5 Steps to Clean Up HubSpot Contacts Efficiently

Maintaining a clean and up-to-date HubSpot CRM is crucial for businesses looking to optimize their sales and marketing efforts. Over time, contact data can become outdated, duplicated, or inconsistent, leading to reduced performance and inefficiencies. In this step-by-step guide, we'll walk you through the process of cleaning up your HubSpot contacts, ensuring your CRM remains a powerful tool for driving business growth.

Initial Assessment of HubSpot CRM Data

Before diving into the process of cleaning up your HubSpot contacts, it's crucial to assess the current state of your CRM data. This initial evaluation helps identify areas that need attention and prioritize your data cleanup efforts.

Over time, various types of data can degrade, leading to inefficiencies and inaccuracies in your business operations. Some common data issues include:

• Duplicate contacts and companies
• Incomplete or missing information
• Inconsistent formatting
• Outdated or irrelevant data

These data quality issues can negatively impact your marketing campaigns, sales processes, and customer support efforts. By identifying and addressing them early on, you can ensure that your HubSpot CRM remains a reliable and effective tool for driving business growth. Data enrichment can help in this process.

HubSpot offers several built-in tools and features to help you assess your data quality, such as:

1. Contact and company reports
2. Data quality dashboard
3. Duplicate management tools

By leveraging these resources, you can gain a clear understanding of the current state of your CRM data and develop a targeted plan for cleaning up your HubSpot contacts. Learn more about sales prospecting tools that can assist in this effort.

Identifying and Removing Outdated Contacts

To maintain a clean and efficient CRM database, it's essential to identify and remove outdated contacts regularly. These contacts may include those who have hard bounced emails or unsubscribed from your communications.

Follow these steps to effectively remove outdated contacts from your HubSpot database:

1. Use HubSpot's built-in email health tools to identify contacts with hard bounces or unsubscribes.
2. Create a smart list that filters contacts based on specific criteria, such as last engagement date, email bounce reason, or unsubscribe status.
3. Export the list of outdated contacts and review it to ensure no valuable contacts are accidentally removed.
4. Use HubSpot's bulk delete feature to remove the outdated contacts from your database.
5. Implement a regular process to identify and remove outdated contacts, such as quarterly or bi-annually, depending on your business needs.

Keeping outdated contacts in your CRM can lead to several issues, including:

• Decreased email deliverability and sender reputation due to high bounce rates
• Inaccurate reporting and analytics due to inflated contact numbers
• Increased CRM costs, especially if your plan is based on the number of contacts
• Reduced efficiency in marketing and sales efforts due to time spent on unengaged or invalid contacts

By regularly identifying and removing outdated contacts, you can ensure your HubSpot CRM remains a valuable and effective tool for driving business growth. For more tips on how to automate sales prospecting, visit our resources.

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Handling Duplicate Contacts in HubSpot

Duplicate contacts can lead to confusion, inefficiencies, and inaccurate reporting in your HubSpot CRM. To maintain a clean and high-performing database, it's crucial to identify and merge duplicate contacts regularly. Here's how to handle duplicates in HubSpot:

1. Navigate to the Contacts or Companies tab in your HubSpot account.
2. Click on the "Actions" dropdown menu and select "Manage duplicates."
3. HubSpot will automatically display a list of potential duplicate contacts based on matching email addresses, names, or company domains.
4. Review the list of potential duplicates and select the contacts you want to merge.
5. Choose the primary contact record that you want to keep, which will inherit all data from the merged contacts.
6. Click "Merge" to combine the selected duplicate contacts into a single record.

Maintaining a unique dataset in your CRM offers several benefits, such as:

• Improved data accuracy and reliability
• Better segmentation and personalization in marketing campaigns
• Increased efficiency in sales and customer service interactions
• More accurate reporting and analytics

To streamline the process of identifying duplicates, HubSpot offers some automated tools:

• Automatic deduplication: HubSpot automatically merges contacts with the same email address upon import or creation.
• Duplicate management tool: Access this feature through the "Actions" menu to identify and merge duplicates based on various criteria.
• Third-party integrations: Utilize apps like Dedupely or Insycle to enhance duplicate identification and management capabilities.

By regularly identifying and merging duplicate contacts using HubSpot's built-in tools and automation tools for enrichment, you can ensure your CRM remains organized, efficient, and effective in driving your business growth.

Standardizing Data Entry and Collection

Consistent data entry and collection practices are essential for maintaining a clean and efficient HubSpot CRM. Standardizing your data ensures that information is accurate, complete, and easily searchable, which is crucial for effective segmentation and personalized marketing efforts. Here are some guidelines for standardizing data entry and collection in HubSpot:

1. Define mandatory fields: Identify the essential information you need for each contact record and make those fields mandatory. This ensures that critical data is always captured.
2. Set default values: Establish default values for certain fields to maintain consistency and save time during data entry. For example, set a default country or lead source.
3. Create drop-down menus: Use drop-down menus for fields with a limited set of possible values, such as job titles or industries. This reduces the risk of typos and inconsistencies.
4. Implement data validation rules: Set up validation rules to ensure that data entered meets specific criteria, such as a valid email address format or phone number structure.
5. Provide clear instructions: Offer guidance to users on how to enter data correctly, including examples and explanations of why standardization matters.

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By standardizing your data entry and collection processes, you can:

• Improve data accuracy and reliability
• Simplify data segmentation for targeted marketing campaigns
• Enable more personalized communication with contacts
• Enhance reporting and analytics capabilities
• Automate lead enrichment

Investing time in establishing and maintaining data standards will pay off in the long run by ensuring your HubSpot CRM remains a powerful and effective tool for driving business growth.

Engaging and Retaining Active Contacts

Identifying and engaging with actively engaged contacts is crucial for maintaining a healthy and productive CRM. By leveraging interaction data within HubSpot, you can pinpoint contacts who are most likely to respond positively to your outreach efforts. Here's how:

1. Analyze email open and click-through rates to determine which contacts are engaging with your content.
2. Track website visits and form submissions to identify contacts who are actively researching your products or services.
3. Monitor social media interactions, such as likes, comments, and shares, to gauge interest and engagement levels.

Once you've identified your most engaged contacts, implement targeted campaigns to keep them interested and invested in your brand. Consider the following strategies:

• Develop personalized email nurture sequences that deliver relevant, valuable content based on their interests and behavior.
• Create exclusive offers or promotions to reward their engagement and encourage further interaction.
• Invite them to webinars, events, or product demos to deepen their connection with your brand.

For contacts who have become dormant, use HubSpot's smart lists to automate the process of re-engaging them. Set up criteria that identify contacts who haven't interacted with your brand in a specific timeframe, and enroll them in a re-engagement workflow. This could include:

• A "We miss you" email campaign that incentivizes them to reconnect.
• A survey or feedback request to gather insights on why they've become disengaged.
• An invitation to update their email preferences or communication frequency.

By leveraging HubSpot's powerful automation tools and focusing on delivering value to your most engaged contacts, you can build lasting relationships that drive long-term business growth.

Scheduling Regular Data Maintenance

Maintaining a clean CRM database is an ongoing process, not a one-time event. To ensure your data remains accurate and up-to-date, it's essential to establish a regular schedule for data maintenance. Here are some best practices to consider:

1. Set a cadence for data audits: Depending on the size of your database and the rate at which new data is added, schedule monthly, quarterly, or bi-annual data audits to identify and address any issues.
2. Assign ownership: Designate a team or individual responsible for overseeing the data maintenance process. This ensures accountability and consistency in the approach.
3. Leverage automation: Utilize automated workflows within your CRM to streamline data cleansing tasks, such as identifying and merging duplicate records, validating email addresses, and removing inactive contacts.

To create a maintenance schedule that works for your business, consider the following template:

• Monthly: Run automated data cleansing workflows to identify and merge duplicates, update contact information, and remove inactive records.
• Quarterly: Conduct a manual review of key data fields, such as job titles, company names, and industry classifications, to ensure consistency and accuracy.
• Bi-Annually: Perform a comprehensive data audit to assess overall data health, identify areas for improvement, and update data management processes as needed.

By establishing a regular cadence for data maintenance and leveraging the power of automation, you can minimize the time and resources required to keep your CRM data clean, while ensuring your team has access to accurate, reliable information to drive business growth.

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Leveraging Integrations and Tools for Data Management

While HubSpot offers a robust set of features for managing your CRM data, integrating third-party tools can further improve your data cleaning processes and overall system efficiency. Here are some ways to leverage integrations and specialized tools:

• Insycle: This powerful data management tool integrates seamlessly with HubSpot, allowing you to perform bulk data cleaning operations, such as updating, standardizing, and deduplicating records.
• Data validation tools: Integrate data validation services to ensure the accuracy of contact information, such as email addresses, phone numbers, and mailing addresses.
• Data enrichment platforms: Automate data enrichment by integrating with providers that can append missing information or provide additional insights on your contacts.

By incorporating these tools into your HubSpot CRM, you can automate many data management tasks, reducing manual effort and minimizing the risk of human error. Additionally, these integrations can help you maintain a higher level of data quality, leading to improved segmentation, personalization, and overall CRM performance.

When selecting integrations and tools, consider factors such as ease of use, compatibility with HubSpot, and the specific data management challenges you aim to address. By leveraging the right combination of HubSpot's native features and third-party tools, you can create a powerful, efficient, and user-friendly CRM system that drives better business outcomes. For example, automated lead management can streamline processes significantly.

Cleaning up your HubSpot contacts can be a tedious task, but it's essential for maintaining an organized database that supports your marketing and sales efforts. While manual clean-up is effective, automating this process can save a significant amount of time and ensure continuous data hygiene. Bardeen offers powerful playbooks that can automate various aspects of managing your HubSpot contacts, from copying contacts to different platforms for further processing to enriching contact information for more personalized communication.

1. Copy all HubSpot contacts to Coda: This playbook enables you to seamlessly transfer all your HubSpot contacts to a Coda table with just one click. It's ideal for teams looking to integrate their CRM data with Coda's versatile documents for advanced data manipulation and sharing.
2. Save LinkedIn profile to HubSpot as a new contact: Leverage LinkedIn for sales prospecting by automating the addition of LinkedIn profiles to your HubSpot contacts. This playbook simplifies capturing valuable lead information directly into your CRM, enriching your contact database for targeted outreach.
3. Copy all HubSpot contacts to Google Sheets: Automate the transfer of your HubSpot contacts to Google Sheets for easy sharing and further data analysis. This playbook ensures your sales and marketing teams have access to the most current contact information, facilitating collaboration and strategic planning.