, and lets you rest assured that your data is safe and secure.

Get Opt-Out Insights From 2022 – Download the Comprehensive Infographic

Hundreds of billions of emails continue to be sent each year to over 4 billion email users worldwide, all of which generate a consistently substantial volume of opt-out requests, as recipients curate their email inboxes. OPTIZMO provides email opt-out collection and processing for hundreds of companies around the world, which allows us to provide insights into trends in overall opt-out activity and analytics that are unavailable anywhere else in the industry.

Traditionally, email marketers tend to focus their attention on their key performance indicators (KPIs), such as open rates, click rates, and conversions. However, a great deal can be learned from so-called ‘negative marketing signals’ such as spam complaints, opt-out requests, and non-engagement. The view of these campaign metrics can be reframed as less of a negative outcome, by focusing more on what that signal is communicating about recipient wants and needs. As an example, days where opt-outs volumes are higher than others suggest that recipients are more engaged in their inboxes during that time compared to other days of the week. Marketers can use information like this to make better optimization decisions in their email campaigns, ideally resulting in fewer opt-outs and higher engagement overall.

The infographic is available for download on the OPTIZMO website by following the link below.

Download A Copy of Our Infographic Here

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