Suppressions

Protect your sender reputation, maximize deliverability, and ensure compliance with legal requirements.

Contacts can opt-out or be blocked from receiving messages from your business. There are several ways that this can happen, and these suppressions can be tracked by checking the suppressions list.

How suppression works

Suppression is a compliance block that Bird places to prevent you from sending messages to a specific number or email address.

Suppression works on an identifier level, not a contact level.

This means that a contact can be subscribed on some channels, such as SMS and Email, but unsubscribed on WhatsApp. This gives your customers control over the channels that they receive messages from you on.

Important

• Unsubscribing from a channel automatically creates a compliance block between you and your the contact.

• A compliance block can only be removed if the contact re-subscribes. For example, if they have unsubscribed from receiving SMS messages, they can re-subscribe by texting "START", or another opt-in key word.

• You cannot remove a compliance block by uninstalling and reinstalling a channel.

Suppression methods

There are many ways that an identifier can be suppressed and added to the suppression list:

• Customer unsubscribes: A customer clicks an unsubscribe link in an email or SMS.

• Customer explicitly opts-out: A customer sends “STOP” or any other opt-out keyword via SMS.

• Manual addition: You manually add the contact identifier to the suppression list.

• Spam complaint: We received a spam complaint from the contact identifier (email only).

• Hard bounce: Emails sent to the address hard bounce, indicating that emails can never be delivered to that address.

• Global suppression list: An email address is part of BirdCRM’s Global Suppression List (GSL), which includes misspelled domains, role addresses, etc, and is applied across all mail streams.

Suppression enforcement

Suppressions are enforced per sender profile at channel level (SMS, WhatsApp, or Email.)

For this reason, we recommend that you separate your message types (marketing, notifications, transactional) by channel so you can handle unsubscribes for each type separately.

There are different types of suppressions, and before sending a message, the contact identifier will be checked against all of these. If the identifier matches any suppression, it won't be sent.

Types of suppression:

• Global suppression: Bird CRM maintains a Global Suppression List (GSL) that is applied across all mail streams. The GSL contains many common misspelled domains as well as role addresses.

• Compliance level: This foundational layer ensures legal compliance and is triggered when a user explicitly unsubscribes.

• Identifier-level suppressions: Suppression stops messages from being sent to a specific contact detail (like a phone number or email address) for a certain type of message (like Marketing or Transactional). These blocks can happen automatically (like when an email bounces back) or can be added manually.

• Contact-level unsubscriptions: Contacts are individuals who might have multiple contact details, like several phone numbers. When someone unsubscribes, it is tracked for the entire contact. If they unsubscribe from SMS messages, none of their current or future phone numbers will receive promotional messages for that service.

Reminders

• Contact-level unsubscriptions are always triggered when a user clicks on an unsubscription link or sends an opt-out keyword.

• Contact-level unsubscriptions only affect promotional traffic.

The suppression list

You can find a list of all suppressed contact identifiers by making sure you are in the Marketing section of your workspace, and selecting Suppressions from the side bar.

Here you will find a record of every number or email address that has been suppressed, and any corresponding contact information.