When handling large data sets, occasionally contacts slip in by mistake who you don't really want to email.
- Maybe a competitor has signed up to your mailing list?
- Maybe you don't want to email your customers?
- Maybe you have an ethical stance and you don't want to email a particularly industry?
There can be all kinds of reasons for excluding a particular type of contact, and exclusion filters are the mechanism we have built to enable you to do just that.
Exclusion filters are located under the campaign's tab, and you can construct and save your exclusion filters in exactly the same way as you would normal filters, however with exclusion filters you have the added ability to switch them on and off, creating greater flexibility when applying them.
Exclusion filters operate at account level, not campaign level, so will be applied automatically to all campaigns unless deactivated beforehand.
When an exclusion filter is active, a contact will be blocked from receiving emails sent either through campaigns or through the journey planner, however they will continue to receive form completion thank you emails.
***Update***
We've had exclusion filters up and running for a while now, and have learnt some really handy best practice that we wholeheartedly recommend following.
First off, excluding by company name is a bit rubbish. Why is that?
Having an exclusion filter like this one...
...is great if all your RNLI contacts have their company name set up as "RNLI". But what if some of them are tagged as working for the "Royal National Lifeboat Institution"?
Well, in that case, your RNLI exclusion filter's just not going to work.
This is why we've come to the conclusion that email address offer a far more bullet proof approach to exclusion filters.
Not all of the email address though (that would be what suppression lists are for). Just the domain part, and not even all of the domain, in fact. Eh?
Let's explain a little bit more, using a different example. This time, Sky.
Most of the time, a Sky email address looks something like this. forename.surname@sky.com
So an exclusion filter like this one, will catch anyone with a standard Sky email address...
...however, Sky's a bloody massive organisation, and they have lots of global variations, such as @sky.co.uk, @sky.au.com, and many more beside.
Simple, right?
We'll just exclude everyone with the word "Sky" in their email address. Like this...
...except with this filter, we'll be excluding everyone that has the word "Sky" in their email, including Sky.smith@yourdreamclient.com, and everyonethatworks@blueskythinking.com.
So, surely there's some middle ground?
Experience has taught us that the best way to exclude by domain, is to prefix the domain with the @, and close it with a full stop. Like this...
This way, you're being specific enough to exclude all the Sky contacts, without casting the net so wide you're excluding all the regional domain variations (TLDs).
One final thought. Whilst a company's web domain and email domain are often the same, there's no hard rule that this has to be the case, so don't use web-domain as a proxy for email domain - that's a one way trip to mistakes occurring.
And if in doubt, check.
We know it's laborious looking at your contact records to ascertain all the different domain variations a company might have, but it never fails to amaze us how a single company can have three, or even four completely different email domains in use. If it's important enough to exclude, it's important enough to check!