3 ways to clean up your CRM
A CRM is only as good as the data and processes you put into it.
You won’t believe the amount of people that think they can just buy HubSpot or Salesforce and are shocked when their marketing doesn’t instantly improve or their close rates don’t increase.
You must create your own system within the CRM so it works FOR you, not against you.
There are an infinite amount of ways to improve your CRM. I’m going to show you a few ways to automatically clean up your CRM to ensure you have clean contact data and effective marketing communications.
[FYI - I did a brief intro to CRM as one of my first editions. You can check that out below!
First, what’s the problem here?
Bad data
There’s nothing worse than sending a marketing email to every person in your CRM every single time. That’s a great way to burn out your contacts and get them to never want to engage with you. Do this over and over again and you’ll have a lot of bad contact and engagement data. So no matter how much you try to segment your lists, it will be low-quality every time.
You don’t want to be sending emails to contacts that have unengaged or unsubscribed. That will hurt your domain and email health and ultimately risk your email domain getting blacklisted. I’ve seen this happen for a company’s PRIMARY DOMAIN. 50% of emails were landing in spam. There is no coming back from that unless you get a new domain.
High CRM costs
Many CRMs have a cap on the amount of contacts allowed in your tier.
In HubSpot, for example, you’ll spend around $50/month for every 1,000 contacts over your allotted account limit.
Most businesses I work with add around 1,000 new contacts every quarter. So you’re looking at a $200/month increase in cost after just 1 year (and that’s excluding upgrades or other platform cost increases).
So on top of your standard HubSpot costs, that’s an extra $2,400/year at minimum just on contacts that might not even want to talk to you.
To improve this, you need to cleanse your contacts and build automated systems around who you want to engage with. You will keep costs down and equip marketing and sales with high-quality contacts that want to interact with you.
Running email campaigns is one of the most common uses for a CRM. Whether you run them directly in your CRM or integrate with another tool, there is a lot email data passing through your contacts.
It’s essential to keep this data in order since you’ll use it to:
Develop new lists for marketing or sales outreach
Run accurate reports to assess performance
Uncover new insights about your business and customer
My 3 tips will directly address email list performance and domain health. However, these tips will also help with:
Lead and customer engagement
List and ad audience quality
Decreasing CRM costs
All 3 center around one primary action: deleting contacts.
Because at the end of the day, you don’t want to carry the cost of contacts who aren’t engaging with you. If they want to engage, they’ll come back and do it.
This is a big psychological/cultural barrier that companies need to get over.
“But this is a perfect contact! We need to keep them in!!”
Ok but they haven’t responded to the past 7 of your marketing emails and sales calls. And now they are on your unengaged list so your email is likely to show up in their inbox. You can’t force them to love you!!
Let’s get into it…
1. Delete bounced contacts
High bounce rates hurt the deliverability of your marketing emails. Over time, this impacts the chance of your sending domain (ie: your company email) ending up in your target’s inbox.
If you send too many emails to bounced contacts for too long, your emails will start showing up more and more in spam.
Your CRM should automatically suppress bounced contacts which protects your domain health - but deleting them will decrease platform costs.
Going even further, you’ll want to create an automated system that automatically deletes these contacts completely once they fit specific criteria.
You may not want to delete every bounced contact so you can get more specific on the criteria that would trigger a deletion. But at the end of the day, this email is a cost in your CRM. So if it’s not serving you, remove it!
2. Delete unsubscribed contacts
This is very similar to the bounced contacts except, these people have actively decided they do not want to receive this communication from you.
Hot take: you need to make it easy for people to unsubscribe. Giving a clunky, poor experience - even to someone on the way out - is a surefire way to make sure they never come back (and they might tell a couple people about this bad experience too).
So your email template should make it easy for anyone and everyone to unsubscribe. But if your content and lists are good - you won’t need to worry!
Another REALLY important thing to consider with both subscribed and unsubscribed contacts is managing their email subscriptions.
When most people unsubscribe, they unsubscribe from everything. And that’s okay! We don’t want to stop them from doing that. What we do want to do, however, is make it easy for them to customize their subscriptions.
So instead of unsubscribing from everything, they can just select 1 option and still receive other communications from you.
There’s a few types of emails they will likely be opted into by default:
Marketing emails
Normal 1:1 emails sent via HubSpot
Product Updates
This should cover at least 50% of your email communications with all prospects, leads, and customers. You’ll probably want to add a newsletter subscription as well if you have one that publishes regularly.
So if you have different types of email communications - consider creating separate subscriptions for them.
And finally, make sure you are defining any email subscription that is transactional. Transactional emails are things like account confirmations, billing updates, etc. Active customers NEED these but the problem is: they can also still unsubscribe from your emails.
Tagging certain email subscriptions as transactional will allow them to still receive those communications while still unsubscribing from marketing.
Your CRM should automatically suppresses unsubscribed contacts, but deleting them will keep you from paying for unnecessary contacts :)
3. Finally…Delete unengaged contacts
HubSpot defines unengaged contacts as 2 things:
1. Never opened a marketing email from you and hasn’t opened the last 11 emails you’ve sent
Or
2. Previously opened a marketing email from you but haven’t opened the last 16 emails you’ve sent.
This information is default and cannot be changed in the system.
However, that’s pretty broad. If you want more rigorous or customized engagement criteria, you can create your own workflow that has lower thresholds for engagement. For example, you could mark people in your CRM as unengaged when they haven’t opened the last 5 emails, instead of HubSpot’s 11.
This is the area where you will have the toughest time deleting contacts.
Because these contacts WERE engaged at some point. They opened at least 1 email from you at some point and ideally, they are a good fit for your business. It’s tough to delete them in case they want to come back.
But that’s exactly the point - if they want to come back, then they will. Don’t force more marketing or sales promotions their way in hopes of bringing them back. If they are truly unengaged - leave them be and focus on the people who actually want to work with you.
That being said, you should absolutely run reengagement campaigns. We don’t have to give up on them that easily.
Running a reengagement campaign
There are many ways to run these campaigns but a simple model is:
Use HubSpot’s criteria for unengaged contacts I just mentioned
Create emails focused on getting them to engage. Be honest about what this particular email campaign is!
For example: “Hey [FNAME], you haven’t been engaging with our emails much lately. To ensure we are giving a great experience for all our contacts, I want to let you know we will delete your contact completely if we don’t hear back. You will receive another email or 2 from us about some upcoming updates but after that, we’ll let you go and hope you come back soon!
Create a workflow that triggers the email series when people become unengaged
If they are still unengaged after those emails, delete them.
You now have an automated system that can be further optimized over time. This ensures your CRM is clean and focused only on the people who want to engage with you. I highly recommend starting with a small cohort of contacts before rolling this out to larger segments.
While this is still scratching the surface in terms of building and reaping the benefits of a CRM - this will put you MILES ahead of other businesses using bloated, inefficient systems.
What CRM does your company use? What are your biggest pain points with it? Reply and I’ll send over a solution or 2.
-Connor