Any best practices out there to clean up contact lists and emails?

[#1]

Hi there, 

We're just going through old lists and emails and attempting to archive old ones - a "clean up" project if you will. 

Is anyone willing to offer how they archive their lists and emails? 

Any help would be appreciated! 

Thanks,

Pina

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi, @pina. While I don't have much experience with list archives, this is an approach I use to periodically purge the portal of unwanted contacts. This isn't exactly the same thing you'd asked about, but can make much quicker work of deletes if you're able to build a list of criteria around it.

First, create a static list which will house the unwanted contacts. It has to be static, as we're just going to delete all contacts from that list over time, which isn't available with smart lists.

Once that static list is created, build a workflow which simply adds contacts to that static list. Include all the criteria for undesired records to kick off the workflow. Plan this part carefully. Make sure you have a set of criteria that you can unquestionably say, "Anyone meeting this criteria should absolutely not be in my portal."

Activate the workflow, then periodically, purge the static list of all its contacts. How often you'll need to do this is up to you.

[#3]

Thank you! @bradmin

This is great as we are looking to purge unwanted contacts as well. 

Can I ask you what criteria you use to determine unwanted contacts? We are thinking through this as well but haven't come to a decision. If you are willing to share, that would be great! 

We are thinking something like: 

Contact is a member of bounces and unsubscribes, but is not part of lifecycle stages: customer, evangelists, other

[#4]

Lifecycle stage is definitely a good one, although it's really a function of the business needs. I've used criteria which sends contacts with competitor's domains in the email address; specific picklist values from Salesforce users syncing to HubSpot. These were all "good" choices because they were ones which represented zero need to exist in the portal.

Bounces and unsubscribes might be appropriate. However, you want to be extremely careful: The Emails Bounced property never resets. So it's very possible to, say, have HubSpot Support unbounce an address, but a nonzero number of bounces still exist against the contact. In a similar vein, purging unsubscribes may not be valuable, if they're only unsubscribed from specific email types, or may reengage or resubscribe later. 

I'm reluctant to offer too many specifics, as this should be something which the team comes to complete agreement on. You don't want to include contacts which you might possibly want to market to later, even as a drip campaign. (Also, in some circumstances, recreating previously-deleted contacts can be a pain, especially if you're trying to resync them to Salesforce, or use them with other connected integrations.)

For however many people might be responsible for this decision, get ironclad agreements as to which contacts have no purposeful reason to be in the portal. Once you reach that agreement, it's simply a matter of building the automation to send unwanted contacts to the purge list, and making sure someone purges that list on a periodic basis.

[#5]

Hey @pina this is a great question, and I'm delighted to see it has sparked such an informative conversation! 

We have just launched a new AMA (Ask Me Anything) thread here: I'm Angela, HubSpot Academy Professor. Ask Me Anything & get answers in a live broadcast!

@AngelaHicks is taking any and all questions from the Community on how to get the most out of HubSpot's marketing tools as well as queries on inbound marketing best practices. Angela will be answering questions throughout the week and will also be selecting some questions to answer live on the Academy's facebook live show this Friday. I hope you find this thread useful!