Spring Cleaning: Step by step guide to a sparkling database
Happy Spring Cleaning season to all who celebrate!
No? Just me?
Like it or not, a little database cleanup can go a long way. And while I’ll let you guess whether I’m being sarcastic or not, I will say this—few things make me happier than a clean, organized database.
If your open rates, reply rates, or new business deals aren’t where you’d like them to be, a messy database might be to blame. So, I’m sharing a few of my go-to tips for a spring data dusting. Fair warning: these are detailed and geared toward the database manager. If that’s not you, feel free to pass them along!
1. Remove hard bounces.
Get 'em out. I know it stings to delete leads you worked hard for, but keeping them hurts more. It damages your domain reputation, lowers your sender score, and makes your reply rates plummet.
HubSpot How-To: Create a contact list with the filter "Email Hard Bounce Reason" is known. Select all, update Lead Status (if you use that field), and tag them as non-marketing contacts.
2. Remove repeat soft bounces.
If an email keeps soft bouncing, it’s time to let it go.
HubSpot How-To: Create a list with the filters "Marketing Email Bounced" is greater than or equal to 3 AND "Email Hard Bounce Reason" is unknown. Select all, update Lead Status (if applicable), and tag them as non-marketing contacts.
3. Check for irrelevant leads.
This depends on your business, but let’s be real—you likely have leads in your database that will never buy. If you're selling to enterprise, a quick win is filtering out personal email addresses. Other useful segmentation fields: company size, industry, or title. If they won’t buy or influence a deal, do you really need them?
HubSpot How-To: No one-size-fits-all approach here, but a good start is creating a list with the filter "Email" "contains", then dropping in the top 20 personal email domains.
4. Run the rest through a list cleaning tool.
For large databases (500K+), this can get pricey, but it’s worth doing annually. It catches bounces before they hurt your domain and weeds out leads known for marking emails as spam (evil!). Some tools I like: Bouncer, ZeroBounce, and NeverBounce.
Ways to shrink your list before cleaning:
Exclude contacts created in the past year
Exclude anyone who opened a marketing email in the last three months
Exclude anyone who filled out a form in the last six months
If you want to be a real pro, set up automations and integrations to handle this in real-time. And if you already have? Now’s the time to make sure they’re working! (I recently audited a HubSpot setup and found that unsubscribes weren’t syncing into Salesforce—yikes.)
Or... ignore all of this and let RevRoutine clean your database for you. We’re even open to bartering—scrub our baseboards, and we’ll scrub your database. The reward? A sparkling sender score and better open/reply rates.
We have a lot of thoughts, ideas, experience, and opinions on database hygiene. If you ever want to chat about it, let us know.
