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 would say it depends on the customer timeline for your business. Understanding a typical lifecycle for a customer and the latency and recency of your customers can help determine when someone can be considered disengaged.
The cadence that I find works best for most of the organizations I've worked with is whatever coincides with your newsletter or largest mailing, as long as that is no longer than once every quarter. If there is a mass mail or email that goes out more frequently (i.e., monthly), then the data should be scrubbed prior to that activity. If the organization doesn't conduct any mass mailings or emails (or that activity takes place at longer than quarterly intervals), then best practice would be to clean up the database quarterly.
I think this is a constant process. If you see something, say something (or correct something). Whether they have the wrong persona assigned, contact isn't there anymore, or other reasons, clean it up as you go.
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.
