You know what they say…you learn something new every day. Even though I don’t really knows who “they” are, I did actually learn something new yesterday regarding your Benchmark Email contact list management.

I was assisting a client with cleaning her contact lists. We noticed that during one of the clean ups, a couple of email addresses were not being removed even though we were selecting to clear out the “unsubscribes”. The client assured me that these were subscribers who had personally requested to be removed from her lists.

The email addresses were showing up in the “Master Unsubscribe List” so I assumed they would have been removed from the active contact list during clean up. However, after I did some investigating, this is what I discovered:

The client I was assisting had manually added some of her contacts into the “Master Unsubscribe List”. If you manually enter an email address into your “Master Unsubscribe List”, our system will recognize that the owner of that email address does not want to receive correspondence from you and the system will prevent email campaigns from going out to that email address.

But because the owner of that email address did not actually click on the “unsubscribe” button in your campaign, the email address will not be removed from the active list during the “clean list” function. Only users who selected “unsubscribe” will be removed during this process.

You will want to keep in mind that if you are manually adding someone to your unsubscribe list, you will also need to manually delete them from your active contact list(s). This will help you to keep your lists as up-to-date as possible.

For more information on unsubscription practices, check out these previous articles: