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Cleaning your email list is one of the most important things you can do for successful email marketing. It keeps your engagement high and saves you money by making sure you’re only paying for active subscribers on platforms like Klaviyo.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about list cleaning—why it’s important, how to do it right, and when it’s time for a cleanup. This is the only guide you’ll need for cleaning your list, identifying spam traps, creating Sunset Flow, and setting up campaign exclusion segments to keep things running smoothly. Let’s get started!
What Is List Cleaning?
List cleaning means suppressing inactive or invalid email addresses from your list to keep it healthy and cost-effective. Suppressing means these profiles won’t receive emails, but they’re not deleted, so you can still track their data and reactivate them if they re-subscribe. With tools like Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), which automatically marks emails as opened, and bots that may click links, your engagement metrics can get inflated. MPP affects open rates, making it hard to tell if people are really opening your emails, while bot clicks can make it seem like more people are interested than they really are. Regular cleaning helps you reach real subscribers, keeping your emails out of spam folders and boosting your chances of converting customers.
Why Clean Your Email List?
Improve Deliverability: Sending to engaged contacts means fewer bounces, unsubscribes, and spam complaints. This helps you maintain a positive sender reputation, leading to higher deliverability rates. You can check your account score under the 'Deliverability' tab in your Klaviyo account.
Deliverability score in Klaviyo Improve Engagement Metrics: By focusing on subscribers who genuinely open and click on your emails, you'll see your open rates, click rates, and conversions soar. This keeps your emails landing in the primary inbox, making your brand one of the “chosen few” (or rather, the “neatly organized”) that reach customers directly instead of getting lost in the promotions tab.
Save Money: Platforms like Klaviyo charge based on the number of profiles in your list. Suppressing dead emails means you’ll pay less on your monthly bill.
Avoid Spam Traps: Spam traps are email addresses used by internet service providers (ISPs) to catch spammers. If you're sending to purchased lists, outdated or inactive contacts, you risk landing in these traps, which can blacklist your domain. Hello, spam folder!
Increase Conversions: By reaching genuinely interested subscribers, you’ll see higher engagement and more conversions—turning your emails into sales-driving assets.
Which Profiles Shouldn't Be on Your List?
Chronic Bouncers: Emails that have soft bounced three or more times in the last 90 days are likely undeliverable and should be suppressed before Klaviyo automatically suppresses them after 7 soft bounces. This proactive approach helps maintain a healthy list and positive sender reputation.
Spam Traps: These are emails designed to catch senders who don't clean their lists. They can look different depending on your account but often have patterns that can be identified. Segmenting and suppressing them is crucial to maintaining list health and inbox placement.
Inactive Contacts (aka "Dead emails"): Subscribers who haven’t engaged in months or ever are dragging down your metrics. It’s time to say goodbye to those who haven’t shown any activity in over 120-180 days.
Understanding Spam Traps
Spam traps are email addresses created to catch senders who don’t properly maintain their email lists. Sending emails to these outdated or fake addresses can harm your sender reputation and may even lead to blacklisting. SpamHaus, a well-known authority on spam traps, doesn’t provide direct lists of these addresses. Instead, it helps identify and blacklist domains or IPs that repeatedly send to spam traps, signaling poor list management. To protect your reputation, use engagement-based criteria, like no recent activity or suspicious email formats, to identify and exclude potential spam traps from your campaigns.
Here are some ways to spot potential spam traps:
Disposable or temporary email domains:
Generic or catch-all email addresses:
Emails with random characters or patterns (appear auto-generated):
Invalid or obviously fake email formats:
notarealemail@nowhere.fake
user12345678901234567890@example.com
Here are some examples of real spam traps:
Pro tip: If spam traps are a frequent issue, consider setting up double opt-in for your lists.
When Should You Clean Your Email List?
Cleaning your email list should be a regular habit. Here’s when to do it:
Routine Maintenance: Your list needs a major initial cleanup and then regular monthly check-ups.
Low Open Rates: If your open rates fall below 30%, it’s time for a deep clean.
High Bounce or Complaint Rates: A spike in bounces, unsubscribes, or spam complaints means you should clean up.
Blacklist Issues: If you’ve been blacklisted, list cleaning is essential to help restore your reputation.
Important Reminder: Keep Sending to Your Engaged Contacts
Even after a cleanup, make sure you continue sending emails to your most engaged subscribers. For less engaged contacts, reduce the frequency—no more than twice a month—to avoid hurting your sender reputation. Additionally, send to your entire list (Master Segment) only once per quarter.
Pro tip: The frequency at which you clean your list, as well as the time conditions in the segments definitions will depend on your business type and customer repurchase rate. Businesses with a long repurchase cycle may keep unengaged contacts for longer, while brands with frequent sales cycles may need more regular cleanups.
How to Clean Your Email List - Step by Step
Step 1: Thorough Cleaning
If you've been sending emails for a while, you should have a significant number of suppressed profiles in Klaviyo.
It might feel painful to suppress contacts you worked hard to acquire, but inactive subscribers can hurt your list health and email performance. Here are the segments you should look to suppress:
No Activity Ever (Potential Spam Traps): Create a segment of contacts that were added more than 90 days ago but have shown no activity at all. Before suppressing the entire segment, selectively go through some profiles to confirm that they’re inactive.
Pro tip: Look through your No Activity Ever segment to selectively look over some odd email addresses. This may help you identify other by similar properties.
Misspelled Email Addresses: Create a segment to catch common misspellings in email domains, like "gnail.com" instead of "gmail.com" or "yaho.com" instead of "yahoo.com." Consider asking ChatGPT for a list of common email domain typos to include. Suppress and exclude these addresses from all campaigns to prevent delivery issues and maintain a clean list.
Chronic Bouncers: Suppress contacts that have bounced three or more times within the last 90 days. These emails are likely undeliverable and keeping them on your list will hurt your metrics.
Unengaged: Create a segment for contacts who engaged (opened or clicked) with your emails before but haven't engaged with any in the past 120–180 days. These unresponsive profiles can harm your engagement metrics and deliverability. Before suppressing, consider including them in a re-engagement campaign or sunset flow to give them a final chance to interact. If there’s no response, suppress these contacts to maintain a clean and engaged list. This segment will trigger your sunset flow - see below.
Step 2: Sunset Flow
Create a "sunset flow" to re-engage inactive contacts before deciding to suppress them. This flow targets subscribers who have engaged in the past but haven’t been active recently. Offering a special discount or exclusive content can help you bring some back to life.
Create a Segment: Identify subscribers who used to be active but haven’t engaged in a specific time frame, like 120 days.
Set Up a Flow in Klaviyo: Trigger the flow when someone is added to the segment, with multiple attempts to re-engage them. Use a Standard Sunset Flow from Klaviyo flow library. Watch this Youtube Video for the guide to setting up the Sunset Flow.
Update Their Profile Property: If they still don’t respond, the last step of the flow will create a new property on their profile - 'Unengaged'. Note: the "Unengaged" tag is just a label and doesn’t suppress profiles automatically. Profiles tagged as "Unengaged" need to be manually suppressed or excluded from future sends.
Create a Suppression Segment: Create a segment of contacts who are tagged with this profile property and exclude them from your campaigns. Suppress them as part of your monthly routine to maintain list health.
Again, depending on the nature of your business and the average repurchase rate, you might want to use different time frames for identifying inactive subscribers.
Step 3: Basic Exclusion segments
Although this is not technically list cleaning, setting campaign exclusion segments is an important part of ensuring good deliverability and keeping your emails out of spam folders. Here are some key exclusion segments you should create:
Chronic Bouncers: Contacts that have bounced three or more times in the last 90 days.
Recent Bouncers: Contacts that have bounced in the last 7 days (or 14 days if you only send emails once per week).
No Engagement After 10+ Emails: Contacts that have received 10 or more emails in the last 120 days but haven't opened any.
Recent Purchasers (Optional): Contacts that placed an order in the last 7-14 days. Depending on your strategy, you might not want to send campaigns to people who are still waiting for their order.
Plus, all your suppression segments:
Unengaged (Sunset flow trigger segment)
Unengaged Tag
No Activity (Potential Spam Traps)
Misspelled Emails
Step 4: Advanced Exclusion segments
As bots become more sophisticated and privacy features like Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) are around, it's crucial to refine your segmentation strategy.
MPP marks all emails as opened, even if the subscriber hasn’t interacted with them, which can make it hard to identify genuinely engaged subscribers based on open rates alone. Similarly, bot clicks may inflate click rates by automatically clicking on links, making it difficult to tell who is actually interested.
Let’s take a closer look at this spam trap and how it can be identified. For example, some profiles may appear active because they show "opened" or "clicked" events in Klaviyo. However, when you dig into the details, you might see indicators like "bot click:true," or "machine_open: true" revealing that these interactions were not real. This highlights the importance of setting up segments to exclude such suspicious profiles from your campaigns.
So the segments you need to create and exclude from all your campaigns would be:
Bot clicks: Use "bot click = true" tag for email interactions identified as clicks made by bots. Create a segment using this tag to exclude these profiles from your email campaigns. This helps to prevent skewed metrics.
Unengaged MPP Opens (aka "Ghost Openers"): With the iOS 15 update, Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), which automatically marks all emails as opened for users who enable this feature. This means that even if a subscriber hasn't actually opened your email, it will still appear as an open. To avoid inflating your engagement metrics, create a segment to exclude these "ghost openers" who have shown no other signs of engagement, such as clicks or purchases.
Step 4: Ongoing Maintenance
After an initial deep clean, set up a monthly process to maintain list health. Regularly review your engagement metrics, remove bouncers and inactive profiles, and watch for any signs that your list quality may be slipping.
Type | Segments |
Suppression Segments | [EXCLUDE] [SUPPRESS] No Activity Ever (Potential Spam Traps); [EXCLUDE] [SUPPRESS] Spam Traps; [EXCLUDE] [SUPPRESS] Wrong Emails; [EXCLUDE] [SUPPRESS] Chronic Bouncers. |
Campaign Exclusion Segments | [EXCLUDE] [SUPPRESS] Spam Traps; [EXCLUDE] [SUPPRESS] Wrong Emails; [EXCLUDE] [SUPPRESS] Sunset Segment - Unengaged Tag; [EXCLUDE] [SUPPRESS] Chronic Bouncers; [EXCLUDE] Recent Bouncers; [EXCLUDE] Received 10+ Emails, No Engagement. [EXCLUDE] Recent Purchasers (Optional); [EXCLUDE] Bot Clicks; [EXCLUDE] Unengaged MPP Opens; [FLOW TRIGGER] [EXCLUDE] Sunset Segment; |
Final Thoughts
List cleaning is crucial for high deliverability, accurate metrics, and cost-effective email marketing. Regularly suppress inactive subscribers, implement sunset policies, address bot clicks and "ghost openers," and set up proper exclusion segments to keep your list healthy.
Customize your approach to your business's needs and customer lifecycle to maximize results. A clean list ensures your emails reach the right audience and drive better performance.
Need help with your email strategy? Contact me for guidance.
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