Email Suppression Settings

If you have a sender status of Healthy or At Risk, you have the ability to turn off automatic engagement-based suppression through your email settings.

This article will provide an overview of email suppression settings. Agencies can refer to this article for more information about email suppression.

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Article Contents

• Email Suppression Settings
• How Engagement-Based Suppression Works
• Sender Status
• Suppression Best Practices

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Email Suppression Settings

Engagement-based suppression is a tool in Lead Gen & CRM that prevents emails from being sent to unengaged leads; leads with either a contact engagement score of 0 or leads that are unengaged due to no engagement in 24 months.

This suppression also applies to emails sent to lists. Healthy or At Risk senders in Lead Gen & CRM have the option to either require or disable engagement-based suppression. It takes 60 days after you become a Healthy sender before you can remove suppression.

To require engagement-based suppression, start from   User Menu > Settings in Lead Gen & CRM's top toolbar or from the    Settings icon at the bottom of the left toolbar. 

1. Click Company Email Settings, located under Features in the left panel.
2. Scroll to Email Suppression Settings and check the Require Engagement-Based Suppression checkbox.
   
   

   Click to enlarge.

Be aware that disabling this setting adds another option to the send screen that has to be disabled on the send itself as well. 

How Engagement-Based Suppression Works

Lead Gen & CRM's Contact Engagement Score feature measures a recipient's engagement. Each contact is given an initial engagement score upon creation. The value of the score depends on the way the contact was created in the system. The initial engagement score for each method of contact creation is:

• 16 points when the contact is created through a form submission
• 9 points when the contact is created manually in the Contact Manager
• A maximum of 9 points when the contact is an imported via list or API connection
• 9 points when the contact is created through a CRM sync or migration

A contact's score is decreased by one point each time a contact is sent an email and does not take one of the following engagement actions:

• Opened an email
• Clicked a link in an email
• Filled out a form
• Visited a tracked site and has opened at least one email
• Clicked a Media Center link
• Sent an email to an IMAP-synced user mailbox
• Replied to an email sent from an IMAP-synced user mailbox

If 16 consecutive emails are sent and the recipient does not interact in any of the above ways, then the score becomes 0, and the recipient is deemed unengaged. Unengaged leads will no longer be sent emails in the system unless you decide to no longer require engagement-based suppression. You can only choose to require engagement-based suppression if you are a Healthy or At Risk sender.

A contact can become unengaged after 24 months of not opening an email, filling out a form, replying to an email sent from an IMAP-synced mailbox, or sending to an IMAP-synced mailbox.  Contacts will start with 24 months remaining until they become unengaged. Once a lead has opened an email or otherwise engaged as defined above, this will be reset to 24 months. If that lead again has no engagement over that period of 24 months, they will become unengaged.

Clients who have opted to have automatic suppressions turned off can still decide at the time of the send whether or not to suppress unengaged contacts.

Sender Status

There are four different sender status categories. Each category is tied to email statistics:

Suppression Best Practices

There are things to consider with the ability to send to unengaged recipients. Lead Gen & CRM has several recommendations as to how to interact with unengaged recipients.

• Practice safe and responsible email sending. Above all, Lead Gen & CRM recommends to only email recently collected and directly opted in contacts.
  
  
• Do not send an email to all of your unengaged leads all at once. If you choose to turn off engagement-based suppression, then you will be able to email your unengaged leads. Keep in mind that these leads are unengaged because they have not interacted with your website or emails in quite a long time. This puts you at risk, as these leads may complain that your email is spam, and file a spam complaint. This may potentially cause long-term damage for your sending abilities, as you may have your emails go to the spam folder even for engaged leads.
  
  
• Be wary of invalid addresses and spam traps. If you choose to send to unengaged leads, be aware that this may affect your sender status. Again, you must be a Healthy or At Risk sender. This could be because their email address is now obsolete or could be a spam trap. So, if you send to unengaged leads, and those email addresses are invalid or marked as spam, then you could lower your sender status. This will prevent you from being able to turn off engagement-based suppression in the future.
  
  
• Send your unengaged leads a resubscribe email. With the ability to send to unengaged leads, it would be a good time to check in with them to make sure they actually want to receive your emails. These resubscribe and permission reminder emails can be as simple as sending an email saying something similar to the following: "We have not heard from you in a while. Are you still interested in receiving emails from us?" To keep up with larger groups of contacts, consider also the option of reconfirming lists.