How healthy is your marketing database? Are you paying for records you will never market to? These questions and more are some that you should be asking yourself every year. Most customer relationship management (CRM) systems or marketing automation (MA) systems allow you to store a certain number of records. Beyond that threshold you have to pay for more space. But if your database is 20% unusable records, you can easily reduce costs by cleaning up your database and removing records you will never use.
Additionally, by having a cleaner database you can increase your deliverability and engagement rates by sending only to valid email addresses as well as people who engage with your content. But while these benefits sound great, many people wonder where to even begin, as this can seem like an overwhelming task. You might not even be aware of all of the features of your MA system. So here are five easy steps to help you clean up your database, save money and improve your marketing engagement.
NOTE: This blog will use some Marketo terminology but these concepts can be applied to any MA system.
1. Identify duplicate records.
Duplicate records can cause many issues in your CRM and MA system. They can throw off your lifecycle, email marketing and so much more. Plus, you do not want to pay for three versions of the same record. To get rid of duplicates, create a dynamic (or smart) list that looks for duplicate email addresses.
Once you have your list, all duplicates will need to be combined. Adobe has a help article specifically about combining duplicates in Marketo. Depending on how large the list is, the process of combining records could require other people’s help. You may need to reach out to your sales team for assistance in deciding which record should win, or even seek outside support. So while this process may take some time, your sales and marketing teams will appreciate the result of your hard work.
After you do your initial duplicate cleanup, be sure to set up an email subscription to this report. We recommend a monthly subscription—once a month Marketo or your MA system will email you the duplicate list. This way you can regularly go in and clean up any duplicates and look for any processes that might be creating the duplicates.
2. Make a list of inactive records.
Inactive records are those that your company has not interacted with in any way in a given amount of time. Always consider the length of your sales cycle when determining the time window of being non-active. By default, we recommend 18-24 months as a time window. This way you can allow for up to two years with no engagement to ensure that prospects are no longer showing interest.
Here are some criteria you should consider when creating your smart list. Have contacts:
- Been created before the timeframe of your activity window (this will exclude anyone who was recently created and has not had the chance to engage yet)?
- Not opened or clicked an email?
- Not clicked on an ad?
- Not visited your website?
- Not filled out a form?
- Not changed program status?
- Not changed their subscription status?
When creating this smart list, be sure to use ALL or AND logic. You want it to read: They have not clicked an ad AND they have not filled out a form. We want to be sure everything is true.
Once your list is created, review it and make sure it looks correct. Some marketing systems do not keep activity records back very far. Play around with the timeframe of your list, or filters used, until you and your team agree that this list is correct and all records are cleared for deletion.
3. Build a list of Invalid, Marketing Suspended, No Email Address, Unsubscribed, and Bounced records.
Sending emails to bad email addresses can hurt your sender reputation. This can limit the number of good addresses that will receive your emails. To help keep up your reputation, as well as clean up your database, we recommend creating a smart list looking for Invalid, Marketing Suspended, No Email Address, Unsubscribed, and Bounced email addresses.
Unlike the previous list, we want this smart list logic to be OR. So it would read: they are invalid OR they are suspended. This way it casts a wider net than using the “AND” operator.
Once the list is created be sure to review it. This will allow you time to address email issues people on the list might have, such as:
- Commas at the end of an email address
- Space in the middle of the address
- Special characters in the address
- Missing .com or .net at the end of the address
4. Identify students, competitors and undesirable records.
Many people want information about your company and product even though they aren’t target customers. It may be a student researching for a school project, or another company researching the competition. You don’t want to spend money on storing records for people that will never buy your product.
You should create a smart list that filters for people with email addresses of competitors, schools or any other type of organization you don’t want to email. This could even be internal employees.
5. Back up records and delete them.
Finally, after creating all these smart lists, you have the ability to back up and delete the records. Create one more smart list that includes anyone in the lists you created in steps 2, 3 or 4. Share this list with sales teams or analytics teams or even the broader marketing team. Let them know that you are planning to remove these people from the system, and ask if this will affect them. You want to ensure that deleting these records will have as little impact on anything else as possible.
Once you have sign-off from the other teams, download any relevant information from your list, just in case you need to re-load them into your system for any reason. Suggested items to back up are First name, Last Name, Company, Email Address, Country and Subscriptions. But you can back up any information you wish.
Once all the information is backed up in another system, the information can be deleted from your MA system as well as your CRM. Adobe also has a great write up of how to delete people, which can be found here. Marketo does have a durable unsubscribe so if someone comes back into your system that you previously deleted and had unsubscribed, the system will know to mark them as unsubscribe.
The Iron Horse insight.
Deleting these records from your system will make your system cleaner. This will increase your deliverability rate as well as help your company save money, by not requiring a larger database subscription. These clean-up practices should be done at least every year (some multiple times a year, such as removing duplicates). There are also a few practices that should be incorporated into your normal operations, such as automatically marking an email address as invalid if it bounces more than 3 times in 90 days. Think of it as spring cleaning, providing a better environment for handling your company’s records. Happy cleaning!
