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How to maintain a clean contact database – Best practices

contacts, emails, database, cleanup rules, clean contact list, delete contacts, remove contacts, inactive contacts, sender reputation

Eduardo Stewart avatar
Written by Eduardo Stewart
Updated over a week ago

Keeping your contact list clean is essential for maintaining high deliverability rates and ensuring the effectiveness of your email campaigns.

For a more detailed guide, please read our blog post:
Why Cleaning Your Contact List is Essential (and How to Do It Easily on Learnybox)

Improve Campaign Deliverability

Cleaning your contact list helps ensure that your messages reach genuinely interested subscribers, reducing the risk of bounces and spam complaints, which can negatively impact your email deliverability.

Protect Your Domain Reputation

A well-maintained contact list helps build and protect your domain’s reputation as a reliable sender with email providers.

Run Re-engagement Campaigns

Before removing inactive contacts, consider sending a re-engagement campaign to encourage interaction. If no engagement occurs after the campaign, those contacts can be safely removed.

Delete Inactive Contacts

Learnybox allows you to identify and delete:

  • Contacts who have never opened your emails

  • Temporary or disposable email addresses (i.e., email addresses created to avoid using a real one)

This can be done automatically or manually, depending on your preferences.

Remove Invalid Email Addresses

You can also remove contacts marked as "Non-existent email address" or "Spam" using built-in filters. Doing so helps improve the overall quality of your contact database.
Need help removing these contacts? See: How to identify and delete contacts marked as spam or with non-existent email addresses

Automate Contact Cleanup with Built-In Rules

Learnybox includes a Contact database cleanup rules section in your account settings, allowing you to automate how inactive contacts are handled.

To access it: Go to Settings -> Emails, then scroll to the Contact database cleanup rules section.

You can configure separate rules for:

  • Leads (contacts who have never made a purchase)

  • Customers (contacts who have already made a purchase)

For each group, you can choose to:

  • Unsubscribe inactive contacts from marketing emails

  • Permanently delete contacts who haven’t opened or engaged with emails in a defined time period

You can also choose to receive an inactive contacts report to preview the number of contacts that would be affected before enabling any rules.

This feature helps you automate list cleaning on a regular basis and ensures your database remains up to date without manual intervention.

Conclusion

By applying these best practices and using Learnybox’s built-in tools, you’ll maintain a clean, reliable, and high-performing contact list—an essential foundation for successful email marketing campaigns.

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