You can manage suppression lists to ensure proper email deliverability and maintain compliance with anti-spam regulations by preventing emails from being sent to contacts who should not receive them. This helps protect your sender reputation and reduces the risk of spam complaints, which can significantly improve your inbox placement rates.
Properly managed suppression lists enable more relevant messaging by automatically excluding contacts who have opted out or bounced, while ensuring your campaigns reach only engaged and deliverable recipients for better overall performance.
A Suppression List ensures that any contact present in it will not receive future communication from your Marketing Cloud account.
Marketing Cloud supports three kinds of suppression lists:
- Do Not Mail (DNM) List – This list is applicable for email contacts suppressed from lists not associated with any specific brand.
- Brands Do Not Mail List – This is applicable for contacts on the email lists associated with a specific brand.
- SMS Do Not Mail List – This is applicable for SMS contacts across your account.
The suppression lists are account-specific; for example, if a contact, Sam.Jones@example.com, is present in the Do Not Mail list of account ‘123,’ then it will not affect the sending to this contact from an account ‘456.’
Note: When a contact is added to the Do Not Mail list, they will stop receiving all email communications (normal campaigns, A/B campaigns, workflow campaigns, and tests) that are targeted to lists not associated with any brand. To be able to resend content again, you must delete the contact from the DNM list.
The Do Not Mail List and the Brands Do Not Mail List function independently of one another. As the name implies, the Brands Do Not Mail List is a suppression list for brand-specific lists. Hence, if a contact is added to Brand A's DNM List, then it can still receive emails sent to Brand B lists as well as emails sent to non-branded lists.
The Do Not Mail list only suppresses emails sent to non-branded lists. Hence, a contact in this DNM list will still receive emails sent to any branded list.
How does a contact get added to the ‘Do Not Mail’ list?
A contact gets added to the DNM list automatically if:
- The contact gets hard-bounced.
- The contact clicks the "Report Spam" link in the footer of an email.
- The contact clicks ‘Never mail me again’ on the "Edit Profile" page accessed from the footer.
You can also add contacts manually to the Do Not Mail list by importing a CSV file into a ‘Suppressed-type' list or by adding the contacts individually to the list.
Managing Suppression Lists
You can access and manage the suppression lists for your account on the Manage Global Suppression Lists page.
1. Click your username in the top-right corner, and from the drop-down list, select Settings. Then, on the Settings page, in the Contacts section, select Global Suppression Lists.
2. On the Manage Global Suppression Lists page, you can see the total number of contacts in each suppression list and then perform actions such as Import, Export, and Encrypted Export (in MD5 hash format).
3. Drill down further to see the contacts in the Do Not Mail List page by selecting Manage from the Actions drop-down menu. On this page, you can add, edit, and delete contacts from the DNM list.
The following screenshot shows the Do Not Mail List page:
Similarly, you can navigate to the Brands DNM List page and Do Not SMS List page, where you can view, add, edit, and delete contacts from the list.