Audience hygiene

Audience hygiene is the practice of keeping your list valid, relevant, and engaged. Maintaining proper audience hygiene is crucial for ensuring your emails reach their intended recipients, maximizing deliverability, and improving your sender reputation. For day-to-day contact management like handling bounces and suppression lists, see Manage contacts.

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How Brew protects your sending reputation

Brew runs automatic checks on every contact added to your account — whether through CSV upload, API, integrations, or manual entry. Contacts identified as invalid, spam traps, or otherwise risky are flagged or suppressed before you ever send to them. Brew also monitors your sending health continuously across two metrics:

• Bounce rate — keep under 2%
• Spam complaint rate — keep under 0.08%

Hard bounces are suppressed automatically. If either metric moves toward the threshold, you’ll be notified with clear steps to resolve it. These checks protect everyone on the platform — a single user with poor list quality can affect shared sending infrastructure.

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Build a quality list from the start

The foundation of a healthy audience is how contacts get on it in the first place. Be clear on your sign-up forms. Tell people what they’re signing up for and how often you’ll email them. Transparency reduces unsubscribes and attracts contacts who actually want to hear from you. Use CAPTCHA on sign-up forms. Bot submissions inflate your list with invalid addresses that hurt deliverability. Three solid options:

• Google reCAPTCHA — multiple protection levels from invisible verification to interactive challenges, with excellent bot detection. Simple integration with most website platforms.
• hCaptcha — privacy-focused alternative with enterprise-grade security, adjustable difficulty settings, and strong accessibility options.
• Friendly Captcha — runs verification in the background without puzzles. Designed for strong privacy protection and compliance with global regulations.

Never purchase lists. Brew only allows permission-based email. Purchased lists contain people who never opted in to hear from you specifically, leading to high bounce rates, spam complaints, and account suspension. See What you can send with Brew for the full policy.

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Monitor engagement over time

Regularly check your key metrics in Analytics:

• Open rate
• Click rate
• Bounce rate
• Spam complaint rate
• Unsubscribe rate

Significant drops from your baseline are the signal that something needs attention — either your content, your sending frequency, or the quality of contacts you’re reaching.

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Segment by engagement

Targeting engaged segments for regular sends protects your sending reputation and improves performance. Create segments based on how contacts are behaving:

• Highly engaged — opened or clicked in the last 30 days
• Moderately engaged — opened or clicked in the last 90 days
• At risk — no opens in the last 60 days but previously active
• Inactive — no engagement in 90 or more days

Audiences in Brew are dynamic. As contacts engage or go quiet, they move in and out of segments automatically. You don’t need to rebuild them. To create an engagement segment:

1. Go to the Audience page.
2. Use the AI prompt box to describe what you want:
   Create an audience of contacts who haven't opened or clicked
   an email in the last 90 days but were active before that.
   
3. Review the generated filters and adjust if needed.
4. Save with a descriptive name like “Inactive 90 days — Q3 2025”.

Repeat for each tier. Use your highly engaged segment as your primary sending audience for regular campaigns.

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Re-engage inactive contacts

Contacts who’ve gone quiet are worth one well-aimed attempt before you stop sending to them. As an Email. Send a one-off campaign to your inactive segment:

1. Go to Emails in the sidebar and open a new chat.
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 output, then send.

As an Automation. Build a 2 to 3 step re-engagement flow that runs automatically for contacts who hit the inactivity threshold. See the Lifecycle emails for SaaS and B2B recipe for prompts and a step-by-step walkthrough. After the re-engagement attempt, handle contacts based on how they responded:

• Re-engaged — move them back into your active sending audience
• Still inactive — exclude them from regular sends or move them to a suppressed audience
• No response after final email — remove from active audience entirely

Continuing to send to chronically inactive contacts hurts your metrics and your sending reputation.

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Set a sunset policy

Decide upfront what inactive means for your business and what happens when a contact crosses that threshold. A simple policy:

1. No engagement in 90 days — enter re-engagement flow.
2. No engagement after re-engagement flow — exclude from regular sends.
3. No engagement in 6 months — remove from active audience entirely.

Export anything you want to keep before removing contacts. Brew stores the filter criteria for audiences, not a frozen list — deleted contacts are gone.

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Recurring hygiene tasks

A few things worth doing on a regular cadence:

• Monthly — check bounce rate and spam complaint rate trends. Flag anything moving toward the thresholds.
• Quarterly — run a re-engagement campaign for contacts inactive 90 or more days.
• Every 6 months — review your active sending audience and prune contacts who haven’t engaged in over 6 months.

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Need Help?

Our team is ready to support you at every step of your journey with Brew. Choose the option that works best for you: