Email is now the top driver of sales for consumers in Australia and New Zealand, making it an essential component of any outbound marketing strategy.
But email marketing shouldn’t be seen as an easy win for your business. Australians are now sending 8.1 million emails every single day. If you don’t want to get lost in the noise, you need to deliver the right message to the right people – and respect their right to opt out, too.
A suppression list is a crucial way to prevent people from receiving unwanted communications from your business. It protects your reputation, maximises your marketing efforts and helps to maintain trust.
Below, we’ll explain why a suppression list should be a key part of your communications strategy – and how to implement one effectively.
What is a Suppression List?
In simple terms, a suppression list is a list of contacts that will not receive your communications. This usually refers to emails, but it can also include phone calls for telemarketing or other ways of reaching out to new or existing customers.
There are many reasons you might need to add recipients to your suppression list. They may have unsubscribed from your mailing list or have reported your emails as spam. Or you may simply want to avoid reaching out to an inactive email address or a phone number that has been disconnected.
A suppression list gives you greater control over how you interact with your audience. And it won’t just benefit your email marketing efforts – it’ll provide a vital foundation for your wider communication strategy. Read on below to find out how.
Why Your Business Needs a Suppression List
A suppression list isn’t just a useful tool for refining your marketing campaigns. Implementing one effectively can have far-reaching benefits for your business, including:
- Regulatory compliance. The Spam Act 2003 requires you to obtain explicit consent from recipients before sending marketing communications. You must also include a functional unsubscribe option – and that means you need a working suppression list. Without one, you run the risk of incurring substantial fines.
- Protecting your brand. No business wants to be associated with intrusive marketing practices. Failing to keep an up-to-date suppression list can give your business a reputation for sending unwanted messages and disregarding opt-outs.
- Improving your customer experience (CX). Some customers will no doubt find your outbound communications engaging and informative. For others, they’re less useful. Allowing customers to set the terms of their interactions with you is essential if you want to deliver an effective CX.
- Clearer engagement metrics. Your email open rate, list growth rate, and other metrics give a vital insight into how your communication strategy is working. But if you're consistently emailing inactive addresses or people who have opted out, your data won’t accurately reflect your efforts.
- Reducing your costs. If your email provider charges based on the number of contacts, an outdated suppression list is costing you money. A similar premise applies in a call centre environment – any time your agents spend calling disconnected numbers or people on the Do Not Call (DNC) register could be better used elsewhere.
Of course, securing these benefits will require an effective strategy for managing your suppression list – read on below for some helpful tips.
Who to Include in Your Suppression List
For your suppression list to be effective, it needs to capture the full range of recipients that should be excluded. This includes:
- Unsubscribed contacts. These are people who have specifically opted out of your communications.
- Hard bounces. This refers to email addresses that are permanently unavailable – for instance, if they’ve been deactivated.
- Spam complainants. This includes people who have marked your emails as spam using their email client.
- Inactive users. You may want to add people who haven’t opened your emails for a certain period (90 days, for example) to the list.
- People on the DNC register. Contacting people who have specifically opted out of calls isn’t likely to garner a positive response – and it could land you in legal trouble.
You should also consider setting up custom blocks for specific types of email addresses. You may want to avoid sending marketing emails to “support@” addresses, for example, as these are likely to be reserved for customer support issues.
5 Key Tips for Managing Your Suppression List
1. Segment Your List
Not everyone will end up on your suppression list for the same reason. On that basis, it can be helpful to segment the list into different categories.
For instance, it can be helpful to separate hard bounces from inactive users. You might want to reach out to the latter from time to time to reengage them, while the former should remain permanently excluded.
By the same token, you may want to give your customers the chance to unsubscribe from different types of communications in a more granular way. Even though they’re not interested in receiving product updates, they might still want to receive news about upcoming discounts.
A properly segmented suppression list allows you to offer greater control to your customers while maintaining the broader efficiency and compliance benefits.
2. Update Your List Regularly
It should go without saying, but you should honour unsubscribe requests as soon as possible. More generally, ensuring that contacts are added to your suppression list quickly will improve your overall efficiency and limit the risk of damage to your brand.
But updating your lists isn’t solely about adding new contacts. You’ll also want to regularly review the list for duplicate entries, accidental inputs and formatting issues. Good data cleansing practices will ensure your suppression rate is accurate – see tip 4 to learn why that’s important.
3. Review the Regulations
Public concerns around data privacy are continuing to grow, with nine in ten Australians wanting businesses and the government to do more to protect their personal information.
As a result, the regulations that govern the use of customer data are evolving. The Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2024 is poised to introduce new privacy protections for customers and more stringent compliance requirements for businesses. And this is likely just the first step toward more comprehensive changes to data protection law.
With this in mind, it’s essential that you stay abreast of any regulatory changes. While your suppression list may be fully compliant right now, that doesn’t guarantee it will stay that way. Complacency could easily catch you out and leave you facing serious repercussions.
4. Monitor Your Metrics
You’ll likely have a range of metrics on hand to help you evaluate your email or cold-calling strategy. Everything from open rates and clickthrough rates to average handle times (AHT) can give you an insight into the success of your current approach.
Keeping an eye on these metrics won’t just help you refine your outbound efforts – it can also help you assess whether your suppression list is working as intended. A high bounce rate, for instance, could indicate you aren’t screening out inactive addresses effectively. A declining open rate, on the other hand, suggests you should move more low-engagement contacts onto your suppression list.
It can also be helpful to measure the growth of your suppression list against your contact list as a whole. If your suppression rate is outpacing your list growth, you may need to reconsider your broader communication strategy.
5. Embrace Automation Tools
In a digital-first world, relying on manual processes will hold you back. In most cases, trying to manage your suppression list manually will simply be too time-consuming and error-prone to keep pace.
Your email management tools should offer a range of settings to help maintain your suppression list. This can include everything from automatically adding hard bounces to the list to scheduling data cleansing processes to check for duplicate entries or inconsistent formatting.
And the same applies to your call centre software. If you choose a platform with powerful call centre quality assurance tools, it’ll be significantly easier to stay compliant and reduce the risk of customer complaints.
Adopting an Omnichannel Solution with MaxContact
A well-managed suppression list is vital to the success of your communication strategy. Whether you’re looking to avoid costly data protection breaches or striving to improve your customer experience, your suppression list needs to be properly managed.
But with a growing number of ways to reach your customers, keeping your suppression list up to date is far from easy. If your business embraces a wide range of channels, an integrated approach is essential.
Here at MaxContact, we’re committed to offering cutting-edge omnichannel solutions for all your communications, from voice and email to WhatsApp, web chat and beyond. With business analytics, advanced automation features and AI integration on hand, you can take a unified and fully compliant approach to engaging your customers.
To book a free demo with a member of our expert team, get in touch today.
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