List hygiene
Keeping a contact list accurate and current by removing or flagging unusable records.
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Keeping a contact list accurate and current by removing or flagging unusable records.
List hygiene is the ongoing work of keeping a contact database accurate: removing invalid and disconnected numbers, flagging landlines that cannot receive SMS, normalising formats, and deduplicating records that describe the same person.
Contact data decays continuously. People change carriers, abandon numbers, and numbers get reassigned to someone else. A list that was clean a year ago will contain a meaningful share of records that are now wrong.
Hygiene is not a one-off project. Validating before each major campaign, rather than once at import, is what keeps deliverability stable and stops spend leaking into sends that were never going to arrive.
Related terms
- SMS deliverability — The proportion of sent SMS messages that are actually delivered to a recipient handset.
- Disconnected number — A number that is no longer assigned to an active subscriber and cannot be reached.
- Reassigned number — A number reissued to a new subscriber after the previous holder gave it up.
- E.164 — The international standard format for phone numbers: +, country code, then the national number.