Question: What is my Act! Marketing Automation Suppression List?
Product: Act!
Product Family: Act! Marketing Automation
Your suppression list is a list of email addresses that will not be sent to even if you add them to a group for your Act! Marketing Automation campaign. This list exists to ensure that Act!, and our customers, comply with the CAN-SPAM Act 2003 and other legislation.
Contacts can be added to your suppression lists in various ways. Once an email address is on the list, emails sent to that address through Act! Marketing Automation will be suppressed.
Import
When you first setup your account, if you moved from Act! E-marketing or any other marketing automation platform, then your Account Manager will have arranged for your existing suppression list to be imported into your account.
If you have not used another Act! E-marketing product previously then you can import your own suppression list. Your first step is to acquire your list of all unsubscribes and hard bounces from your previous marketing automation platform. This list should be a simple one column CSV file that contains email addresses only. Once you have acquired your list and are ready to import:
- Click into Marketing Automation from the Act! left menu.
- Click the Admin button in the upper right portion of your screen. If you do not see this menu item, then you do not have Admin rights. In this case, you should then have an admin help you with this task.
- From the Admin screen, click the "What would you like" drop down and select Suppression List - Email. Then click Go.
- In the suppression list page, click the Actions drop down and select Import.
- In the Upload Lists pop up, use the file upload tool to upload your CSV file. As mentioned earlier in this article, the file should be a single column, email-only CSV file.
- For the "Please enter a source" field, enter where this list is coming from. For example, if you came from Constant Contact, you may enter that in the field. If you leave the field blank, it will auto-populate with "Uploaded" once the import is complete.
- The next field allows you to select Unsubscribe, Bounce or Complained. What you select here does not affect how the suppression list performs, it serves instead to help you and other users determine the reason a record is in the suppression list. This can come in handy if a contact reaches out to you down the road wanting to re-subscribe to your emails, for example.
- Once you have completed this page, click Upload.
- Once the list has been uploaded you will receive a confirmation email and you can now click the "Refresh" icon on your browser to see your full suppression list.
Business As Usual
Records will also automatically be added to your suppression list if you send emails through AMA that come back as a hard bounce, the recipient clicks the unsubscribe link in your email, or if the recipient reports your email as SPAM (this counts as a Complaint).
Unsubscribes
Unsubscribes are where the customer has clicked on the unsubscribe link within an email you have sent them.
Hard Bounces and SPAM Complaints
‘Hard’ bounces are where an email couldn’t be delivered to an email address for permanent reasons. There can be a number of reasons for this but examples of the more common ones are that the email domain doesn’t exist or the email address doesn’t exist.
SPAM complaints occur when a recipient of an email marks it as SPAM via their ISP (Internet Service Provider).
These are fed back to our servers and flagged so that emails are prevented from being sent to these email addresses.
Note: The list view on the Suppression List page only shows up to 5000 records. If you would like to see all records within the list, you can export by clicking 'Actions' > 'Export'. You will be given an Excel file containing all records in your suppression list.
You can also use the search bar to search for a specific email address to determine if they are being suppressed from email sends.
If you wish to remove contacts from your suppression list please refer to the following article: