Audience hygiene refers to the practice of keeping your email list clean, valid, and engaged. Maintaining proper audience hygiene is crucial for ensuring your emails reach their intended recipients, maximizing deliverability, and improving your sender reputation.

This guide focuses on strategic and preventative practices for maintaining audience quality. For day-to-day contact management tasks like handling bounces and managing suppression lists, see our Manage Contacts guide.

Better deliverability

Clean lists have lower bounce rates and higher inbox placement

Higher engagement

Engaged subscribers are more likely to open, click, and convert

Helps compliance

Helps you comply with important regulations such as CAN-SPAM

Poor audience hygiene can significantly impact your email performance. To protect your email reputation and comply with CAN-SPAM, Brew monitors your email performance and may temporarily suspend your account if you exceed the following thresholds:

  • Spam complaint rate above 0.08% (less than 1 complaint per 1,000 emails sent)
  • Bounce rate above 2% (20 bounces per 1,000 emails sent)

We implement these safeguards to ensure all our users maintain good sending practices.

Learn about Managing Contacts

Understand email bounces, suppression lists, and contact management best practices

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Building a Quality Audience

The foundation of good audience hygiene begins with how you collect contacts in the first place. Here are best practices for building a quality audience:

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Monitoring and Segmenting Your Audience

To maintain good deliverability, you need to regularly monitor your audience engagement and create appropriate segments:

1

Track engagement metrics

Regularly monitor key metrics to identify potential issues:

  • Open rates
  • Click rates
  • Bounce rates
  • Unsubscribe rates

Use Brew’s Ask AI feature to track these metrics over time. Ask questions like “How have my open rates changed over the last 3 months?” or “Which segments have the highest engagement?”

2

Create engagement-based segments

Use Brew’s AI to segment your audience based on engagement levels:

  1. Go to the Audience page
  2. Use the AI prompt box to describe an engaged audience (e.g., “Contacts who opened or clicked an email in the last 3 months”)
  3. Save this as your primary sending segment for regular campaigns

Audiences in Brew are dynamic - they automatically update as contacts meet or no longer meet the criteria. This means new contacts who become engaged will automatically be added to this audience, while those who become inactive will be removed.

Learn about Sign-Up Forms

Discover how to create forms to collect new contacts

3

Identify inactive contacts

Similarly, use AI to identify disengaged contacts who may need re-engagement:

  1. Go to the Audience page
  2. Use the AI prompt box like “Create an audience of contacts who haven’t opened or clicked emails in the last 90 days but were active before that”
  3. Save this audience with a descriptive name like “90+ Days Inactive - Q2 2025”

Like all audiences in Brew, this inactive segment is dynamic. As contacts go longer without engaging, they’ll automatically be added to this audience. If they suddenly engage with one of your emails, they’ll automatically be removed.

These contacts are candidates for your re-engagement efforts.

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Re-engaging Inactive Subscribers

When contacts become inactive, you need a strategy to either re-engage them or eventually stop sending to them to maintain good deliverability.

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Step 1: Create a Clean Sending Audience

First, create a dynamic audience for your regular campaigns that includes only engaged contacts:

  1. Use the AI prompt box: “Create an audience of contacts who have opened or clicked an email in the last 6 months”
  2. Save this as your primary sending audience for regular campaigns
  3. This ensures you’re only sending to engaged contacts

This audience will automatically update as engagement changes, ensuring you’re always sending to your most receptive contacts.

Using this approach helps protect your sender reputation by excluding chronically inactive contacts from your regular email campaigns.

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Step 2: Choose a Re-engagement Method

After establishing your clean sending audience, choose one of these methods to re-engage your inactive subscribers:

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Create your re-engagement campaign

Design a compelling campaign specifically for inactive contacts:

  1. Go to the Create page and select Campaign
  2. Select your inactive audience segment
  3. Use a prompt like: “Create a re-engagement email with a subject line about missing the recipient, acknowledging their inactivity, reminding them of our value, and including a clear CTA to stay subscribed”
  4. Review and refine the AI-generated content
  5. Send this to your inactive audience

Make the subject line especially compelling for subscribers who haven’t engaged in a while. Questions or statements that create curiosity often work well.

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Track campaign results

After sending your campaign, monitor which inactive contacts have re-engaged:

  1. Use Brew’s Ask AI feature to see who opened or clicked the re-engagement content
  2. Create a new segment of “Recently Re-engaged” contacts
  3. Include these contacts in your future regular campaigns
  4. For those who didn’t engage, consider one final attempt or exclude them

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Creating a Systematic Hygiene Process

To maintain audience hygiene long-term, implement these recurring practices using Brew’s AI capabilities:

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