Newsberry

Suppression (Do Not Email) Lists

This entry was posted on October 22, 2009 by Natalie Nagele and is filed under News and Tips.

We often have customers ask us about separating a group of subscribers who should not receive their email campaigns. Some call this a suppression list, or a Do Not Email (DNE) list. Whatever you call it, there is an easy way to do this in Newsberry so I thought it would be helpful to quickly outline it.

Setting up the file

Newsberry has a few system-wide fields that indicate a subscriber’s status. In order to tell Newsberry to mark someone as Inactive, you need to import a file with some extra fields. Note: The following fields and values need to be entered exactly, in order for Newsberry to recognize them.

The two fields necessary: Subscriber Status and Reason

Add these two fields to your existing Suppression file (.csv or .xls). Now you will need to provide a value for each subscriber. For the purpose of a DNE list, type Inactive for everyone’s Subscriber Status. In MS Excel, you can select all the cells and copy the value, which should make this really easy. For the Reason you have a few options:

• Unsubscribe
• Manually Deactivate
• Spam Complaint

Whichever you enter for a subscriber, that Inactive Reason will show up in your subscriber list. Keep in mind that Unsubscribe and Spam Complaint are permanent, meaning a user cannot reactivate them in the account once their status is set. This is to protect someone from accidentally activating a subscriber who asked not to be contacted.

Result

Once you complete your file, you can simply import it as you normally would. Newsberry will recognize the new fields on the second step of import, and select the field names for you. If Newsberry did not recognize the fields, you may not have the correct spelling/wording in your file. Double check that it matches exactly.

Once the import is complete, these users will now have a new Subscriber Status and Reason. If these subscribers were active before, they will now become inactive within that list.

For more detailed, step by step instructions (with screenshots) of how to create and import the file, check out this article on our help site.

As always, feel free to email support if you need help with this.