As you continue to use your HubSpot portal, you will probably notice that you enter more and more data about each one of your contacts. While this data is helpful and informative, it is useless if it is not clean and up to date. Since most of your HubSpot campaigns, emails, lists, and more will be based on your contact’s data, it is important that you take the necessary steps to ensure its integrity before it gets too messy.
The Importance of Clean Data
One of the things we like the most about using HubSpot for our CRM and marketing and sales tools is how much data we are able to collect and use from our contacts. However, if we take the time to create campaigns, lists, and other automated processes based on this data, we need to be able to trust that it is correct.
For example, let’s say we created an automated marketing email campaign to reach out to leads every quarter to check in. We set this up to occur automatically through workflows and lists to ensure that:
- We don’t forget to send it out and
- To save us time that we would have spent sending it out to the correct people every quarter
For this campaign, we want it to send out to every contact who has the lead status “Quarterly Checkup.” However, if our data is not clean, we could be missing a group of people who should be receiving this campaign content, or even worse, we could be sending it to people who shouldn’t be receiving it (such as current clients or leads we don’t want to market to).
By not taking the time to ensure the integrity of your data and set up processes to clean it up, you could risk creating ineffective marketing campaigns. This could cause your contacts to unsubscribe or lose faith in your message and you will not be able to reach out to them in the future.
However, if you make it a priority to first clean your current data and second implement processes to keep it up to date, you will be able to ensure that your automation, lists, campaigns, and more are safe and ready to send.
How to Decide What to Clean Up
We always recommend taking the time to make sure your contact data is clean when you enter it into HubSpot.
However, this is not always possible for a couple of reasons. You could simply not have that information about your contact at the moment or you could not be aware of a certain property or piece of data you need for a future campaign.
Once your portal, data, and campaigns have developed, you might be at the place where you realize the importance of keeping everything clean. However, there are so many properties HubSpot offers when it comes to data tracking. How do you decide which is imperative to your business operations to keep clean?
The properties you choose to manage and keep clean really depends on how you run your campaigns and manage your contact lists.
However, there are a few that you check for every contact that should be pretty standard across the board, including email address, first and last name, and phone number so you always have a way to get in touch with your contacts. To check these, you can just run a filtered search in your contact list to make sure they’re all filled out.
After that is complete, you can decide which properties are important to processes you have in place in your portal and include that in your monthly checks.
For example, we have a workflow tracking sheet that we use to manage what triggers will enroll contacts in every workflow we have in place. It is important to us to include those properties and triggers in our monthly clean data checks.
We also use lead statuses and deal stages as we progress our contacts through our sales process, so to ensure those are always up to date, we include those in our monthly checks as well.
Other properties we check in HubSpot to make sure data stays clean include:
- Contact owner - this is important to us because many workflows and form submissions are set to notify a contact owner and if there is none, those leads may be lost in the shuffle
- Companies, deals, and contact associations - if a contact is associated with a deal or a company we want to make sure that those records are tied together so nothing is missed between the three.
- Deal Closed Lost Reason - we need to know why a deal was lost so we can properly categorize the contact for any future interactions
- Other Original Properties - if we create any original properties, especially ones for specific campaigns and workflows, we need to be sure those are filled out and the contact is appropriately categorized.
How to track and clean your data monthly:
The process we have implemented to both clean up current data, as well as check monthly for the future, is a simple solution - create a list.
For any contact property we want to check, we create a list that checks for any contact who does not have that specific property filled out. The goal (for the most part) is for the list to always stay empty since that would mean the data is clean.
For example, we want to make sure every contact in our portal is assigned a HubSpot owner. To check this, we would:
- Create a list titled “Data Cleanup - Contact without Owner”
- The criteria for this list would be Contact Owner is Unknown.
- Any contact who is a member of this list would have unclean data and simply need to be assigned a contact owner.
- Once they have an owner, they are automatically removed from the list.
- We can then keep an eye on this list and once a month (or however often you need), take the time to clear out all members of this list.
These lists can be created for all of your important monthly data checks to keep your data intact and clean.
Conclusion
While HubSpot is a great tool to assist with your sales and marketing processes, it can get complicated if you don’t have good contact data to work with. Taking the time to create processes to keep your data clean and up to date will help you to create better workflows and automation as well as save you time in the long run.
As you use these processes to keep the integrity of your contact data, you can be sure that as you develop more complex campaigns and reach out to more people, you are touching the right contacts and your message is being seen by the right group of people.