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.
I try to clean out our contacts as often as I can - at least a couple of times a year. Due to the type of data we handle, I have set up custom lists to identify contacts that should not be deleted (they have an existing relationship with us, but have opted out of all communications) to be compared with contacts opted out or having low engagement.
My indusrtry is seasonal, and there are so many cross-customers for out of season sales, so since we just are building this database, I am not sure on how often to clean and update. I believe after the biggest season (christmas) we will need to clean and organize. So every 12 months, in Februarym will be our goal.
I take the opportunity to clean the database after mailings. Looking into what's not sent gives me a chance to look if they have moved to a new company that is still a target account and update or delete accordingly. Periodic (monthly or quarterly) check if possible. Summer is also a good time at least for me to do more database cleansing since there are more out of office returns that give you a chance to update records.
We review our lists every six months and remove anyone who is not opening/engaging with our communications. We don't have a process in place for cleaning other data on a regular schedule. Probably something we should do 😉
It is also good to make sure that your incoming contacts are clean to start with. Mass imports such as badge scans from tradeshows are often "dirty" - since the information "on the badge" is what the tradeshow attendee entered, it is not uncommon to have different versions of company names, for instance. Cleaning this BEFORE you enter it makes life a lot easier and helps minimize the work needed when you do periodic cleaning.
Hi, we clean our data base every quarter since we receive a lot of inbound leads and sometimes they use different email addresses because they come from different channels. Therefore we need to have an eye on duplicated contacts and companies. However, merging them is often very useful.