About List Cleaning Services

List cleaning is also known as email scrubbing, which is a process that scans your email marketing contacts for bad or invalid addresses. Many online companies offer list cleaning services, but accuracy varies and is never 100%.

In this article, you'll learn more about list cleaning services.

Things to know

Here are some things to know.

• When you sign up for Mailchimp, you agree to get permission from the contacts you plan to send email marketing to.
• We don't typically recommend list cleaning services because they cost money and aren't always helpful in solving problems related to audience health. Instead, you can unsubscribe inactive subscribers in Mailchimp, or reconfirm your audience.
• Mailchimp should never be used as a list cleaning service.

Should I hire a list cleaning service?

Although list cleaning services are often used in the email marketing community, we seldom recommend them. Most list cleaning services don't remove invalid addresses for you. They'll note which addresses are least likely to be delivered successfully, and expect you to remove those addresses yourself.

Cleaning a list may solve an obvious problem, like stale addresses, but it can hide bigger issues with your audience collection and management procedures. You won't discover or solve ongoing audience issues, like abuse complaints, spam traps, or denylists (other providers may refer to it as "blacklists"), so it isn't an acceptable solution to other compliance or delivery issues.

Hiring a list cleaning service is only a viable option if you have a good record of subscriber permission, and your audience management methods and email content are in line with Mailchimp's best practices.