Do you remember having, or you may still have, a physical address book for your friends and family? When you looked at it last did you think ‘this is a bit messy’, people move houses and change phone numbers, the same is true for your business contacts, prospects and customers.
Your CRM will have incorrect information in it, people move jobs, job titles change, maybe the company has moved offices.
Keeping your CRM clean and correct is key. You don’t want emails to bounce or miss out on a prospective client.
Use these tips to keep your HubSpot database in top condition.
Proper case for first and last contact names
Make sure you’re using proper case, when the contact is used for say, an email, daniel looks unprofessional and looks like it’s automation in use, Daniel is correct. Using the wrong case will damage your conversion rates and credibility.
Phone number formatting
01905458696
(01905) 458696
01905 458696
01905 458 696
Choose one format for your contacts, this will make the numbers compatible with any systems that are pulling them for use and for your team who are using them to contact your prospects and customers.
Mail address formatting
We don’t do this as often now but posting mail still happens and formatting your contacts address correctly will save time when you come to pull these address for use. Postcodes especially, use either one or two parts. WR37QA or WR3 7QA
Email address formatting
This is one that 99 times out of 100 is correct. But people do make mistakes when filling in forms. Check that the address is name@company this will show when doing a mail shot but it’s better to get it right first.
Removing spaces, and unwanted characters will help your searches and filtering of contacts. Some characters may have appeared whilst exporting or importing data caused by encoding issues.
Standardise job titles
Job titles have become more specific in recent years but formatting job titles will help filter your lists ie. Chief Finance Officer or CFO, standardise to one or the other so when you search they will all appear.
Some job titles overlap, ie. content marketing manager, chief marketing officer, marketing director etc. Standardising these to one job title will give you the best chance to catch all when searching.
The same goes with industry if the industry is the same but the descriptions are different, change these to the same title. You can always add in notes if you want specific information for that one contact.
Link contacts to companies
In time contacts will move jobs or job titles, keeping on top of this will help you stay in touch with prospects, companies and clients. If you see that emails have bounced as the email is no longer in use.
This may be that your contact has moved on from that company or their role has changed, if you think this is the case, contact the company and ask for an updated contact.
Remove contacts that bounce
As above, contacts leave their jobs and email addresses are disabled. If your mail shot has a high bounce rate HubSpot will disable your email as they may think you’re spamming. Why does HubSpot suspend my emails?
Keep up to date with unsubscribers
With GDPR came a new responsibility to the data that you hold. Contacts that have unsubscribed from communication, marketing efforts or everything need to be taken notice of. If a contact has unsubscribed you contact’s entry will automatically update, but it’s worth keeping an eye on it as some will have unengaged by not opening the last 3-4 email’s you’ve sent.
You can use a workflow to send them an email saying that you’ve noticed the lack of engagement and asking if they’d like to unsubscribe or if there is something else you could help with.
Remove duplicated legacy fields
Removing fields that are similar to others, forms sometimes have similar fields so clearing the duplicated fields will make the contact easier to read and navigate.
Remove duplicate contacts
Sometimes a contact may have more than one entry, this will confuse you and your colleagues as you may be updating different entries thus not getting the best out of the tracking elements of your CRM.
HubSpot has a function for this - Clean up your database with ai powered duplicate management.
For further reading on keeping data clean see - https://blog.hubspot.com/customers/5-phases-cleaning-hubspot-crm-data