What is a Suppression List?
Suppression lists are intended to help you avoid sending emails to opted-in recipients to whom the email may not be relevant or necessary. They are not meant to act as a replacement or backup for the standard unsubscribe process. Regardless of whether or not you decide to use a suppression list, Click will still exclude any members of your marketing list who have previously unsubscribed from your emails. Suppression lists will also exclude recipients from Transactional emails as well.
You may select one or more static or dynamic Marketing Lists to exclude from your Email Send. For example, if you want to send an email to people who have not yet RSVP'd for an event you are hosting, you can use your original Marketing List of possible attendees as the one you will send to, and set other Marketing Lists of people who have already said they will attend and people who have already said they will not attend as your suppression lists for the Email Send. Anyone on the suppression list(s) will be excluded from being sent the email even if they are on the original Marketing List of possible attendees that was set for the Email Send if the email addresses match.
How can I add a Suppression List to a Send
You can add Suppressed Marketing Lists via the grid within the Email Send record draft. Click Add Existing Marketing List and choose the desired Marketing List(s).
To add a suppression list to your Email Send, you can also click on the Related dropdown menu and choose Suppressed Marketing Lists.
Click Add Existing Marketing List and query for the list(s) you would like to use for suppression purposes.
When the Email Send is sent out, Click will refrain from sending the email to anyone who may exist on both the specified suppression lists and the original marketing list of recipients. You can see these excluded recipients under the Email Send's related Excluded Emails. More on excluded emails here.
Cautionary Notes
NOTE: While Suppression Lists are very helpful, it is still important to keep your Marketing Lists clean. For example, if you send an Email Send to 10,000 recipients while including a Suppression List for 9,500 of those recipients, you are putting a lot of unnecessary strain on your environment. Depending on your environment's performance capabilities, this may result in your environment generating a timeout error during the Email Send processing, thus pushing your Email Send into Error Recovery.
NOTE: If you are using automated processes to trigger Email Sends containing Suppression Lists, ensure that you are never executing multiple Email Sends with the same Suppression List at the exact same time. This can cause an error with accessing the Suppression List and one or more of the Email Sends may fail. If this does occur for you, simply re-send the failed Email Sends individually.
FAQs
Can I use one Suppression List for all my contacts/leads?
No. Suppression Lists are based on entity type—remember that they are a Marketing List which you have to set to the Contact, Lead, or Account entity. So when sending an email only to Leads, a Lead Suppression List can be used.
However, if contacts are also on your Email Send, even if a contact has the same email address as a lead that should be suppressed, the contact will be sent to. The Lead Suppression List can't suppress a contact since it's a different entity. Ideally, you won't have duplicate email addresses in your Dynamics anyway, but if you do need to account for all entities on an Email Send, just be sure to add a Suppression List for each entity you're sending to.