For price-conscious shoppers, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are practically holidays themselves.
They’re big days for consumers, and they’re big days for email marketers too. After all, whether people shop online or brave the crowds, the first place they look for a deal is their email inbox. In fact, email is the channel consumers prefer brands use to communicate with them.
But just because you’re laser-focused on sending your subscribers good deals doesn’t mean you have to miss out on a way to optimize costs. Your secret weapon for saving money might be hiding in front of you: the email suppression list.
Strategic use of email suppression lists can improve your email program by allowing you to drive greater results while spending less. Here are a few ways email suppression lists can keep you from suppressing your revenue.
1) Suppression lists can help you maintain CAN-SPAM compliance.
With the buzz around new regulations like GDPR and California’s new data privacy laws, it can be easy to forget about the CAN-SPAM Act. Still, staying CAN-SPAM compliant is every bit as important going into 2019 as it was in 2003 when the law was first passed.
Because CAN-SPAM fines can cost you thousands, it’s important to honor email opt-outs as quickly as possible. The law requires you to honor opt-outs within 10 business days, but the sooner you quit emailing these addresses, the better. Email suppression lists prevent you from emailing your opt-outs and racking up costly penalties.
Of course, honoring opt-outs is just one part of following CAN-SPAM laws. Read up on other ways to stay CAN-SPAM compliant here.
2) Suppressing current customers from certain emails may help you make sure they stay customers.
If you shop on Black Friday, you probably know the feeling of getting what you think is a great deal…only to see a much better deal a week later. It’s inevitable, and it’s frustrating. Maybe not so frustrating that you disguise yourself as Santa and steal Christmas, but frustrated enough that you get annoyed with that brand or unsubscribe from their emails.
Fortunately, suppression lists can save your customers that frustration. By suppressing your current customers, you can save your brand’s reputation and prevent your marketing emails from annoying your list. Even better, by suppressing current customers in your affiliate email marketing campaigns, you spend less acquiring new customers.
It costs less money to keep your old customers than it does to acquire new customers, so keeping customers happy can keep more of that email ROI in your pocket.
3) Suppression lists can help you deliver more email to your engaged subscribers.
Mailbox providers use email engagement to determine whether your email belongs in the inbox or goes straight to spam. If you send email to a lot of unengaged subscribers, mailboxes might dock your sender reputation accordingly. That means fewer emails will make it to the engaged parts of your list, which means fewer opportunities for you to generate email revenue.
Consider creating a list of your unengaged subscribers that you can suppress against and send to less frequently. This allows you to 1) send to your engaged customers without fatiguing the rest of your list, and 2) prevent engagement metrics from hurting your deliverability. The more (relevant!) email you can put in the inboxes of your most loyal customers, the greater returns you can get from your email campaigns.
4) Save money on leads.
Finally, suppression lists will come in handy when it comes down to optimizing your acquisition spend. Syncing email suppression lists between partners prevents you from paying for leads who have already opted out of your communication and are therefore unusable. You can also suppress against customers you already have, so you don’t spend money acquiring the same customer twice.
The UnsubCentral platform allows email marketers to sync email list data across platforms and scrub multiple lists against each other simultaneously, optimizing even the most complex partner email programs. That way, you can stop paying for leads you can’t use.
You can learn more about UnsubCentral’s lead hygiene solution here.