No matter how big (or small) your audience is, regularly cleaning your email audience can save you money and will improve the performance of your email campaigns.

Nowadays, email service providers (like Mailchimp) have built-in tools to automatically clean any contacts that can’t be delivered to (hard bounces) – removing them from your audience and excluding them from future email campaigns you send. However, if a contact becomes inactive or unsubscribes, they will remain in your audience and will need to be cleaned manually.

What are the benefits?

• Email service providers charge you based on the number of contacts you have. So you can reduce costs by removing inactive and unsubscribed contacts from your audience.

• Around 30% of all email addresses will become invalid each year, and sending to these contacts will result in a hard bounce. You can reduce your bounce rate by removing any inactive contacts from your list.

So here's what you do

We recommend cleaning your email audience once per quarter. A simple way of doing this is to segment any contacts that have been inactive for over three months and archive them. But wait! Before you remove them, try a targeted win-back campaign that shows what they are missing, and explains they’ll be removed if they continue to be inactive.