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.
I have performed reviews 1-2 times per year, and find it is helpful to clean as you go as well. We are B2B and probably don't get as many contacts as some companies do. When I receive an alert about a certain contact and I know we don't want them in the database (spam or someone trying to sell us something), I immediately delete them. When I get duplicate alerts I address those as well.
It's recommended to regularly clean your contact database at least once a year, or more often if your data changes frequently. This helps keep the information accurate and up-to-date, ensuring better communication and more effective marketing efforts. Additionally, removing outdated or invalid contacts can improve the overall performance and organization of your database.
It depends on the type of list and the sales cycle involved. As a general rule I perform a more thorough list hygiene quarterly, every 3 months or so. For more or dynamic lists, I audit those at the point of use to ensure the data is relevant and the necassry rules are set.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
