Think of your database as your home and every contact as a piece of furniture or decoration. To maintain your home’s cozy atmosphere, you channel your inner Marie Kondo and ask yourself whether an item still sparks joy.
You then declutter regularly to keep the pieces that bring you joy and donate or sell other items that you don’t need.
If your contact list has become outdated, that’s like keeping trash in your database and having a less effective CRM because you’re not reaching prospects.
You’re even spending time and money reaching out to prospects who are probably not receiving your messages because of incorrect contact information.
Here are other reasons you should not be afraid to let go of some contacts:
The health of every database—including yours—will gradually deteriorate. A database needs regular pruning to stay “healthy.”
According to reports, marketers lose up to 30% of their email contacts annually because of normal attrition. People leave companies and change email addresses. People move out to live in another city and change their addresses and phone numbers.
It’s hard to measure your email marketing’s success with a contact list that doesn’t get cleaned regularly. Your open and click-through rates are distorted figures.
An up-to-date contact list makes it easy for you to analyze data and draw better insights about your prospects and customers.
What is CRM data cleaning?
Also known as data cleansing or data scrubbing, data cleaning is the process of modifying or removing inaccurate, duplicate, incomplete, corrupted, or inconsistently formatted data.
CRM data cleaning is one of the processes of CRM data hygiene. The goal of data cleaning is to make sure your data is as accurate as possible. Think of it as spring-cleaning, a task you do on a regular basis to make sure you’re not collecting clutter at home.
Similar to your spring-cleaning, data cleansing is not a one-time effort. You can perform monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, or annual cleaning, depending on the amount of data that you have and your team’s workload.
The benefits of CRM data cleaning
Now that we’ve expanded on the dangers of contact hoarding let’s explore the good stuff.
What’s on the other side of a good CRM data cleaning routine? The numerous benefits of a regular data cleanse include:
Improved CRM data accuracy: When you remove obsolete data, you get accurate reports that reflect the true performance of your sales and marketing teams.
Increased sales and marketing efficiency: Avoid wasting resources on dead data – with up-to-date contacts in your system, you can be sure you’re targeting your contacts effectively.
Reduced costs: Sending mail to duplicate and obsolete contacts can become costly over time, so data cleaning can help your business save.
Data regulation compliance: Avoid costly fines and stay compliant by making sure your contact database is clean of deceased contacts or outdated information.
Improved customer experience: With contact clutter out of the way, your business can provide a more satisfactory experience to current and potential customers.
When should you delete a contact from your CRM database?
Now that you know the benefits of purging your hoarded contacts, let’s take the next step: Delete them. But how do you know when it’s time to bid them farewell?
It’s time to delete a contact from your CRM database when it’s:
Not engaged,
Bounced,
Unsubscribed,
Duplicated,
Or outdated.
Let’s look at each criterion in more detail to find out which kind of clutter is polluting your CRM database.
1. The contact is not engaged.
A contact who has not engaged with your business for over six months—or longer if your product or service has a longer buying cycle—can leave your database. This contact may no longer be interested in your products or services.
Before you delete unresponsive and unengaged contacts, though, make sure you’ve run re-engagement campaigns (which we’ll discuss further in the next section) to confirm if they’re no longer interested in your business.
2. The contact bounced.
There are two types of bounces: hard and soft.
A soft bounce refers to an email that temporarily fails to get delivered. Some of the possible reasons for a soft bounce are a full inbox or a server that’s down.
A hard bounce, on the other hand, takes place when an email permanently fails to deliver because the email address is invalid or the domain is no longer active.
Whichever type of bounce happens, delete the contact. The person is either no longer using the email address, or your email is going directly to their spam folder. Remember that bounces hurt your sender reputation.
3. The contact unsubscribed.
Delete a contact that unsubscribed from you. They are no longer interested in your services—and explicitly expressed that by unsubscribing. Like bounced contacts, those who unsubscribed are clutter in your contact list.
4. The contact is a duplicate.
You can either merge your duplicates or delete the outdated copy. Duplicate contacts clutter your contact list, making it difficult for team members to find the correct contact information.
5. The contact’s information is outdated.
As people move companies and states or simply change their phone numbers, database information can quickly become outdated.
While some contacts may offer their newly updated information, many won’t. And it’s your responsibility to ensure you’re not holding onto long-gone phone numbers and email addresses.
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6 CRM data hygiene tips for efficient relationship-building
Having a squeaky-clean contact list is a great place to start. Now let’s go through CRM data hygiene process tips so you can keep that contact list clean and your relationship-building as efficient as possible:
1. Identify the relevant and important data for your business
To make your data cleansing process efficient, you must know how you’ll use the data you collected. Doing so will help you identify which information is important for your business and which isn’t.
Ask your stakeholders to identify the relevant information they need. Does your marketing team need the sources where your leads came from? What customer information does your service team need to provide better customer support?
2. Create a data cleansing and maintenance schedule
Set a cleaning strategy and schedule. Having a schedule is important to keep your data up-to-date and to maintain your database’s cleanliness.
If your car has a maintenance schedule to ensure it’s always running in top shape, so should your database to make sure your CRM efforts are robust and efficient.
Set up monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, or annual reviews and data cleaning. Inform all the team members involved and set a recurring schedule to keep everyone on the same page.
3. Create documentation for your CRM data management’s standard practices
Have a live standard practices document of your CRM data management and share it with your team. The purpose of this documentation is to:
Provide guidelines for data gathering to make sure your team is collecting all the necessary information you need from prospects and customers
Provide templates to maximize your team’s efficiency
Guide team members on style rules such as capitalization
Guide team members on tips to keep your database clean and avoid contact hoarding
Reduce the number of errors in the future as you collect and maintain data
4. Use data validation tools to ensure contact accuracy
Thanks to advancements in software and automation, the mundane, time-consuming process of checking and cleaning contact data has been made much simpler.
Instead of going through each and every contact to check its validity, a robust contact validator tool can save your team precious time in your cleanup routine.
5. Run re-engagement campaigns to find out who’s still interested in your business
Before you delete an unresponsive contact, it’s best to make sure that they are no longer interested. The best way to find out is to run re-engagement campaigns.
You can send quarterly emails that check in on your contacts and ask, “Would you still like to hear from us?” or “We’d like to hear your feedback: How are we doing?”
6. Implement segmentation strategies on your cleaned-up list
When you’ve done a deep cleanse of your room or office, don’t you just suddenly have an appreciation for the things that were hidden under the clutter? Maybe you become more motivated to organize your space?
As a bonus step in your data cleaning routine, we recommend showing appreciation for your healthy and engaged contacts by doing some contact segmentation.
Of course, you can do this as a separate routine. However, with your current contacts still fresh in your mind, this may be the perfect time to use targeted segmentation to optimize your future sales and marketing efforts.
Stop contact hoarding. Start cleaning.
Letting go of contacts who are no longer relevant to your business is one of the best ways to keep your CRM data hygiene in top shape. Regular data cleansing can improve your team’s productivity and ROI.
