Whenever an inactive contact is removed (cleansed) from the Marketing Cloud account, their journey status and any other workflow within the system end entirely.
Note: Cleansing is an automated process that takes place every day at 3:00 AM EST.
What are the benefits of using a Cleansing Rule?
Since the rules help you remove inactive email accounts from your system, it enables you to send campaigns to the correct target audience with less chance of your emails being bounced, thereby improving your campaign’s delivery, open, and click-through rates.
It also enhances the reputation of the sender and its IP address provider since the emails are not getting rejected (bounced) by the receiver’s mailbox provider.
Therefore, it's always a good practice to remove contacts that are inactive, don't receive emails from you, or are getting bounced continuously. To help with this, we have set up a mechanism wherein if you receive 10 consecutive “mailbox is full” bounces for any given email contact, we will remove (cleanse) that particular contact from your MMC account.
In this Article
Managing Cleansing Rules
Firstly, to access this module, go to Navigations >> Audience >> Cleansing Rules.
From here, you can manage all of your cleansing rules from the Cleansing Page Index page. You can also create new rules by clicking on the “New Rule” tab. Additionally, you can delete or modify existing rules as per your requirements from the Actions panel.
Creating a Cleansing Rule
Upon Clicking on the “New Rule” tab from the index page, you will be redirected to the rules creation page. The page is further subdivided into two sections namely: Cleanse Non-Openers and Cleanse Mega-Openers.
Under Cleanse Non-Openers, you can create rules for identifying contacts who are either not opening your emails frequently or whose mailbox is full; hence, you receive a bounced status from them regularly.
Note: If you want to target non-openers from all the domains, then leave the Contact Domain Name field blank.
Under Cleanse Mega-Openers, you can create rules for finding contacts who have a very high email campaign open rate as compared to your target audience. This could be an indication that these contacts are internet bots (firewall applications or security software at the contact’s end) that normally run automated tasks and other processes upon receiving the email campaign from you.
Once you have added the rules and criteria, you can save the changes. Remember, the contacts that are identified and cleansed will be moved to the Do Not Mail (DNM) list.
Viewing Cleansed Contacts
After the cleansing rule is created and executed, you will receive a notification along with an option to download the list of contacts who were cleansed as part of the ruleset. The downloadable file is in .csv format which can be exported from the notification panel. Besides, the file can also be exported from the Actions panel present on the Cleansing Rule Index page.
