The health and organization of your data is essential for any business, but it's especially critical when you're using HubSpot to manage customer relationships. Data alone will not drive success. You can negatively impact your customer relationships if your data is inaccurate, incomplete, or outdated.
The purpose of this article is to discuss why periodic data cleaning is crucial to HubSpot's performance and provide best practices for maintaining accurate and fresh data.
Marketing and sales professionals need accurate and up-to-date data to make informed decisions about customers, leads, and prospects. A lack of accurate or current data can lead to inaccurate analysis and poor decision-making. It can also damage your reputation with customers, leading to lost opportunities and revenue.
Additionally, keeping your data clean and organized can help you avoid the costs associated with sending emails to inactive or invalid email addresses. If you have a large number of invalid or inactive email addresses in your HubSpot database, your email deliverability may suffer. Cleansing your data regularly can help you maintain a high delivery rate and prevent spam flags.
Establish a Data Clean Up Schedule: Cleanup of data should be performed on a regular basis. The frequency of these reviews will vary depending on the size of your database, but quarterly or biannual reviews are a good place to start. The HubSpot platform makes it easy to find and update outdated or incomplete data.
Audit Your Data: Auditing your data to identify any duplicates, inconsistencies, or outdated data will be a good start. To learn about the different types of audits you can perform on HubSpot, click here.
Identify Duplicate Records: Database duplication can cause confusion and inaccuracies. The Duplicate Management tool in HubSpot allows you to find and merge duplicate records. Here you can find the full guide on system duplications.
Remove Inactive or Invalid Records: Review your data for inactive or invalid records and remove them from your database. The result will be better email deliverability to your subscribers and a decrease in email campaign costs.
Standardize Data Fields: It can be challenging to analyze your data accurately if your data fields are inconsistent. By standardizing your data fields, you will be able to keep your data clean and organized. Custom fields can be defined in HubSpot's platform to suit your business needs.
Set Up Workflows: You can automate data entry and updates with HubSpot's workflows, reducing the risk of errors and ensuring that new data is always accurate.
Train Your Team: Your team should be trained in best practices for data entry and management to maintain clean, organized data.
Data is the lifeblood of any business, and keeping it clean and organized is crucial to success. Data fragmentation can occur as businesses grow and evolve. By maintaining scheduled audits and periodic clean-ups, it will remain accurate and relevant. It will lead to better marketing campaigns, more efficient operations, and better decision-making.
Additional reading on this topic is available on HubSpot’s blog.