Contact exclusion is the process of deliberately removing certain contacts from receiving a specific email campaign — without permanently deleting them from your list.
Smart marketers use exclusions to create focused, relevant, and compliant campaigns that align with user behavior and intent.
Here are just a few situations where you’d want to exclude contacts:
Avoiding duplicate sends when contacts are in multiple lists
Excluding existing customers from new-user-only offers
Filtering out inactive users from high-engagement promos
Respecting unsubscribed or contacts that opted out
1. Use suppression Lists
A suppression list is a collection of email addresses that you intentionally exclude from your email campaigns. These lists contain addresses of users who have unsubscribed, repeatedly caused bounces (hard or soft), or are flagged for compliance reasons, such as avoiding invalid addresses.
Here are the following types of email addresses you should include in your suppression list:
Contacts who have unsubscribed: Users who opted out should never receive further emails.
Hard-bounced and repeatedly soft-bounced email addresses: A hard bounce occurs when an email address is invalid, blocked, or doesn’t exist. Multiple soft bounces can also indicate a problem that needs suppression.
Inactive or disengaged users: Subscribers who consistently ignore your emails may saturate your engagement metrics. Suppressing inactive users ensures higher deliverability and engagement rates.
2. Segment Your List
Segmentation allows you to include only the contacts who meet specific criteria, automatically excluding the rest. This ensures emails stay relevant and targeted.
If you use an ESP like Mailmodo AI, you can create a segment that excludes specific contacts with a simple prompt, saving time and reducing errors. For example, you can create conditions that filter out:
Contacts who didn’t open your last three emails
Users who haven’t logged in for 60+ days
Subscribers who already clicked a CTA in a previous campaign
3. Tag-Based Exclusion
Tags are labels assigned to contacts to group them based on attributes, behavior, or status. Tag-based exclusion allows you to temporarily skip specific contacts without creating separate lists.
If you use Mailmodo, you can easily assign tags to contacts and exclude them from campaigns automatically. For example, you might tag contacts as exclude_campaigns if they’re on hold, in negotiations, or part of a pilot program. When sending an email, Mailmodo will automatically skip all contacts with this tag, ensuring they don’t receive that campaign.
4. Manual Exclusion
Manual exclusion is ideal for small or one-off campaigns where you want to deselect specific contacts individually. It allows you to control exactly who receives the email without affecting your larger contact lists.
However, this method is not suitable for large or recurring campaigns. It’s easy to forget someone, prone to human error, and can result in sending emails to unintended recipients. For ongoing campaigns, automated methods like suppression lists or segmentation are more reliable and scalable.
Some email service providers (ESPs) like Mailmodo take care of certain exclusions behind the scenes so you don’t have to think about them each time you send a campaign. They automatically skip contacts who have unsubscribed, addresses that generate hard bounces, and recipients who have marked your mail as spam.
Conclusion
Excluding the right contacts is just as important as reaching the right ones. With Mailmodo’s smart segmentation filters, suppression lists, and built-in safeguards, you can send your campaigns confidently to the right audience, every time.
