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Best Practices for Maintaining a Clean Lead Database

Andrew Sheridan Business Intelligence Project Manager, DialogTech

Cleaning up the lead database is something all marketers will need to do from time to time. Most databases, such as those found in marketing automation or CRM solutions, entitle you to a set amount of storage, which will be measured in gigabytes or number of records. Once your database gets close to or exceeds your limit, you will in all likelihood be contacted by the vendor and asked to reduce the size of your database or to purchase more storage space. When that happens, you can use the following methods to clean up your database, but performing a routine cleanup on a semi-annual basis will also help prevent you from reaching your limit and restrict the amount of work needed to keep your database at a healthy size.

Best Practices for Reducing Your Lead Count

  • Duplicates: Having a high number of duplicate leads is one of the easiest ways to reach your database limit. Unfortunately, it is often one of the more difficult steps to take. Start by identifying duplicates using a unique identifier – this will most likely be an email address (for higher precision look for leads with the same email address, full name, etc.). Once duplicates have been identified, you can then begin the process of “de-duping.” Ideally, this is accomplished by merging duplicate records in order to prevent any data loss. Secondary records for the same lead can also be deleted, but this is not best practice.
  • Leads without an email address: Another good chunk of leads that can be deleted are those with no email address. This is especially relevant for lead databases in a marketing automation system due to the fact that the vast majority of contact is done via automated emails. If you do not have the ability to email these leads, they don’t hold much value to you as a marketer. Part of this group should also be leads with invalid email addresses. Marketing to these leads is extremely difficult when your emails will not be delivered.
  • Chronic bounces: Leads with email addresses that are consistently bouncing are ones that you do not want to keep in your database. These are leads that have been sent multiple emails that repeatedly bounced in a set period of time (3 months is standard). The number of bounces and period of time is variable depending on your campaign frequency. Continuing to email these leads is risky due to the possibility of them turning into a spamtrap.
  • Inactive leads: These are the leads that have not interacted with your company for a determined period of time. This means that they have not opened any of your marketing emails, visited any of your webpages, filled out any forms, or connected with your company in any other way. You should also filter out any leads that were created within a certain timeframe, such as 1 year or 6 months, to ensure that they have had a sensible amount of time to become an active lead.

Steps to Take Before Deleting Leads

There are a number of things to take into consideration before deleting any records from your lead database. You should always verify that leads are not actually current customers. This would be a simple explanation for why they have not had any recent contact or activity.

Leads who have not been active in recent months also can be re-engaged instead of deleted right away. These leads may have simply forgotten about your company and could now be open to working with you. However, you still need to be careful when emailing leads that have been inactive for longer periods of time as these could have turned into spamtraps.

Before you delete any leads from your database, it is extremely important to export all of their lead data. This ensures that you always have a record of the lead and their information, while enabling you to safely remove them from your database.

Why Stay Clean?

Maintaining a clean database can help your marketing organization in a number of ways. Most importantly, it will help keep you under your database limit, ensuring you don’t need to purchase more storage. By eliminating your old and inactive leads you will increase your email deliverability and reduce the possibilities of hitting spamtraps. And finally, by merging duplicate leads in your database you will increase the amount of data that was previously available for marketing and sales to use to close more business. Always say yes to better data!