End of the Year Cleaning for Your Leads Lists

End of the Year Cleaning for Your Leads Lists

Leads lists play a significant role in your company’s earned revenue. That’s why maintaining their quality throughout the year is critical, especially when you consider that inaccurate data can result in a 23 percent decrease in revenue and higher marketing platform costs for storing unnecessary contacts.

Get your leads lists up-to-date by hosting an end of year leads lists cleaning party with these three tips:

Identify Disengaged Subscribers

The first contacts you want to target for leads list cleaning are uninterested ones. Subscribers who are no longer engaged with your company should be unsubscribed from your emails.

Review the activity of unsubscribers to ensure they’re inactive across all your communication outlets. You also want to check if another team member has marked them as being a prospect or interacted with them within the last 12 months. If a coworker has made contact, do not delete them.

Find Bounced Email Addresses

The second group of contacts to delete are those with bounced email addresses. What causes a bounced email? Incorrect email addresses, fake addresses, and strict spam filters are some of the most common causes of a returned email.

Determining which contacts have phony email addresses is simple. Check if their first email bounced, then see if they attempted to re-engage with your company. If they never engaged with your business, whether through a purchase, social media, or email, then you can go ahead and delete those contacts.

Merge Duplicate Contacts

End of year leads list cleaning is the ideal time to merge duplicate contacts. Not only does combining duplicate contacts improve your list’s organization, but it also reduces the number of contacts, which can lower your company’s storage costs for leads.

Find identical contacts by searching for contacts with matching names, as well as other fields that match, like company name, title, and email address. A general rule for merging contacts is ensuring multiple fields are identical — not just their name and email address. With this approach, you prevent the accidental merging of two similar, yet different prospects.

Now that you’ve finished your leads list cleaning, how can you make it easier for next year? With these four tips:

Organize Data Fields

A risk many people take when creating or importing contacts is using one field to store multiple pieces of information. A single field, for instance, may hold a contact’s first and last name. The risk of placing two or more pieces of data into one area is you cannot separate them — say to greet a contact by their first name — when sending out an email blast.

Fixing this organizational error does take time. While you may not be able to correct every contact’s information, you can ensure all new connections are entered in the appropriate data fields. As you remove contacts over time with your annual leads list cleaning, you’ll have a list of contacts with optimized data fields for email blasts and other marketing and sales communications.

Delete Extra Data Fields

While some additional fields, like for first and last names, are needed, others are unnecessary. Databases without extra columns and rows not only clean up the appearance of your contact pages but also make upload and download times of your database faster.

Select and delete any unneeded columns and rows. If you’d like to keep your complete contact database intact, you can also store a copy of it outside of the software your company uses for all its marketing and sales tasks.

Convert Text Fields to Drop-Down Menus

Help your contact lists stay accurate by lowering the risk of incorrect information being entered with drop-down menus. While some fields, like first and last names, require entering by hand, others such as for company names could qualify for a drop-down menu.

Set Reminders for Future Leads List Cleaning

Keeping your leads list up-to-date is essential, which is why setting reminders for leads list cleaning is a must. How frequently you set reminders is up to you. Some professionals review their contact databases each quarter, while others choose six months or do it at the end of the year.

With your leads list cleaned and organized, you’re ready to add new prospects. At TelephoneLists.Biz, we have a wide selection of high-quality lists for the U.S. and Canada to help you reach your target audience and sales quotas. Explore our available lists, download a free sample or contact us to learn more.