This guide will walk you through the process of systematically cleaning your contact list by removing inactive, unsubscribed, and bounced email addresses. Good email deliverability heavily relies on maintaining a clean database to ensure your emails land in the primary inbox rather than the spam folder.
Sending emails to non-existent recipients or unengaged users will significantly lower your deliverability rate and permanently harm your sender IP reputation.
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Open Rate Target
High open rates drastically improve your overall deliverability status. We strongly recommend aiming for a minimum open rate of 20% to remain grouped among the top-tier sender pools in our platform.
1. Clean your email list by deleting inactive non-customers
To safely delete inactive contacts without harming your accounting records, you must filter your database to isolate only those users who have never opened an email and have never made a purchase.
1
Navigate to your Contacts database
In your main top navigation panel, click on the CRM tab, then select Contacts from the dropdown menu to open your master list.
2
Apply the Email Activity filter
In the left-hand filter sidebar, activate the Email activity parameter. Choose a historical date in the "No email opened or clicked since" field (e.g., exactly 1 to 3 months prior to today's date, depending entirely on your baseline sending frequency).
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Protect Your Customer Data
It is crucial that you retain the data of paying customers for accounting purposes and lifetime purchase history records. You should never completely delete a contact who has made a payment.
3
Filter out your paying customers
To securely isolate only the non-customers, activate the Contact state filter and explicitly select the Has not made any payment yet parameter.
4
Delete the isolated batch
You will now see a targeted list of all contacts who have completely ignored your emails over the last month and who have never purchased anything from your business. Click the master checkbox at the top to select the entire list array, then click the bulk Delete action button.
2. Stop sending emails to your inactive customers (Unsubscribe)
Because it is good business practice to preserve customer data, you should strictly unsubscribe inactive paying customers from your marketing broadcasts rather than permanently deleting them from the platform.
Unsubscribing them ensures they no longer tank your open rates and destroy your deliverability, while keeping their purchase history fully intact inside your CRM.
1
Isolate the inactive profiles
Return to the filters panel. Activate the Email activity filter again, and choose the same cutoff date under the "No email opened or clicked since" parameter.
2
Execute a bulk unsubscribe action
Select all contacts in this query list using the master checkbox. Click on the More actions dropdown menu and select Unsubscribe from all marketing emails. These contacts will no longer receive any newsletters or automated campaign emails, but their core profiles will remain safely accessible in your database.
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Re-engagement Campaigns
Instead of immediately unsubscribing, you can also assign a specific tag to your list of inactive contacts and attempt to route them through an automated re-engagement sequence. However, proceed with caution: attempting to re-engage contacts who have been completely dormant for a very long time can trigger heavy spam complaints.
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Handling Bounced Emails
Cleaning inactive contacts is only half the battle. Learn exactly what to do with contacts that have registered a hard "Bounced" status to protect your domain.
Read Bounced Contacts Guide β
