How to Clean Your Contact Database Before Your HubSpot Renewal

As your HubSpot renewal approaches, it’s the perfect time to review and clean your contact database. A cluttered or outdated database doesn’t just affect your marketing performance—it can increase your HubSpot costs and hinder the effectiveness of your campaigns. 

By taking the time to clean your database now, you can ensure your CRM is optimized, reduce costs, and improve your marketing results.

In this post, we’ll take a deep dive through six steps to clean your contact database and maximize value during your HubSpot renewal.

If you're looking for information about how to keep your HubSpot portal clean and running at it's best, read this article on how to keep a clutter-free HubSpot portal.

Why Cleaning Your Database Is Essential Before HubSpot Renewal

Your HubSpot subscription cost is based partly on the number of contacts stored in your CRM. Note that even if you don’t have HubSpot Sales Hub, HubSpot counts the number of marketing contacts in your portal. A bloated database with outdated, duplicate, or inactive contacts means you’re likely paying more than you should. Regular database cleaning helps you avoid this by removing irrelevant contacts and ensuring you’re focused on the people who matter most to your business.

According to several research studies, approximately 22-26% of an email database becomes stale or decays each year. For example, HubSpot states that email marketing databases naturally degrade by about 22.5% every year.

This rapid degradation of email data occurs due to various factors:

• People changing jobs or email providers
• Businesses closing or merging
• People abandoning old personal email addresses
• Typos and invalid emails entering the database

Here are the key benefits of cleaning your database before renewal:

• Improves email deliverability: Removing invalid or outdated contacts reduces bounce rates and enhances sender reputation.
• Enhances reporting accuracy: Clean data leads to better insights, helping you make informed marketing decisions.
• Lowers unnecessary costs: By deleting inactive or irrelevant contacts, you’ll only pay for the contacts that add value to your business. For example, we’ve had success helping businesses reduce their costs by cleaning their contact list by an average of $1,200 per year.
• Boosts lead segmentation: A clean database allows you to target specific audiences more effectively, enabling better personalization and nurturing efforts.

Step-by-Step Guide to Identify and Delete Contacts

Here’s the structured approach we use in our daily work with clients to clean contact databases before renewal. Use this approach to clean your database, too.

Step 1: Identify and Merge Duplicate Contacts

Duplicate contacts can clutter your database and lead to the embarrassing situation of sending an email to the same person twice. Use HubSpot’s built-in Duplicates Tool to automatically detect and merge contacts with matching data. This ensures that all interactions and information are consolidated under one entry.

Step 2: Segment Inactive or Disengaged Contacts

Identifying contacts who haven’t engaged with your business recently is important. Use HubSpot’s list segmentation tool to create lists of inactive contacts. We normally filter for contacts that haven’t visited the company website or opened an email in the last year, and that don’t have an active deal. From here, you can either remove them or run a re-engagement campaign to test their interest.

Step 3: Segment Geographically Irrelevant Contacts

If you only sell products or services in a certain geographic area, you can segment contacts that fall outside of that area for removal. For example, we don’t sell outside of North America, so we segment “international contacts” for removal from our system.

Step 4: Segment Bounces and Unsubscribes

There’s no use keeping contacts in your database that can’t receive your messages or don’t want to hear from you. HubSpot allows you to filter out hard-bounced and unsubscribed contacts while keeping your list clean and compliant.

Step 5: Review Non-Marketing Contacts

One often overlooked aspect of database cleaning is dealing with non-marketing contacts. These are contacts that might exist in your HubSpot CRM for reasons outside of marketing and sales, such as internal team members, vendors, or other third-party contacts that don’t need to be part of your active marketing efforts. It’s best to review these contacts and decide if any are worth keeping in your database.

Step 6: Archive and Delete Contacts

Following the steps above, you’ll have several new lists in HubSpot. The best practice is to export each list and move it to a shared server in case you need to re-import any of these records in the future. Now that you’ve backed up these contacts, you can delete the contacts from HubSpot. Keep in mind that you have to delete the contacts, not the list, as deleting the lists will not delete the contacts. 

I recommend keeping the lists for future contact audits.

Is Deleting Unsubscribed Contacts Safe?

I’ve gotten questions in the past about CAN-SPAM compliance with unsubscribes. If you delete a contact and they’ve unsubscribed, what happen if they are added as a contact in the future?

Even if you delete a contact in HubSpot after they have unsubscribed from your emails, their unsubscribe preference is still saved. If a new contact is created with the same email address, they will also be automatically opted out of receiving marketing emails. The unsubscribe status is tied to the email address, not the contact record itself. 

Best Practices for Maintaining a Clean HubSpot Database

Now that your contact database is clean, how do you keep it that way? Here are some tips.

1. Implement Regular Audits

Cleaning your database should not be a one-time task. Set up a recurring schedule (monthly or quarterly) to audit your HubSpot contacts and remove any unnecessary data. That’s why I recommend saving the lists you created above rather than deleting them. Contacts will automatically show up in these lists for future contact audits, saving you time.

💡 Pro Tip: Create saved lists for inactive contacts, duplicates, unsubscribes, and bounced emails so you can easily monitor them during your regular audits.

2. Use Workflows for Automation

HubSpot workflows can automate parts of your database management. Set up workflows to auto-assign lifecycle stages, notify your team when contacts become inactive, or even delete certain contacts after a specified period of inactivity.

💡 Possible Automation Workflow Use Cases:

• Automatically unsubscribe contacts who have been unengaged for over 12 months.
• Notify the sales team when a contact associated with a deal hasn’t been contacted in over 90 days.
• Move contacts to a "re-engagement" list if their lead score drops below a certain threshold.

3. Keep Your Team Trained and Aligned

Ensuring that everyone on your marketing and sales team follows the same data entry standards will help keep your database clean in the long run. Inaccurate or incomplete contact details and inconsistent data tracking practices can quickly lead to a cluttered database.

💡 Tips for Team Training:

• Establish clear data entry guidelines.
• Train your team on HubSpot’s contact properties and the importance of keeping records up to date.
• Encourage the regular use of HubSpot’s duplicate contact tool.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Cleaning Your Database

While database cleaning is essential, there are a few common mistakes that marketers make. Here’s how to avoid them:

• Deleting too aggressively: While it’s tempting to clear out large numbers of inactive contacts, some may simply need a better re-engagement strategy or nurturing approach. Consider a re-engagement campaign before mass deletions.
• Neglecting inactive contacts entirely: On the flip side, don’t let inactive contacts sit idle without testing their interest. Re-engagement efforts often reveal valuable leads that just need the right messaging.
• Over-relying on automation: Automation can save time, but always double-check your results before making permanent changes. Be careful!
• Not backing up contacts: Before deleting contacts, export them and store them in case you need to access the data in the future.
• Not restricting access to delete contacts: Restricting access to who can delete contacts will ensure that contacts don’t get accidentally deleted.

How a Clean Database Improves HubSpot Performance and ROI

A clean, well-organized database makes your HubSpot tools more efficient and ensures that your marketing and sales teams are working with reliable data. Here’s how cleaning your database impacts HubSpot’s performance:

• Higher engagement rates: With clean, relevant contacts, your email open and click-through rates will improve, leading to more engagement.
• More accurate reporting: Clean data allows for better insights into campaign performance and audience behavior, helping you make data-driven decisions.

Clean Your Database Before HubSpot Renewal for Maximum Impact

Cleaning your contact database isn’t just a housekeeping task—it’s a strategic move that can save you money, improve your marketing efforts, and make your HubSpot tools work harder for you. By following the steps outlined here and leveraging HubSpot’s built-in tools, you’ll have a more efficient, organized, and high-performing database.