The Scenario
You are a deliverability consultant working with a client. They have 8 Benchmark Email contact lists that have not been cleaned in anywhere from three to eight months. Some are full of bounced addresses from a campaign they ran in January. Some have addresses that have gone cold.
Before the client runs another campaign, the lists need to go through Benchmark Email's built-in cleanup. You have a Google Sheet with the 8 list IDs in column A, and you need to trigger cleanup for all of them and report back which ones completed successfully.
The slow version:
- Log into Benchmark Email as the client
- Navigate to list management
- Find list 1, trigger cleanup, wait for confirmation
- Find list 2, trigger cleanup
- Repeat for all 8 lists
- Write down what happened for each one in a separate notes doc
- Forty minutes later you are still waiting on list 6 to confirm.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your spreadsheet that reads the list IDs and triggers the cleanup operations in batch, so you do not have to click through the Benchmark Email UI eight separate times.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Clean each Benchmark Email contact list whose ID is in column A of my sheet — trigger cleanup for all 8 lists and write "cleaned," "already clean," or "failed" to column B for each row. Write today's date into column C for any row that completed successfully.
SheetXAI reads the list IDs, calls the Benchmark Email cleanup endpoint for each one, and logs the result in column B. You get a per-row audit of what happened without leaving the sheet.
What You Get
An 8-row status log with one row per list:
- Column B — "cleaned," "already clean," or "failed" per list
- Column C — today's date for lists that completed, blank for failures
- Failure rows visible — any list that returned an error is flagged in column B so you know exactly which ones need follow-up
The audit trail is the deliverable. When your client asks which lists are ready to use, you send them the Google Sheet. The answer is column B.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Deliverability projects have a way of being messier than they look at the start.
When some list IDs in column A have been deactivated
A few of the 8 lists were archived by the client's previous email manager and no longer accept cleanup requests.
Trigger Benchmark Email cleanup for all list IDs in column A. For any list that returns a "not found" or "inactive" error, write "Inactive — confirm with client" in column B rather than "failed." Write the result date into column C for successful cleanups.
When you need to check the list size before deciding whether to trigger cleanup
Cleanup on a 50-contact list is pointless. You only want to trigger it for lists above a certain threshold.
For each list ID in column A, first fetch the contact count from Benchmark Email and write it into column B. Then trigger cleanup only for lists with more than 500 contacts. Write "triggered" or "skipped — under 500" into column C accordingly.
When cleanup needs to run in a specific order because of suppression dependencies
List 3 in column A should be cleaned before list 5, because list 5 uses list 3's unsubscribes as a suppression source.
Trigger Benchmark Email cleanup for list IDs in column A in order from row 2 to row 9. Do not start the next list until the previous one returns a confirmed result. Write the result and completion time to columns B and C for each row as they finish.
When you need cleanup status plus a hygiene score for each list
After cleanup, you want to know the before and after contact counts so you can calculate what percentage of each list was removed as invalid.
For each list ID in column A, fetch the current contact count before triggering cleanup and write it to column B. Trigger cleanup. Then fetch the post-cleanup contact count and write it to column C. Calculate the percentage of contacts removed and write it to column D as a hygiene score. Write the cleanup result to column E.
The pattern: describe the full before-and-after picture you want, and let SheetXAI handle the sequencing and the API calls in one prompt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a sheet with Benchmark Email list IDs in column A, then ask SheetXAI to trigger cleanup for each one. The Benchmark Email integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. See also how to export all contacts for deduplication or the Benchmark Email in Google Sheets overview.