HubSpot Marketing

JorieMunroe
Inbound Professor
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.

1,570 Replies 1,570
nippergs
Member

How often do you clean your contacts database?

Not nearly often enough. About once a year, but now that we're moving to Hubspot, we're looking forward to stronger automation and processes that will help us with this integral piece.

EWilson38
Member

How often do you clean your contacts database?

It really depends on the list. For dynamic lists, I audit those regularly at the point of use to make sure filters to set rules still apply. I perform a more thorough list hygiene quarterly, every 3 months or so.

briimcc01
Participant

How often do you clean your contacts database?

Depending on the list, it can be as often as weekly or as long as yearly. For example, prospective leads change lifecycles quickly, so they'll need to be updated at least on a weekly basis in the CRM (by the agent, their status should be updated immediately once it changes though). For past clients, this can be looked at every 6 months-1 year.  It truly all depends on how big your database it, the lifecycle, etc. 

0 Upvotes
myathazinhan
Participant

How often do you clean your contacts database?

In our organization, there is some scheduling method to check whether the users are active or inactive bi-annualy (every 6 months). When the user cannot contact or does not response at all, we have to remove that user and changed status to "inactive" then send to backup data. 

0 Upvotes
mrcanty
Member

How often do you clean your contacts database?

On of the best ways we have found to continually maintain our database is to use lists that account for common scenarios that would lead to use removing a lead from the system. We do this for both Companies and Contacts and then have workflows that mark a custom field on both records as a deletion candidate. 

As an example, when we have an account in our system that has not had an activity registered in 6+ month, we mark both the account and the contacts associated to the account as deletion candidates. 

These get reviewed on a minimum of a quarterly basis

0 Upvotes
RavenWorksATL
Member

How often do you clean your contacts database?

I'm not sure my team has had a formalized system. We just have workflows that set our contacts to non-marketing. Initially, I want to create a secondary list for every list we have and name it as the "INACTIVE" version of the existing list. Both of these would be active lists that customers can move between during their inactive and re-engaged stages. Later, I would like to clean our list 1x quarter. 

0 Upvotes
SVirtue
Participant

How often do you clean your contacts database?

We are just develoing our CRM for a Faculty at a university, but I've made a note that we should review every term (every four months) which will work well with the university calendar.

0 Upvotes
lanaphuong
Participant

How often do you clean your contacts database?

In my company, we continue to contact customers for 2-3 months to give them different choices, then if they are still not interested, we will list them as bad contacts. So we will clear contacts in quarterly

0 Upvotes
bridgetalexys
Member

How often do you clean your contacts database?

Once a month, it helps me to keep organized, focused, and to make sure I am not trailing far behind from my contacts. 

0 Upvotes
Poker
Participant

How often do you clean your contacts database?

The frequency of cleaning can vary depending on the size and usage of the database.

0 Upvotes
ASolomon1
Member

How often do you clean your contacts database?

Quarterly or where necessary

0 Upvotes
MMcNaughton
Participant

How often do you clean your contacts database?

Not as frequently as I like. One of the aspects that is super time consuming is updating contacts within a company as the retail industry we serve has high turnover.   I wish there were a way to integrate a plug in to update when someone in the CRM changes their title on LinkedIn. Currently I have to do that manually or our outreach and our reporitng of MQLs and KPIs related to engagement and conversion are not correct.  Does anyone know of an automated way to do this?  

 

JHacker
Participant | Diamond Partner
Participant | Diamond Partner

How often do you clean your contacts database?

I like cleaning databases based on how it's structured. I personally like having my top 5-10 percent as a focus and then everything else accordingly. Based on that, the top 5-10% would be biweekly, while prospecting clients or those close to converting monthly, and then those that are either completed or on a touch-base campaign quarterly. Truly depends on how you strucure your database and your sphere!

kelvinoyibo
Participant

How often do you clean your contacts database?

Quarterly works all the time to reduce ineligble and spam contacts

Briannapri
Member

How often do you clean your contacts database?

It depends on how many contacts are generated during each period.

MReuter
Member

How often do you clean your contacts database?

We should be making contact with our customers every 3-6 months & checking in on their satisfaction, needs & wants.

GLivingston4
Participant

How often do you clean your contacts database?

Monthly, to match end of month reporting pulls.

0 Upvotes
AnaGarcia
Member

How often do you clean your contacts database?

Is one of the first (and most important) items on our list as we are re-structuring the business and the whole marketing organization! I hope we'll be able to do it at least 2 a year. It is not realistic to affirm we'll do it quaterly, but in the future we'll try!

0 Upvotes
MLittles
Member

How often do you clean your contacts database?

Quaterly unless there is a deliverability issue. 

tiffaliprandi
Member

How often do you clean your contacts database?

It is a project we are working on now after many years of not doing so. But I think 1-2 times a year is essential.

 

habdalsajad
Participant

How often do you clean your contacts database?

good

0 Upvotes