Audience Hygiene

Strategies for maintaining a clean, engaged audience to maximize email deliverability

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.

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 0.2% (2 complaints per 1,000 emails sent)
• Hard bounce rate above 3% (30 bounces per 1,000 emails sent)
• Soft bounce rate above 5% (50 bounces per 1,000 emails sent)

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

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:

Use clear sign-up methods

Make sure your sign-up forms clearly state what subscribers will receive and how often. Transparency builds trust and reduces unsubscribes.

On your website, consider:

• Being specific about email content and frequency
• Setting clear expectations
• Providing value in exchange for an email address

Protect your forms from bots with CAPTCHA

Adding CAPTCHA verification to your sign-up forms is an effective way to prevent spam submissions and ensure only real humans join your audience. This improves deliverability and engagement metrics.

Three recommended CAPTCHA solutions with different approaches:

• Google reCAPTCHA: Offers multiple protection levels from invisible verification to interactive challenges, with excellent bot detection algorithms. Simple integration with most website platforms.
• hCaptcha: Privacy-focused alternative that rewards websites for user verifications. Features enterprise-grade security with adjustable difficulty settings and strong accessibility options.
• Friendly Captcha: Minimizes user friction by running verification in the background without puzzles. Designed for strong privacy protection and compliance with global regulations.

Implementing any of these solutions will significantly reduce bot signups and maintain a higher-quality audience.

Implement double opt-in

Double opt-in requires a subscriber to confirm their email address by clicking a link in a confirmation email before they’re added to your list.

This essential practice:

• Verifies email addresses are valid and deliverable
• Confirms subscribers genuinely want to receive your emails
• Reduces bounce rates and spam complaints
• Creates a documented record of consent

You can implement double opt-in workflows using Brew’s API. Reach out to us on Slack, Email or by calling us on [phone] if you need help.

Do not purchase email lists

With Brew, you can only email people who have explicitly consented to receiving emails from you. Purchasing email lists is not allowed because:

• Lists typically contain outdated addresses
• People haven’t consented to your specific emails
• They lead to high bounce rates and spam complaints
• Can result in account suspension

Grow your list organically with genuinely interested subscribers who want to hear from you.

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 Analyze 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 how to create audiences with natural language

   Create targeted segments with Brew’s AI-powered audience builder

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.

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.

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.

Step 2: Choose a Re-engagement Method

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

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.

Track campaign results

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

1. Use Brew’s Analyze 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

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.

Track campaign results

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

1. Use Brew’s Analyze 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

Create a re-engagement automation

Set up an automated sequence for ongoing re-engagement:

1. Go to the Create page and select Automation
2. Use a prompt like: “Create a 3-part re-engagement sequence for subscribers who haven’t opened emails in 90+ days. Include emails with: 1) We miss you message with value reminder, 2) What content they’d prefer to receive, 3) Final chance to stay subscribed”
3. Select “Contact updated” as the trigger
4. Set the trigger condition to “hasn’t engaged in 90 days”
5. Review and activate the automation

Set up decision branches

Enhance your automation with conditional paths based on engagement:

1. After the first email, add a branch based on whether they opened or clicked
2. If they engaged, move them to a “Welcome Back” path with relevant content
3. If they didn’t engage, continue with the re-engagement sequence
4. After the final email, add contacts who still haven’t engaged to an “Exclude from Regular Sending” audience

Creating a Systematic Hygiene Process

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

Create engagement tiers with AI

Let Brew’s AI help you create audience segments based on engagement levels:

Example prompts:

• “Create an audience of highly engaged contacts who opened or clicked in the last 30 days”
• “Create an audience of moderately engaged contacts who opened or clicked in the last 90 days”
• “Create an audience of at-risk contacts who haven’t opened emails in 60 days but were active before”

These segments let you tailor content and frequency to match engagement levels.

Implement a sunset policy

Establish clear rules for handling chronically inactive contacts:

1. Define what “inactive” means for your business (e.g., no opens for 6+ months)
2. Create a specific audience for these contacts using Brew’s AI
3. Either exclude them from future campaigns or significantly reduce their email frequency
4. Consider a final “We miss you” campaign before removing them from regular sending

Set up regular maintenance checks

Schedule recurring audience hygiene tasks using Brew:

• Monthly: “Analyze my bounce rate trends over the last month”
• Quarterly: “Create a re-engagement campaign for subscribers inactive for 90+ days”
• Bi-annually: “Analyze which audience segments are most likely to convert”

Brew’s AI can help you analyze, segment, and create content for each maintenance task.

Monitor key deliverability metrics

Keep your metrics within these healthy thresholds:

• Bounce rate: Aim for under 2% (well below the 3% hard bounce threshold)
• Spam complaint rate: Keep under 0.1% (half the 0.2% suspension threshold)
• Open rate: Look for significant drops from your baseline

Use Brew’s Analyze feature to track these metrics with natural language questions.

Need support?

We’re here to help!

Scheduled support

Book a call with the founders — we have time slots open most days

Book a call

Immediate support

Call us on [phone] or emails us on [e-mail]

Email us now

We’re more than happy to help you maintain a healthy audience. Ping us on Slack (we should have connected with you by now) or through one of the mechanisms above.