How to clean your Shopify or WooCommerce customer emails before a campaign

An online store collects email addresses all day without anyone looking at them. Every checkout, every account sign-up, every discount pop-up adds a few more. Most are fine. Some aren't, and you won't find out which until a campaign bounces.

Here's how to clean them before your next sale.

Why store lists go bad

• Checkout typos. People type fast on their phones. gmial.com, hotmal.com and yaho.com are real addresses on real store lists.
• Throwaway addresses. A discount pop-up is the perfect reason to use a temporary inbox. The code gets used and the inbox disappears.
• Old customers. Someone who bought from you four years ago may not use that address any more.
• Guest checkouts and test orders. test@test.com from the week you set the store up is probably still in there.

Order confirmations and shipping emails usually go out once per order, so a bad address only fails once. A marketing campaign sends to everyone at the same time, and that's when the bounces pile up.

1. Export your customers

If you send with MailPoet on WooCommerce, export from MailPoet, not WooCommerce. That's the list your campaigns actually go to. Go to MailPoet > Subscribers, click Export, pick your lists (including the WooCommerce customers list) and choose CSV. Full steps are in Exporting your contacts from MailPoet.

If you use WooCommerce on its own, go to WooCommerce > Customers and click Download at the top of the table. Larger lists are emailed to you.

On Shopify, go to Customers, click Export, choose All customers and Plain CSV file. If you have more than 50 customers, Shopify emails you the file.

If your campaigns go through Mailchimp, Klaviyo or another email tool, export from that tool instead. It's the list you'll be sending to.

2. Only keep people who said yes

Shopify's export has a column showing whether each customer agreed to marketing emails. Buying from you isn't the same as signing up for your newsletter, so filter to the customers who opted in before you do anything else.

Most email tools only hold opted-in contacts already, which is another reason to export from the tool you send with.

3. Check a few first (optional)

Spot something odd in the export? Paste up to 10 addresses into our free email checker. It needs no account, and it flags typos like gmial.com, throwaway domains and domains with no mail server straight away.

4. Clean the whole file

Upload the CSV to ListBouncer. It finds the email column on its own, checks every address against its mail server and sorts them into groups:

• Safe: the mail server confirmed the mailbox exists. This is your clean list.
• Major provider: Yahoo, Outlook, Hotmail and AOL. These providers don't let anyone confirm a mailbox, so they get their own download. Mail to them usually delivers.
• Will bounce: the mailbox doesn't exist, the domain has no mail server, or it's a throwaway address.
• Risky and Unknown: catch-all domains, shared inboxes like info@, and servers that wouldn't give a clear answer.

Typos get a suggested fix, so you can see that jane@gmial.com was probably meant to be jane@gmail.com. Don't email the fixed address unless you can confirm it with the customer, though. It might belong to someone else.

New accounts get 100 free credits. Duplicates and broken rows aren't charged, and neither are Unknown results.

5. Remove the bad addresses where you send from

Don't delete customers from your store. Their order history matters. Just stop emailing the ones that will bounce:

• MailPoet: import the Will bounce file and set the status to Unsubscribed.
• Mailchimp: unsubscribe or archive them.
• Klaviyo: add them to your suppression list.

The exact steps for each are in Removing bad addresses from your email tool.

6. Send your campaign in two parts

Send to your clean list first. Then send the same campaign to the Major provider list as its own segment. If any bounces come back, you'll know they came from the addresses nobody could confirm, not from your clean list.

Keep it clean

• Clean before every big sale. Black Friday, a summer sale, a launch. These are the sends you can least afford to have land in spam.
• Clean every few months if you get a lot of orders. Checkout typos add up quickly. See how often to clean your email list.
• Fix the source. If the same typo keeps appearing, a checkout plugin or app that suggests corrections as people type stops it at the door.

Wondering how accurate this is? See the results of our accuracy test.