Step 3 - List Hygiene Review

See the list hygiene rules you need to implement to be compliant and identify the audiences you should exclude from the warm-up phase.

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💡 Goals

• Understand the importance of good list hygiene

• Implement best practices to be compliant with Batch's guidelines, sender's guidelines, and local legislation

• Review and improve the quality of your recipients base

• Identify the recipients categories you should exclude from the warmup phase and most of your campaigns/automations

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📌 Deliverables

Userbase review table

Once you have evaluated your current email performance, you can start qualifying users that will be addressed first during the email warmup phase.

The subscribers qualification can be done in three steps:

1. List hygiene policy: Be sure you are already following the best practices to have as few bounces as possible.

2. Subscribers categorization: Group recipients per subscription source, to ensure you are sending the right message to the right audience and reduce the chance of getting negative feedback.

3. Engagement-based qualification: Qualify recipients based on their last engagement.

List Hygiene Policy Review

The first thing to do consists in reviewing your current list hygiene policy.

Migrating from one email solution to another is a great opportunity to start fresh and clean your list.

This is an important task to be sure your practices match today's mailbox providers' guidelines, legal requirements, and Batch guidelines. Please take some time to review your list hygiene policy and apply changes when needed:

Best Practices on List Hygiene and Recipients Collection

Subscribers Qualification

→ Recipients Categorization

Leads, signed up users, and newsletter subscribers should not be treated the same way and receive the same message. In the context of a warm-up, this can result in unexpected high levels of unsubscribes, bounces, and spam complaints you need to avoid.

Make sure you can clearly identify the subscription source of each one of your recipients, to address them with the right message:

→ Engagement-based Qualification

Focus on quality over quantity and dedicate your first emails to the most engaged of your users. Then, gradually increase the volumes of sent emails and extend your messages to other segments of users when the risks are lower for your newly created reputation.

During a warm-up phase, and even after, inactive recipients should not be part of your "normal" audience if you send newsletters. Dedicate a special reengagement program for them and let them go if needed.

Less engaged segments should be added to the batches of recipients in chunks of 15% of your existing volume. This is important to avoid tipping your reputation from good to bad.

Run Your First Diagnostic

Once you've evaluated your list hygiene policy, applied required changes & identified segments for targeting, use this table to visualize your recipient base and determine a "healthy" subscriber count.

This table should help you identify the segments you should exclude from the warmup and from most of your usual campaigns/automations.

📌 Recipients base review table

Segment	Leads	Newsletter subscribers	Service users	ALL SEGMENTS
New
Opt-in
Opt-in + opt-out
Engaged
Opt-in
Opt-in + opt-out
Less engaged (Last open <3 months)
Opt-in
Opt-in + opt-out
Inactive (Last open > 3 months)
Opt-in
Opt-in + opt-out
TOTAL
Opt-in
Opt-in + opt-out

Next step

Now you have reviewed your list hygiene rules and qualified your recipients base, let's take time to define a warm-up goal per subdomain:

Step 4 - Estimate Your Warmup Target