How to Clean Your Email List in Klaviyo

Email list cleaning is one of the most crucial yet overlooked practices in email marketing, especially for e-commerce businesses. Maintaining a healthy and engaged list ensures better deliverability, higher open rates, and of course, more conversions. In Klaviyo for email marketing, regularly cleaning your email list will directly impact your campaign performance and, critically, your sender reputation.

So, if you’re wondering why your bottom line continues to suffer, it might just be time for a scrub, go figure. 

We are a certified Klaviyo partner, and in today’s post, you’ll learn how to do list cleaning in Klaviyo. Let’s roll!

Why list cleaning is important

List cleaning in Klaviyo

Automated list cleaning in Klaviyo

List cleaning best practices

Why list cleaning is important

Over time, your email list will naturally accumulate with:

• Inactive subscribers
• Invalid email addresses
• Spam traps
• Unengaged contacts

Sending emails to these contacts can hurt your deliverability rate, increase bounce rates, and lower your sender reputation — which means your emails are more likely to land in the spam folder.

But okay, you might not be interested in deliverability and sender reputation. Let’s consider it from the revenue perspective. 

Zack Schieffer, founder of ZHS-Ecom, laments the revenue drain so many e-com brands suffer, owing to dirty lists. 

“I just checked a brand last week with 11% open rates on their welcome flow. That’s terrible! These should be your BEST performing emails at 50-60% opens. And here’s the funny part: They were obsessing over the design and copy when most people weren’t even seeing their emails,” Schieffer reveals. 

You get the idea. List management is directly related to revenue generation. You go wrong here, you go wrong everywhere. 

But let’s explore this further in order to press it deeper home. 

April Paige, email marketing expert, hypothesizes, “If your RPE is $1, and you send to 100,000 addresses with every broadcast campaign that won’t get seen due to junk boxing or blocking, that’s $100,000 you just let slip through your fingers.”

But even that’s not all. List cleaning can in fact reduce your email marketing costs. Most ESPs charge on the basis of email volume. If a substantial portion of your contacts aren’t seeing your emails, you’re obviously paying more than you should. 

Contrast this scenario with its opposite. Imagine sending emails to those who expect them. You’ll not only drive a better return on your investment, but boost revenue generation as well. 

In sum, these are the benefits of list cleaning  for e-commerce businesses:

• Better Deliverability – Reduces bounce rates and prevents emails from landing in spam.
  
• Higher Engagement – Focuses on engaged subscribers, improving open and click rates.
  
• Lower Costs – Klaviyo charges based on list size; removing inactive contacts saves money.
  
• Prevents Blacklisting – Sending to unengaged users increases spam complaints, harming your sender reputation.
  
• Accurate Metrics – A clean list ensures your email performance data is reliable.

List cleaning in Klaviyo

Follow these steps to keep your list clean and engaged. 

1. Identify inactive subscribers

Go to Lists & Segments → Create a segment with the following conditions:

• Received Email at least once over X days
  
• Opened Email = Zero times
  

This will show all subscribers who have not engaged with your emails.

2. Run a re-engagement campaign

Before deleting inactive subscribers, consider sending a win-back email campaign with:

• Personalized offers
  
• Exclusive discounts
  
• Feedback surveys
  

If they still don’t engage with these, it’s time to remove them.

3. Suppress inactive contacts

In Klaviyo, you can suppress unengaged subscribers instead of deleting them. This way, they won’t receive emails but are still in your system for data purposes.

Go to Profiles → Bulk Suppression

4. Remove bounced & invalid emails

Under Profiles, filter by:

• Hard bounces
  
• Invalid emails

Suppress or delete these contacts to prevent deliverability issues. 

5. Use double opt-in

Enable double opt-in for new subscribers to ensure you’re only adding people genuinely interested in your brand.

Automated list cleaning in Klaviyo

For automated list cleaning, follow these steps. 

1. Create a segment for inactive subscribers

Go to Lists & Segments → Create List/Segment

Select Segment

Set the following conditions:

• Received email at least once in the last 90 days
  
• Opened email zero times in the last 90 days
  

2. Create the sunset flow (Automation)

Go to Flows → Create Flow, as shown below. 

Choose Create flow as illustrated in the next screenshot.

Name your flow: “List Cleaning Automation”

Add Segment Trigger

Select the segment you created in Step 1 as the trigger.

3. Add a re-engagement email

Drag and drop the email action into the flow. 

Write a friendly email like, “Hey, are you still interested?”, include a small discount, simple CTA, and an unsubscribe option.

4. Wait time

Add a Wait step for 5-7 days to give them time to engage.

5. Suppress inactive profiles automatically

Add a conditional split:

• Opened Email at least once → YES → Keep them
  
• Opened Email = Zero times → NO → Suppress Profile

6. Turn on your flow 

Click Review & Turn On, and Set it to Live.

List management best practices

Here are some elementary list management best practices:

1. Zoom in on your most engaged subscribers. Be top-of-mind by sending out brand updates and product recs.
   
2. Create granular segments based on historical purchase data, purchase recency, demographics, browsing behavior, etc.
   
3. Track the right metrics. Go beyond open rates, and track click rate, time spent on email and website, checkout data, product page behavior, etc.
    
4. Make it super easy to unsubscribe. If relevant to your brand identity, get creative with your unsubscribe option. 

Need help with email marketing in Klaviyo?

Our Klaviyo expertise is made up of 15+ Klaviyo-certified experts. Having worked with over 100 Klaviyo-specific clients, and run over 1,000 campaigns/automations on the platform, we can be the people you’re seeking to hand over your Klaviyo instance. From discovery to analytics and reporting, our six-tier email marketing framework is built to do the heavy lifting for you. Let’s talk!