How to clean your email list

This guide will walk you through the process of cleaning your contact list by removing inactive, unsubscribed, and bounced email addresses (addresses that are no longer valid and result in error messages).

To get started, you will need the following:

a systeme.io account
a list of contacts

Why Clean Your Contact List:

To ensure your emails reach your recipients' inboxes and don't end up in spam folders, it's crucial to maintain a clean contact list. Sending emails to non-existent addresses can harm your email domain's reputation and reduce your deliverability rate.

A good rule of thumb is to aim for a high open rate, ideally at least 20%, which will position you among the best users of our system. (Read this article to learn more about this).

There are three key steps to improve the deliverability of your emails:

1. Clean your email list by deleting inactive contacts

Go to the "Contacts" tab and select "Contacts" (number 1 in the image).

Activate the "Email activity" filter (number 2 in the image) and choose a date from one month ago in the "No email opened or clicked since" field (number 3 in the image).

Example: If today is 04/06/2022, select the date 05/05/2022.

IMPORTANT: We recommend keeping your customers' data in case they request refunds or for financial accounting purposes.

To achieve this, you can use an additional filter to select only those contacts who have never made a purchase.

For the "Contact State" filter (number 4 in the image), select "Has not made any payments yet" (number 5 in the image).

You will now have a list of contacts who haven't engaged with your emails in the last month and have never made a purchase. To clean your contacts database, select the entire list (number 6 in the image), then click "Delete" (number 7 in the image).

2. Stop sending emails to inactive contacts

Remember to always keep a record of data for customers' who have made purchases from you. Their purchase history is valuable.

Instead of deleting inactive customers from your contact list, unsubscribe them from your emails. This approach will enhance your open rates and, consequently, your deliverability.

To stop sending emails to inactive contacts, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the "Contacts" tab and click on "Contacts" (number 8 in the image).

2. Activate the "Activity" filter (number 9 in the image) and choose a date from one month ago in the "No email opened or clicked since" field (number 10 in the image).

Example: If today is 04/06/2022, select the date 05/05/2022.

3. Next, select all records in the list (number 11 in the image), click "More actions" (number 12 in the image), and then select "Unsubscribe from all marketing emails" (number 13 in the image).

NOTE: You can also assign a TAG to your inactive contacts and attempt to re-engage them with an email sequence, which may bring some of them back into active engagement.

3. Delete unsubscribed contacts

Activate the "Contact state" filter (number 14 in the image), then choose "Unsubscribed" (number 15 in the image).

To remove all unsubscribed contacts, select the entire list (number 16 in the image) and click "Delete" (number 17 in the image).

Finally, click on "Confirm" (number 18 in the image).