Email List Hygiene Best Practices In 2025

Why is Email List Hygiene Important?

Practicing email marketing list hygiene can greatly enhance your deliverability and your website's Google ranking. This means updating your contacts list to include only valid addresses and engaged recipients, but how?

Email marketers would be familiar with accumulated expired or invalid accounts and contacts no longer interested in your business. By clearing these from your contacts list, you achieve higher open and click-through rates. These metrics send positive signals to Google and other search engines, boosting your site’s organic rankings and brand authority.

You can also improve your algorithm with email service providers (ESPs) by cleansing your contacts list of recipients who frequently move your messages to the spam folder.

This article covers email list hygiene best practices to easily retain genuine, non-risky addresses.

What are Key Email Hygiene Best Practices?

Try these five steps you can incorporate into your workflow to keep a clean email list:

1. Secure consent through double opt-ins

Making email audits a habit begins with getting proper consent from your recipients. A double opt-in is a two-step collection method. Unlike single opt-ins, which only ask users to provide their email address, double opt-ins require users to confirm their subscription by clicking a link in a confirmation message you send them.

While double opt-ins may appear slower, it establishes explicit consent from your recipient. Confirmed subscribers are less likely to send your messages to the Spam folder, protecting your sender reputation.

2. Include a clear unsubscribe link

ESPs like Gmail and Yahoo now require a one-click unsubscribe option in email headers.

Another alternative is to provide recipients an "opt down" option, which lets them continue receiving emails from you but less frequently (for instance, monthly instead of weekly).

3. Set an email scrubbing schedule to check your email performance

Your frequency will depend on your number of contacts. For example, large enterprises can clean an email list monthly. Meanwhile, startups and medium-sized businesses can do it biannually and quarterly.

4. Have a sunset policy

This specifies which recipients should no longer receive emails or receive them less frequently. It naturally segments subscribers and should ideally proceed after email scrubbing.

Bounced emails

Bounced emails need immediate attention and action. Although 2% to 5% is an acceptable bounce rate, it’s best to stay below 2%.

• A hard bounce refers to an undeliverable email due to an invalid address or a blocked server and must be immediately removed.
• Meanwhile, a soft bounce is an email that doesn't reach an intended recipient due to a temporarily unavailable server or full inbox. Try sending up to three more times in a week before removal or re-engagement.

Frequency/campaign-to-engagement level matching

Tailor your messages based on subscriber segments such as these:

5. Avoid spam traps

Some terms can activate spam filters by associating with spam messages. Examples include: urgent, free, limited-time offer, buy/act now, guarantee, 100% satisfied, make money fast, cash get paid, and save big.

More importantly, don't grow your subscriber base by buying a contacts list. They can be filled with unengaged or invalid addresses.

How Do You Implement Email Marketing List Hygiene Best Practices?

Here's how the best practices discussed above would look like if arranged as a workflow:

1. Verify emails with email hygiene software

Email hygiene services like VerifiedEmail can analyze and remove problematic addresses. It conducts a multi-layered, real-time validation, detecting syntax errors (standard structure—username followed by email domain and allowed characters), invalid domains, and duplicate entries.

If you'd like to experience VerifiedEmail's real-time verification, validate your email address below!

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2. Establish an email scrubbing schedule

Whether you do it monthly, quarterly, or twice annually, select a recurring schedule to prevent the buildup of invalid/inactive addresses.

3. Track engagement metrics

You can use your ESP's analytics tools or integrate it with a web analytics solution to check metrics that measure campaign performance:

• Open rates (percentage of read emails)
• Click-through rates (percentage of subscribers who clicked links inside your message)
• Time spent viewing email
• Conversion rate (completed form sign-ups or bought a product)
• Bounce rate
• Unsubscribe rate
• Spam rate
• List growth rate
• Share rate

4. Run a re-engagement campaign

Strategize to re-engage your disengaged and least engaged subscribers before removing them from your list.

5. Maintain compliance

Following these laws will prevent your messages from being flagged as spam:

• The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
• The United States's Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act
• Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL)
• Australia's Spam Act

These emphasize explicit and informed consent while safeguarding subscriber data. To uphold transparency, use a recognizable sender name with accurate contact information. Furthermore, ensure your subject line reflects your message's content.

Email List Hygiene Best Practices: Secret to Improved Marketing ROI

Adopt our email list cleaning best practices to maintain or return to consistent deliverability and strong engagement despite the following:

• High bounce rates
• Multiple spam reports
• An influx of new contacts after a webinar or special promo
• Switching to a new ESP or customer relationship platform