Contact Suppression Lists
Contents
Suppression provides the means to honor your customers preferences and segmentation. You can suppress contacts from being attempted on an account-wide basis by using the Contact Suppression List feature.
Contact suppression, set up from the Compliance tabbed page, allows you to associate one or more unique suppression lists to an account, thereby preventing specific contact attempts from being made from any campaign or sub-campaign in the account.
Using Device Suppression, you can suppress a single device, such as an email address, and leave other devices, such as the home phone number and cell number, available for attempts or retries.
You can use Client ID Suppression to suppress all devices in the record by suppressing the Client ID. Each device or Client ID is assigned an expiration date, allowing you to temporarily cease making attempts to a specific contact.
With multiple suppression lists, you have the ability to manage separate suppression lists. You can also associate a single list to multiple campaigns, eliminating the need to duplicate a list in order to use it with campaigns having different purposes.
Note that "active suppression", or suppression that is created during a contact attempt, must be included as a part of a script (for example, "If you do not want to receive future messages, press 1.") and is not a part of Account Suppression.
List columns
On the Campaigns tabbed page, select Account Suppression (or Enterprise Suppression from the Enterprise Account) to view a list of suppression lists available for use in the account.
The suppression lists appear in a table with the following column headings:
- Name - The name of the suppression list.
- Level - Indicates the level at which the suppression list is applied, either the account level or the enterprise level.
- Size - The number of records in the suppression list.
- Use - Indicates the number of campaigns to which the suppression list is associated.
- Required - Indicates whether or not the suppression list is required.
- Expires - Indicates the number of days that each device - or Client ID - remains on the suppression list before being removed. "Never" indicates that the device or Client ID is never removed from the suppression list.
- Type - Indicates whether the suppression occurs by a device or Client ID.
- Channels - Indicates which channels are suppressed by a device or Client ID. The options are Voice, Text and/or Email.
To sort the suppression lists, select the arrow to Sort Ascending or Sort Descending.
Create a new suppression list
To create a new suppression list for the account:
- Select Compliance -> Contact Suppression List.The Contact Suppression Lists page appears.
- Click Add -> New List.
- The New Suppression List dialog appears.
- In the Name: field, enter the name of the new suppression list as you want it to appear.
- Select one or more channels, Voice, Text, and/or Email.
- From the Expires: list, select the expiration option for the suppression list. Note that the expiration occurs at midnight, relative to the Account settings. The options are as follows:
- Never - the device or Client ID is never removed from the suppression list
- Today - the device or Client ID is removed at the end of the current day
- 1-30 days - select the exact number of days that each device or client ID remains on the suppression list
- 45, 60, 90- days - select the defined number of days, 45, 60 or 90, that each device or client ID remains on the suppression list.
- From the Type: list, select from Device or Client ID.
- Select Required: if this suppression list is required for all campaigns in the account.
- Click Create List.
Import or export a suppression list
Import a suppression list
To import a new suppression list for the account:
- Click Add -> Import file. The Import List page appears.
- Click Browse to browse to the file to be imported and select it
- Select the specification file option:
- Select Do not use specification file if you are importing a CSV file and the header row is already defined with the standard messaging system structured headers,
- Select Specification File to import a file using an input specification file already available in the account,
- Select Select File to import a file using an input specification file not already in the account. Browse to locate and select the input specification file on your PC or network.
- Specify the destination for the contacts contained in the imported file
- Select Create New List and enter a name for the new list,
- Select Append to List and select the existing suppression list to which the contacts will be appended. (Note that this option is available only if there is an existing list to append to.)
- Select the Suppression List attributes, as follows:
- Select Required if use of the suppression list is required for all campaigns in the account.
- Select the expiration option from the Expiration: list. Note that the suppression expires at midnight, relative to time zone of the Account. Select from the options as follows:
- Never - the device or Client ID is never removed from the suppression list
- Today - the device or Client ID is removed at the end of the current day
- 1-30 days - select the exact number of days that each device or client ID remains on the suppression list
- 45, 60, 90- days - select the defined number of days, 45, 60 or 90, that each device or client ID remains on the suppression list.
- Select Client ID or Device from the suppression Type: list.
- Select one or more channels, Voice, Text, and/or Email.
- Click Next. The Lists > Import > Review Mapping page appears. This page present the fields found in your original file and the mapping to the messaging system contact list fields. If an input specification file was used during the import, the format of the specification file is also shown.
- When finished, click Next. The Lists > Import > Confirm page appears, which displays the number of records available to be imported. Although the number of duplicate devices appears, all records, including the duplicates, are imported. (If desired, the duplicates can be excluded during the campaign set-up process.) Records containing an invalid number (for example, a number containing letters or an invalid number of digits) are not imported.
Click Complete Import. The list is imported and available for use.
Notes about specification files:
- To import a CSV file without using a specification file, you may need to first edit the original file to include a header row with field names that match the messaging system contact list field names. See Contact list fields.
- If you used an input specification file, you may need to edit it so that it extracts the data correctly. If the mappings are incorrect, modify the contact list or input specification file and re-import the data.
Export a suppression list
When you export a suppression list, a CSV file is retrieved from the messaging system data base that contains all records in the list.
To export a suppression list:
- Select a suppression list and click Export.
- Select To Desktop or To FTP.
Append a suppression file
To append a suppression file:
- Click Add -> Append file.The Import List page appears.
- Click Browse to browse to the file to be appended to the list and select it.
- Select the specification file option.
- Select Do not use specification file if you are importing a CSV file and the header row is already defined with the standard messaging system structured headers,
- Select Select File to import a file using an input specification file not already in the account. Browse to locate and select the input specification file on your PC or network.
- Specify the destination for the contacts contained in the imported file.
- Select Append to List.
- Click Next. The Lists > Import > Review Mapping page appears. This page present the fields found in your original file and the mapping to the messaging system contact list fields. If an input specification file was used during the import, the format of the specification file is also shown. See notes about specification files.
- When finished, click 'Next. The Lists > Import > Confirm page appears, which displays the number of records available to be imported. Although the number of duplicate devices appears, all records, including the duplicates, are imported. (If desired, the duplicates can be excluded during the campaign set-up process.) Records containing an invalid number (for example, a number containing letters or an invalid number of digits) are not imported.
- Click Complete Import. The list is imported and available for use.
Add or remove contacts
Add contacts
To add contacts to an existing suppression list:
- Select a suppression list and, on the Account Suppression menu bar, click Add -> Add Record(s).
- The Add record(s) to:<suppression list name> dialog appears.
- If the existing suppression list is a Device type list, you are prompted to enter the list of Devices to append. Note that phone numbers must be entered in the proper form as the system will not reject badly formed phone numbers.
- If the existing suppression list is a Client ID type list, you are prompted to enter the list of Client IDs to append. Note that Client IDs must be entered exactly as they appear in the database. Include leading zeros and match the case exactly when entering Client IDs.
- Enter the device(s) or Client ID(s) (one per line) to be appended.
- Click Add Record(s).
Clear contacts from a suppression list
To clear all contacts from an existing suppression list:
- Select a suppression list and click Add -> Clear List. A confirmation dialog appears.
- Click OK.
Note that this action clears the contacts from the list but leaves the now empty suppression list, with all characteristics such as Type, Channels and Expiration intact.
Edit a suppression list
To edit an existing suppression list:
- Select a suppression list and click Edit. The Edit Suppression List dialog appears.
- From the Expires: list, choose the expiration date. Note that the suppression expires at midnight, relative to time zone of the Account. Select from the options as follows:
- Never
- Today
- 1-30 days
- 45, 60, 90- days
- Select (or clear) Required.
- Click Save List.
Delete a suppression list
To delete an existing suppression list:
- Select a suppression list and click Delete.The Delete confirmation dialog appears. Note that this action deletes the list and all its contents.
- Click OK.