Blocklisting in Email Marketing – When and Why Should You Permanently Exclude Recipients?

You can use your own blocklist (formerly blacklist) to block recipients or domains from getting your newsletters.

Blocklists – formerly known as blacklists – are an essential tool in email marketing. There are two ways of using it – one is incredibly helpful, the other less welcome for email marketers. But first things first:

At first glance, this may seem less friendly than it actually is. There are lots of good reasons why newsletter senders should stop sending emails to certain recipients. This article explains what these are and why they’re useful.

Blocklisting is not just a one-way street: it’s not just the sender who can blocklist certain contacts from their list. Email providers can also block recipients or entire domains. No serious email marketer wants to end up on a blocklist. At the end of the day, their subscribers signed up for the newsletter because they want to get valuable info, updates, and offers. Nobody wants the email they’re waiting for to end up in the spam folder or even get blocked and not delivered.

How Does Blocklisting Work in Email Marketing?

You can blocklist recipients in two ways:

• As the sender, you can add addresses or domains to the blocklist to stop them from getting your newsletter.
• Recipients can also be added to the blocklist automatically via feedback loops. This happens when people add your newsletter to their spam folders. Our email marketing tool receives feedback from the recipient’s email program, which leads to blocklisting the recipient.

Who Can You Exclude From Your Email List?

Use the CleverReach blocklist to permanently exclude individual recipients or entire domains from your newsletter. Unlike unsubscribing, these addresses are blocked permanently. They cannot (re)subscribe to your newsletter.

CleverReach ensures that these users receive an error message indicating that the address is invalid. However, they are not informed that they are on the blocklist.

What Benefits Does Blocklisting Hold for Email Marketers?

Blocklisting in email marketing is a great way to make sure you’re not sending your newsletter to people who don’t want it. They can either tell you they don’t want it or mark it as spam. You must add the corresponding entry to the recipient data record in the first case. In the second case, this is done automatically via feedback loops.

• Blocklisting guarantees you legal certainty when sending your newsletter and protects your sender reputation.

Reasons for Blocklisting Recipients

The primary reason for excluding certain recipients is to ensure legal certainty. If people who don’t want your emails get them anyway, you might get a warning, which could become quite expensive!

You should also permanently exclude recipients to protect your good reputation as a sender from spam complaints. Protecting your sender reputation is crucial. A bad reputation makes email service providers more likely to regard your emails as spam and sort them out. Dies führt zu einer geringeren Zustellrate. Blocklisting will positively impact your email delivery rate, ensuring the continued effectiveness of your campaigns.

There are several reasons you might permanently exclude recipients from your newsletter:

Recipient’s Request

The recipient does not want any more newsletters. Blocklisting lets you make sure you’re following the GDPR and that you don’t accidentally contact them in the future. This could result in them filing a complaint, which could have legal ramifications and be costly.

Feedback Loops/ Frequent Spam Complaint

Blocklist entries can be made automatically via feedback loops. If someone reports your newsletter as spam in certain email or free mail programs (like Gmail, Yahoo, GMX, AOL, or others), this is what happens. Newsletter systems like CleverReach get direct feedback in that case. To keep your sender reputation clean, the recipient is usually added to the blocklist automatically.

Sender’s Request

At last, you can add certain URL addresses to your blocklist yourself. This is a great way to exclude competitors from your newsletters. To do this, just save an entry with a placeholder, like *@competitor.com. That means anyone with an address in the domain name you’re checking out won’t be able to sign up for your newsletter.

When Does Blocklisting Not Make Sense?

There are other situations where you might want to think about adding someone to a blocklist. What are these cases and why isn’t blocklisting always the best solution?

Unsubscribes

If you’re sure someone no longer wants to get emails from you, CleverReach lets you add them to a blocklist so they’re deleted from all your lists and evaluations.

However, this step must be carefully considered because it will result in these users being unable to subscribe to your newsletter again (or for as long as they are on your blocklist). They will get an error message. As a general rule, if you unsubscribe from a GDPR-compliant newsletter, you’ll be able to unsubscribe reliably and subscribe again at any time.

Automatic blocklisting on unsubscribes is only useful if you work with several lists. If someone unsubscribes from your newsletter, it’ll only affect that recipient list. The recipient may be contacted again or their email address may be listed as active when imported into another recipient list. This may result in your newsletter being marked as spam or you receiving a warning.

So, we suggest that you create just one recipient list and use segments and tags if you only want to send to only some of your contacts. If someone unsubscribes, they’ll stop getting messages from you, but they can easily opt back in whenever they want.

Recipient Has Been Inactive for Quite Some Time

It might be a good idea to put people on a blocklist who haven’t responded to your emails for a while. They probably won’t be interested in your content anymore, and there’s a chance they’ll mark your newsletter as spam at some point. Instead of blocking inactive recipients, try a reactivation campaign to get them interested in your newsletter. If this doesn’t work, just remove them from your email list.

Bounces

It’s also best not to blocklist bounce emails, i.e. emails that come back as undeliverable because the address is invalid or the mailbox is full. Our email marketing tool protects users from the negative consequences of an excessively high bounce rate. No need to worry about that.

How Does Blocklisting Help Your Sender Reputation?

Blocklisting through feedback loops is an effective method for preventing further complaints after spam complaints have been submitted by dissatisfied or uninterested recipients.

Mail programs use sophisticated algorithms to analyze the behavior of email recipients. Marking a newsletter as spam is a clear indication to email service providers and company networks that the sender is sending unwanted emails.

So, high complaint rates can affect the sender’s rating. This makes it harder for future emails to reach people. They end up in spam folders or are blocked. This isn’t ideal for you as the sender because you want your emails to be delivered securely.

By automatically blocking recipients who keep complaining about spam, the sender can cut down on this risk a lot and keep their good reputation. This way, the sender can make sure their emails reach the people who are actually interested.

It seems a bit strange that your newsletter is marked as spam, since your recipients have been added to your list using Double-Opt-in and have confirmed that they want to receive it.

From a legal standpoint, you have nothing to worry about. You can prove that they opted in to receive your newsletter. In this case, the spam message won’t have any impact.

Why Is It Still Recommended to Exclude Spam Complainers From Newsletters?

If your newsletter is marked as spam too often, it can hurt your reputation. To stop this, these people are added to the email blocklist automatically.

Blocklisting in Shop Plugins

Online stores that use CleverReach for email marketing can exchange data automatically with plugins. This means that the email addresses of your store customers are transferred to the newsletter tool.

You can block these addresses or domains with CleverReach using the blocklist function. This lets you keep your recipient list free of invalid throwaway or marketplace-generated email addresses.

Read more about setting up the blocklist feature for our store interfaces in the HelpCenter article “Automatic blocklist synchronization before recipient import.”

What is the Difference Between Blocklisting and Removing a Recipient from Your Email List?

Most unsubscribed recipients are set to “inactive.” They can still be contacted even if they don’t want it. This can happen when you re-import address data or enter them in two lists.

Newsletter blocklisting is safer and more reliable. CleverReach lets you block unsubscribed recipients. They are then blocked from all emails.

Summary: Blocklisting Recipients – Why It’s Good

Blocklisting improves the quality of your email list. By blocking recipients who regularly submit complaints, you can focus on an engaged and interested target group and avoid the negative effects of spam complaints.

You keep your good reputation, make sure your emails are opened and clicked on, get your emails delivered, stick to the law, and make your mailing list better. Overall, you’ll see better results from your whole email marketing strategy. If you want your email marketing campaigns to be successful and effective in the long term, you need to blocklist as a proactive measure.