Jul 11, 20217:39 AM - edited Jul 11, 20217:40 AM
Inbound Professor
How often do you clean your contacts database?
We’re in a data-driven era, where datasets are shared between marketing, sales, and customer service teams to increase organizational effectiveness and facilitate alignment. When you have high levels of inconsistent data, it’s not just one team taking the hit. It’s everyone. The entire company. The fallout from that bad data extends to every corner of your business that the data touches. With that in mind, how often do you currently audit and clean your contacts database? Once a month? Every quarter? Once a year? What does the process look like? Share your thoughts and current schedule.
We try to clean our contacts db every 6 months but sometimes due to schedules, it ends up being closer to 12 months. I scrub inactive members and merge lists where it makes sense.
Due to numerous acquisitions, our contact database is undergoing a major overhaul and cleaning. This has been considered the pre-requisite to our initialization of HubSpot on the company level, especially tying into SalesForce, already deployed by sales.
We try to clean our database every 3 to 6 months, but are not always successful. We have gotten in the habit now, however, or doing critical reviews with every customer touchpoint to quickly review accounts and update info and/or fill in field gaps.
We're only just setting up our contact database, but it's interesting to hear what everyone else does so we can set the standard moving forward, and keep it clean from the 'get-go'!
As a Marketer - It is necessary to have clean data . you know the old adage "garbage in equals garbage out" is true for any type of CRM information. Training users to input information properly is the first step in keeping a clean database - then auditing after each campaign is helpful to clean out garbage contact information.
Right now we don't have a process for cleaning our contacts database. Once we have migrated our old database to Hubspot, we plan to clean it at least twice a year!
Actually, I clean daily - every time I look at a contact's info, I make sure that info is up to date. But, I also set aside time, weekly and monthly to do full check of the database.
I manage clients' portals and differs for each client. In general, I follow - Basic cleaning ( Unsubscribe, Bounce etc) - Every 15 days - Deep Cleaning ( W/f, email ids ect) - Monthly. I use tools like Coglide to clean contacts.
For me, it's like cleaning my house. The longer we let it go, the harder it becomes, but it varies by how much mess a person (or team) can put up with. Clutter drives me batty. We clean ours quarterly as a general rule, but I have been known to go into a hyperfocus work mode in the past and do a little cleaning here and there.
