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 A cluttered or outdated database doesn’t just affect your marketing performance—it can increase your HubSpot costs and hinder the effectiveness of your campaigns.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.
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 A bloated database with outdated, duplicate, or inactive contacts means you’re likely paying more than you should.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:
Here are the key benefits of cleaning your database before renewal:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now that your contact database is clean, how do you keep it that way? Here are some tips.
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.
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:
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:
While database cleaning is essential, there are a few common mistakes that marketers make. Here’s how to avoid them:
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:
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.