How do you keep your contact database fresh and up-to-date?

Marketing & Content Hub Email Deliverability
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1

We currently have around 10,000 contacts in our database and regularly send marketing emails to segmented groups. On average, our largest email campaigns have a 30% open rate, and adjusted a bit below 50%. However, like many of you, we face the challenge of maintaining the quality of our database over time. It constantly degrades due to bounces and disengagement, which are often hard to track.

We’ve implemented a cleanup process, partly automated with some exclusions and special handling for established customers. Here’s a breakdown of what we do:

  1. Data Backup and Formatting:

    • Back up all data.
    • Format names to proper case.
    • Standardize phone numbers.

  2. Automated Processes:

    • Set contacts with hard bounces (e.g., “Mailbox full,” “Unknown user”) to non-marketing status.
    • Mark all unsubscribed contacts as non-marketing.
    • Use workflows to create tasks for reaching out to established customers who have hard bounced (e.g., “Mailbox full,” “Unknown user”).
    • Remove non-established customers who have hard bounced.

  3. Manual Cleaning:

    • Manage duplicate contacts and companies.
    • Handle contacts with hard bounces due to content, spam, policy, or other issues. I don’t have a solid routine for this yet. Do you contact all of them? If so, how do you approach it? I’ve read that it’s better not to pursue these and simply mark them as non-marketing contacts.
    • Delete unsubscribed contacts who are not established customers.
    • Suppress unengaged contacts from email sends. I’m still figuring out the best approach here. Do you use the unengaged contact list for anything, especially with Apple’s privacy features? Or do you just opt not to send emails to unengaged users?

Additionally, we haven’t enabled click tracking because we prefer not to have long URLs and unfamiliar domain names in our emails. However, I’m starting to think this might be essential for tracking engagement. Any thoughts or suggestions?
Thanks,
Daniel

2

Thanks for your post @DBorg! It sounds like you have a great baseline for cleaning up your contact list and maintaining the quality of your data. If you haven’t, check out HubSpot’s Knowledge Base article to review Best practices for adding and maintaining contact lists.

I’d like to invite @danmoyle, @Phil_Vallender, and @karstenkoehler to provide their tips & tricks for managing your contacts to improve deliverability here as well!

Best,
Kennedy

3

Hi @Romulus,

Based on your current practices, here are some additional recommendations:

  • Implementing a re-engagement campaign for contacts who haven’t opened emails in a specified period (e.g., 3-6 months).
  • Set up automated email verification tools to regularly check the validity of email addresses.
  • Review and A/B test everything. Make sure none of your emails trigger any spam filter. Quickly archive any underperforming email campaign(s).
4

Hey there @Romulus - love this list of tasks. I especially like the automation “Use workflows to create tasks for reaching out to established customers who have hard bounced (e.g., “Mailbox full,” “Unknown user”).” This is such a good idea, and one I think a lot of folks don’t think about making a regular task (or automated one for that matter).

As for tracking, I’m a fan of it. Open rates continue to be a poor indicator of email health. Getting folks to click is critical for a lot of businesses (not all, I recognize some email is just for awareness). So that tracking is becoming more important. That’s my two cents on that.

Thanks for sharing this perspective. I’ll have to hang onto this and share with others!