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.
Cleaning our database is a continuous process. We use Salesforce and update/remove company/contact info based on campaign responses, research, and website leads etc.
I wish I could explain our process. We don't have one and no one on the sales team keeps their contacts up to date. So it's not that we have a bad system, we don't have a system, and it's very upsetting.
Cleaning our database is a continual process for TiER1. We use Salesforce and update/remove company/contact info daily based on campaign responses, research and website leads.
The company I joined hasn't cleaned their database in over a year. It was one of the first activities I did. The pandemic caused many people in our industry to change jobs so much of the data had become outdated.
None of my clients want to clean their database. That is often one of the 1st tasks I do. I always export the data before archiving so they have a copy just in case and it makes them feel better when they see the total number of contacts dropping. I run reports of unengaged and old contacts that have no interactions in at least a year. Although the database should be cleaned on a quarterly basis typically this doesn't happen and annual is the best I have been able to get them to agree to.
It depends on your business needs and frequency. I would prefer at least monthly however if your database does not get frequent updates quarterly would be fine. If you had an extaordinary large database and handle a lot of manual unsubscrubes and do not contacts weekly might be needed.
We would like to clean our database once per quarter, but first want to do a re-engagement campaign. Some of our customers have potential firewalls that block our marketing efforts even though they themselves actually want our correspondence. We are hesitant to cull un-engaged contacts due to this reason.
