Auto Suppression of contacts -Salesforce Marketing Cloud (ExactTarget)

Suppression management is an important task whenever you are targeting a set of audience to receive your emails or sms or push notifications through any channel or any tool. With the latest laws like CAN-SPAM and the fines associated with it it’s of more significance for people who are not meant to to not receive emails than people actually receiving it as the fine associated with former is much more than the revenue generated by the latter. Auto-Suppression is a functionality provided by Salesforce Marketing Cloud where you can prohibit people from receiving emails via automation. Just prepare a list, feed into the system and they would be left out from every email going out of your software.

Some pointers-

1. Use an auto-suppression list when you want to assign a suppression list to be used across the entire enterprise or for specific business units for specific send classifications.
2. You can assign auto-suppression lists at different levels of your account.
3. Suppression lists filter out email addresses and prevent those addresses from receiving your messages.
4. Suppression lists serve as a do-not-contact list for your email sends.
5. You can assign auto-suppression lists across an entire enterprise or to a specific business unit with a specified send classification
6. If you assign an auto-suppression list to the enterprise, email addresses on the auto-suppression list will not receive any messages from any account for the send classification you specify.

Creating a list-

1. login into marketing cloud via url – https://mc.s7.exacttarget.com
2. go to Email app
3. click on Admin in the top menu
4. click on Auto-Suppression configuration towards the end of side-menu
5. click on create button
6. enter the details as shown in the below demoshot
7. select the CAN-SPAM classification type- Commercial, transactional or to both
8. select the business units you want the suppression to happen
9. click on Save

Adding members to list- We cannot import via manual transfer in the auto-suppression list like we do in a data extension. Import can be done only through a import job which will directly insert the records into the list.

1. Create a .csv file with 2 colums – ‘Email Address’ and ‘Event Date’. 1st columns is a required field while 2nd is just for record purpose. Put the file on your FTP location
2. go to email tab in marketing cloud
3. click on Interactions>Import
4. Fill in the details
5. select the FTP location defined for this file
6. select the file-type and provide a filename which matches to the filename on your FTP location
7. select Data Extension radio button
8. select the auto-suppression configuration option
9. select your list you just created
10. select the import type as add and update or overwrite as per business requirement
11. enter a notification email address to receive success or error logs on imports done
12. click Save

Resources-

• https://help.marketingcloud.com/en/documentation/
• https://help.marketingcloud.com/en/documentation/exacttarget/admin/auto_suppression_lists/