How to manually 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of cleaning your contact list by removing inactive, unsubscribed, and bounced email addresses (addresses that are no longer valid and result in error messages).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
Good email deliverability means your emails land in the inbox rather than the spam folder.
Sending emails to non-existent recipients will lower your deliverability rate and can also harm your sender reputation.
High open rates improve your deliverability. We recommend aiming for a minimum open rate of 20% to be among the top users of our email sending system (read this article to learn more about this).
1. Clean your email list by deleting inactive contacts
Head to the CRM tab in your account, then click on Contacts (1).
Then, activate the filter Email activity (2), and then choose the date from 1 month ago in the field No email opened or clicked since (3).
Example: We selected December 16, 2025, assuming today is January 16, 2026.
Note: The date range you select depends on your email sending frequency.
Important: We recommend keeping customer data for accounting purposes.
To do this, use the Contact state filter (4) and select Has not made any payment yet (5) to isolate non-customers.
You will get the list of all contacts who have not opened or clicked on a link in your emails in the last month, and who have never purchased anything from you.
Select the entire list (6), then click Delete (7).
2. No longer send emails to your inactive contacts
Remember: Always keep data for existing customers to preserve their purchase history.
Moreover, it's good business practice to retain your customers' data, as it is far more valuable than that of your contacts who have never purchased.
Therefore, unsubscribe inactive customers rather than deleting them. Unsubscribing inactive customers from your emails will improve your email open rates and thus your deliverability.
Follow these steps to stop sending emails to inactive contacts:
1. Activate the filter Email activity (8), and then choose the date from 1 month ago in the field No email opened or clicked since (9). Example: we selected the date December 16, 2025, assuming today is January 16, 2026.
2. Finally, select all contacts (10), click on More actions (11), and click on Unsubscribe from all marketing emails (12).
This will ensure that these contacts no longer receive any of your emails.
Note: You can also assign a tag to your list of inactive contacts and try to re-engage them with an email campaign; this will allow you to recover some of them.
However, proceed with caution; we advise against trying to re-engage contacts who have been inactive for a very long time.