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Creating and Managing a Suppression List
Creating and Managing a Suppression List

Set up rules for your Do Not Contact List to prevent some or all contacts from a particular company from being activated in a campaign.

Ryan O'Donnell avatar
Written by Ryan O'Donnell
Updated over a week ago

Why you might want to create a suppression list:

  1. Suppress your current customers (and/or their companies)

  2. Suppress your current 'warm' leads (and/or their companies)

  3. Suppress your competitors (do this at the domain level not individual email addresses to ensure that all contacts from that company will be blocked)

  4. Suppress surly contacts (or their company domain ie - 'abc.com') who reply to an email saying something like 'if you ever email someone from my company again, I'm calling the cops'.  Do you really want to do business with someone who talks to others like this?  Thick skin and short memory is key.  Suppress and move on.

How to create a Suppression List:

  1. Go to the Main Contacts page and click 'Manage Suppression' to create your rule(s).

  2. Click the 'Create New Rule' button.

  3. Create your rule for what do suppress and click the 'Save and Apply Rule' button before leaving the page.  *This rule will apply to any contact you previously added to Replyify

Best Practices for Creating Suppression Rules:
We built the suppression rules to be flexible since your use cases may vary.  Some companies use different email domains than their main website.  IBM.com (homepage) vs. us.ibm.com (email). Here are a few best practices for creating rules.

  1. Use the 'EMAIL' option for 'Contact Field Name:' 

  2. Set the 'Comparison' = 'Ends With'

  3. 'Values to Suppress' is where you will paste the data you copied from an excel doc or other source.  This could be a list of emails OR domains (but not both in the same rule)

  4. Pro Tip: if you are adding a list of domains, keep the '@' symbol in front of the domain.  This prevents your attempt to block 'abc.com' from also blocking 'getabc.com'  So your input value would be @abc.com

*Tips for excel: You can add value(s) to a rule at any time.  If you are working from an excel spreadsheet to populate your list for the first time, use the Data>Text To Columns>Delimited>Check 'other and input the @ symbol>Next>Finish>Confirm  Note: this will strip off the '@' symbol but will separate the email handle from the domain.  To add the @ symbol to the beginning of the domain to build your suppression list, insert a new column before the column with the domains.  Insert the @ symbol and drag to copy and fill every row in the file with the @ symbol.  Use the 'CONCATENATE' function to  =CONCATENATE(B2,"",A2) to combine your two columns, then copy/paste into the values field.

To suppress an email address, so you won't accidentally email that person agin.  Select 'EMAIL' option for 'Contact Field Name:', 'Comparison' is 'Equals', then paste or type the email address.  ps - unsubscribing the contact also ensures you won't email them again.  (go here and search for unsubscribe to learn more)

Suppressing a Contact/Company for yourself or your Team:

Before you Save and Apply the Suppression rule, select an option from the dropdown to suppress the contact or company for ONLY your account or for your team.  If you suppress for the team, your personal account will also inherit the suppression rule.

Viewing Suppressed Contacts:

From the Suppressed Contacts main page, select the tab for Suppressed Contacts.  You will see the Name, Email, Company, 'Suppression Rule Match', and an option to view the contact details.  If a contact is suppressed, and shouldn't be, please edit your rules to find the data value causing the conflict.

PS - If you run an Agency or Consultancy and trying to figure out how to set suppression rules for multiple accounts/clients you manage, then check out this post.

Questions?  Let us know by replying below!  

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