Email Marketing News and Tips

One day this past week, I was working with a customer with a marketing email she was trying to get out. Later that day, a different person at the same company also wanted to send out a marketing email. In addition, there was another mailing already set to go out the following morning.

The problem? A handful of recipients overlapped across all three mailings.

Had this gone unnoticed, these recipients would have received 3 mailings from the same company in less than 24 hours. By anyone’s standards, that’s just too much. What was originally supposed to be a marketing message, simply turned into spam.

I suspect this happens more often than we think. List management is something that is often given little priority. When emails are sent out, the focus is on the email itself. The list just becomes an afterthought.

While managing your lists across all your users may sound like a big undertaking, there is a simple solution - suppression lists.

Suppression lists, as the name would imply, allow you to suppress recipients from your current mailing. So if you know that lists ABC and XYZ were sent to within the past few days, then I would strongly consider using these as suppression lists. That way, any recipients that may be on those lists and yours will not be mailed yet again.

Yes, you will lose a few entries in your list, but the benefit outweighs the loss. Or would you rather risk having the recipient optout from all mailings entirely?