Data hygiene best practices in HubSpot

A messy customer relationship management (CRM) database is like a messy house: the clutter makes it difficult to find what you need most. Capturing contact information is an important part of your business development strategy, but inaccurate entries, unlogged-in users or outdated information can make your CRM cluttered and negatively impact your marketing efforts, sales productivity and customer retention.

Routine data cleansing allows you to focus on the contacts that are important to the success of your business.

Whether you're cleaning up your CRM for the first time or looking for a new approach, here are some best practices you can use to clean up your CRM on a routine basis.

What is data hygiene?

Data hygiene describes the process of eliminating bad data to optimize your database and ensure you have only high-quality, relevant information. So what is bad data and what is good data?

Bad data includes irrelevant or outdated information, incomplete contact information, or conflicting data, such as multiple phone numbers for two contact entries.

Good data is accurate, current, and consistent.

It is important to know that good data is not just about accuracy. CRM data should focus on quality over quantity. Remember that you are paying to store your data.

So make sure the information is useful to improve your team, create more efficient operations, and increase your company's ROI.

How can I remove bad data from my CRM system?

Determining which data is good and which is bad is part of your data audit. In this phase, you review the health of your data by determining whether it is current, useful, and relevant to
your team. This will help you determine what data is worth keeping and what can be removed.

In many cases, bad data is due to data entry errors, but you should also be aware of these possibilities:

Rejected or unsubscribed contacts

If you have created a list of outdated contacts, you can use this procedure to delete them from your database.

Double contacts

Identify and delete duplicates during your cleanup process. Depending on your subscription level, HubSpot offers a duplicate management tool that uses machine learning to search for duplicate contacts, companies, and properties.

Unreached contacts

It is inevitable that some contacts will become disengaged over time. Although determining whether a contact is no longer involved is not a perfect science, there are good rules of thumb for identifying disengaged contacts:

• A contact who has never opened a marketing email and has not opened the last 11 emails
.
• A contact who has opened a marketing email in the past, but has not opened the last 16 emails
.

How can I maintain a clean CRM?

1. Specify who will clean the CRM

Cleansing CRM data will likely look different for each team. Regardless, it is important to develop a standardized approach to data cleansing.

You could designate a CRM manager to cleanse the data on a regular basis. Alternatively, you could consider cleansing as a team effort to ensure that each team member manages the data for which they are responsible. This option is suitable for larger organizations that frequently enter large amounts of data that would be impossible for a single team member to manage.

2. Create a cleaning schedule

Once you have determined who will do the cleanup, establish a consistent routine. Rather than being overzealous and assessing data every time a record is entered, establish a monthly, quarterly or annual schedule, depending on the amount of data you are dealing with.

It will take some time to set the right schedule for your business, so you might start with an annual review. You could schedule your cleanup around other important annual events, such as tax season, and think of this as your "spring cleaning" for data. Regardless of the timing, your cleanup will result in less clutter and more productive messaging to useful contacts.

3. Standardization of data entry

One way to make data cleansing easier for your team is to standardize the data entry process to minimize future cleansing. One important way to standardize the process is to set up property fields that automatically appear when contacts or companies are manually created. This creates consistency in the entry process.

You can use the same strategy when potential customers enter their data into a form. This way, you get information in key fields that are useful for your team.

To ensure that your data is consistent, check your contacts against key fields that are not of value to a contact. For example, if a contact doesn't have a specific industry, the "Industry Unknown" criterion lets you categorize that contact more precisely.

4. Leverage HubSpot's integrations for support

To assist with data collection and assessment, you can leverage one or more of HubSpot's data management integrations:

ZoomInfo is a B2B software platform that contextualizes contact information from multiple sources to enrich the data and create a more complete picture without much friction with the prospect.

Leadspace
Is especially useful for sales teams, as it manages accurate data to optimize the distribution of leads to the right team members.

Insycle Data Management
Enables you to automate data cleansing with features such as duplicate record merging, standardized values, and record matching on data import.

Dynamics by SyncSmart
provides your CRM leads and contacts with lead intelligence data that enables you to segment and market to contacts effectively.

5. Consistency is the key

There is no magic formula for a clean CRM. That's why it's important to establish a standard process for data entry and follow your routine for data cleansing. Ultimately, your entire team should be using the same data to ensure solutions are found and your customers receive comprehensive service.