Jul 11, 20217:39 AM - edited Jul 11, 20217:40 AM
HubSpot Employee
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 the contacts database is not a one-and-done solution. Data is constantly changing which means we need to have a proactive and routine approach to data cleansing. Depending on the size of contact database, I think we should consider monthly or quarterly cleansings to keep the data up to date.
When I was a realtor and self employed, I used to try and ensure I had minimim three client contacts a year that were not business related. One on their birthday (card followed by call on their birthday), one at Christmas (in person with small gift), and one at end of June/beginning of July (phone call) for Independance Day. At every client interaction, business related or not, I would go through their entry in my CRM and update anything as needed.
If it ever came to a client telling me to remove them from my CRM, I did so immediately without fuss. If they were no longer in my area of Licensed practice, I kept them as out of area contacts (you never know where a referral may come from - and you always want to be able to thank them!), and if I hear nothing back over 4 contact attempts I would archive but not delete their entry in my CRM. When I archived an entry, I would check if they still had their same home address for their birthday and just mail them a card once a year.
I didnt have a huge CRM, so I was only mailing out a few cards each week, but it was a pretty effective method of staying on top of each entrys relevence (keeping up to date on things like family or employment changes can help predict how and when people are going to make big life changes like moving home) and current information, and even brought a few archived entrys back to life. It wasnt inexpensive either, but was definately a big return on the investment, both in time and money.
In the dynamic world where business strategies and marketing needs keep changing, keeping the DB of contacts clean is very crucial for inbound strategies. Although a through cleanup can be done quarterly or bi annually, a quick cleanup can be done as and when needed or can be scheduled every fortnight to be effecient and efffective.
We do partial cleanups bi-annually, but it's not enough and that has become clear as we try and import contacts and companies to HubSpot. We are in the first stages of on boarding now and the team is looking forward to the opportunity to get a fresh start with our data.
I hardly clean up my contacts and I can see how bad that is because I am suffering with this decision. With the new knowledge I have gotten from Hubspot Academy, I can see its important to quaterly clean up data and ask the question who are my unengaged clients.
Probably see if there is a need to get them engaged or completely delete them off my data base. This is a golden information that will help me approach my database from a productive angle.
As a recent convert to HubSpot, we did a huge data cleanup when we converted. I'm curious to know if anyone uses any sort of workflows to keep data clean and keep contacts engaged with email content; and if so, how?
At my company we usually try to clean up and organize our contacts every business quarter to ensure that the information sent out to customers is the best possible data and up to date. By doing this, our nearly 2 million contacts are streamlined and we can cut down on the customers that aren't truly interested in our product.
As a consultant I've worked for many companies who all had different strategies for their database/CRM. The most organized businesses all had one thing in commen: They had a procedure for cleaning up databases that was well-known to all employees using the database & had some managers in charge to follow-up the database quality.
The time span for cleaning up varied in a lot of these companies. Although, I agree with once a quarter as been mentioned on this post. But in my experience, it doesn't really matter how often it's done, as long as there are good and clear procedures that employees follow up and there are moments in place to have a clean up. A lot of compenies have these kind of procedures, but it's the following up part where things go wrong 😅. So I guess the most important part about database clean-ups is not the how often you do it, but that there are people responsible for making it happen that check it on a regular basis.
