Jul 11, 20217:39 AM - edited Jul 11, 20217:40 AM
HubSpot Employee
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.
As we are just starting out with zero contacts in our database, we do not have a set schedule yet. However, we will all be monitoring the veracity of our datase as we go along by removing any contacts that have hard bounced and those who have unsubscribed. Ideall, we would also look for duplicates in the database. I would envision this process happening once a quarter, as we expect to be adding a very high volume of contacts.
At my school, we work on projects for the School of Agriculture on a yearly basis. The people that we work with and that help our program are put under a contact list. Each contact list is managed on a yearly basis. Typically, the goal each year is to add new people to the list to grow our support and following.
I would say it depends on the type of business you are in to determine how often your data is cleaned. If you are a B2C business where a customer engages with your brand once a month, you may want to consider auditing your data once a year. It really depends on the lifecycle between your brand and your customer to determine when it should be reviewed/evaluated for relevancy. I have worked for companies where 2 years' worth of data is still relevant and for companies for 6-months is relevant. It all varied on how the customers engages with the brand and when it becomes irrelevant data.
We are beginning the cleaning and audit of our data now. We have been using hubspot since a year now and our goal is to make it as updated as possible.
Companies should consider the age of a contact before deleting it so that recent programs can be accurately reported. If you delete all the bad records a campaign generates in the next cleansing cycle, you'll lose that information in the platform. In previous companies, we looked at leads on a rolling 24 months so that we could still report through the marketing automation platform or CRM the results of campaigns.
Every quarter is the recommended time to review and clean the customers you are targeting. As you are making an effort to attract them, you may wanna be sure that you are persuing the customers that fit your offer
I guess it depends in part on how frequently you're touching those contacts (or attempting to). In general, it should be after every outreach. But speaking more broadly, one a quarter sounds like best practice.
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