To keep things as easy to manage as possible, we’ve always kept unsubscribes at the list level, not the client level. This means that if a customer is subscribed to List A and List B and they unsubscribe from List A, they will still be subscribed to List B. This approach has worked very well for the majority of you guys. Most of you only have one or two lists per client and more often than not there isn’t much cross over anyway.
The problem with this approach is that as your list management needs get more complex, the chances of an unsubscriber being accidentally sent to again increase. On top of this, there are plenty of other list management scenarios out there. You might want to ensure anyone who unsubscribed is never contacted again, no matter how many lists they’re in. What if you’ve got a big chunk of unsubscribers from a previous system that you want to ensure are never added to any of your lists in Campaign Monitor? The list really does go on. From tomorrow, all of this will be possible from your Campaign Monitor account.
The Answer: Suppression Lists
Tomorrow we’ll be introducing a new feature called “Client-wide suppression lists”. This is basically a client-wide do not email list. Here’s a screenshot of how you can access this list from your subscriber list index page:
Any address in this list will never be added to your subscriber lists and you can add and remove addresses from it whenever you like. By default, any unsubscribes from each list will be added to the suppression list for that client automatically. Here’s how the page to manage your suppression list will look:
This keeps you safe by ensuring you can never re-send to a previous unsubscriber accidentally. The best part is, you don’t need to lift a finger to start taking advantage of this feature, it will work behind the scenes automatically.
Choose which approach works for you
While the suppression list will be turned on by default for each list, we’ve give you the ability to turn it off on a list-by-list basis. If you’d like to revert back to the old approach, no problem at all. You’ll be able to adjust how this is handled in the Unsubscribe Settings for that list. Here’s a quick screenshot of the new options:
I hope you all find the new suppression list feature useful. We think it’s a big improvement over the current approach and like any good update, works seamlessly behind the scenes without you actually needing to do anything.