Cleaning

Cleaning and managing your list of subscribers is one of the most important ways to increase deliverability, reduce cost, and dramatically enhance the profitability of your email marketing.


When first getting going, you often push for list growth milestones such as your first 10, 100, or 1,000 subscribers. And while these goals feel like major achievements in the beginning (because they are!), they can end up hurting the success of your email campaigns as you continue to grow.

The most profitable emailers around are focused on cutting the size of their list down to their most engaged subscribers.


A focused list of engaged subscribers will beat a list that is simply large without filters.

In this article, we will guide you on the different ways Campaign Refinery helps you clean and manage your list.


Here's how and where you can easily navigate through the cleaning options for your account:

  1. Go to Contacts>Clean at the left side panel menu.

  2. You will see the three tabs that you can use to clean your list.

Re-engagement Rules

Will be updating soon!


De-duplicate Contacts

The "de-duplicate" function refers to a feature that identifies and eliminates duplicate email addresses from your contact list. This process ensures that the same email address doesn't appear multiple times in your database. While it merges duplicate contacts based on email address and all other values (Name, custom fields, tags, etc), it removes the duplicate tags, forms, and sequences from the same contact. Moreover, when at least one opt-in instance is identified, the merged contact is designated as "opt-in." By executing this process, your email campaigns maintain accuracy, minimize clutter, and uphold the compliance of your contact list with recipient preferences.



    1. From the Contacts>Clean page, select the De-duplicate Contacts Tab

    3. Please read through the reminders before clicking on Merge Duplicate Contacts.



Revalidate Contacts

To keep the quality of your list at its highest level and avoid harmful contacts that can damage your 'sender reputation', Campaign Refinery automatically unsubscribed harmful contacts before you ever click send on your first email. However, previously good emails can become undeliverable or even turn into spam traps which have a significant negative impact to sender reputation if they are mailed.


First, let's have a look at the contact categories that the system will automatically remove from your list through the cleaning process. Any contact that is unsubscribed will not be rechecked by the system.


1. Dormant Accounts

Email addresses that used to be valid, but have since been abandoned by their owners.

2. Spam Traps

Exclusively created to catch spammers, and never legitimately opt-in for email. However, previously legitimate emails that were abandoned can turn into spam traps if not properly removed in a timely fashion.

3. Invalid Emails

Accounts that do not exist. Often inserted by freebie seekers and/or bad actors looking to damage your reputation.

4. Typo Domains

Addresses with spelling errors such as "gmil.com" and ultimately fail to deliver (these will hard bounce).

5. Role Accounts
Examples include "support@", "admin@", "sales@" and more. These are at a higher risk for complaints because they tend to change hands and the original person who signed up may not be the person getting your emails now.
6. Serial Complainers
Contacts who are known to consistently abuse the spam button on the legitimate email they actually signed up for in the first place.
7. Robots (BOTS)
Bots will artificially inflate your open/click data but never buy anything and simply waste your resources.

Note: Role Accounts and Complainers can be exempted from being automatically unsubscribed case-by-case basis and by request and approval of our Admin.


The Revalidate Contacts function is an automatic re-clean schedule of subscribed contacts in a set time interval. This helps ensure contacts are still clean, valid, and safe to send to, every time you send your emails. A few points to note about this function:

    1. You have control over the cleaning interval to some degree, though the default of 90 days is considered best practice.
      • From the Contacts dropdown, scroll all the way down to the Clean function and select the Revalidate Contacts tab.

      • Once there, you can easily click on your preferred time interval for cleaning. You can select from 30, 60, 90, up to 180 days. Click Save once you have made your choice.

    2. Cleaning costs 5 credits per contact. The system will not recheck for any contact that is unsubscribed, thus not costing you any credit. (5 credits x the number of subscribers that are subscribed)
      • Example: 5 credits x 8,300 (contacts that are subscribed) = 41,500 credits will be used up from your credits for the cleaning on the scheduled date

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