Cleaning Your Contact Database Saves Time and Money

Email database churn, which averages about 25% a year (source: HubSpot) due to unsubscribes, email bounces, job changes, and other reasons, is a common challenge for businesses that rely on email marketing to engage with their customers. This can have several negative effects on your business including putting your email sender reputation at risk and costing you real money in the form of wasted marketing budget.

The Benefits of Purging Inactive Contacts

1. Cost Savings: Marketing platforms like Hubspot, Mailchimp, Pardot and others typically have subscription models where you pay fees based on how many contacts you have in your database. By eliminating inactive contacts, you can save on email marketing costs since you won’t be paying for contacts that are unlikely to engage.
2. Enhanced Deliverability: Email providers such as Gmail and Yahoo! have algorithms that prioritize emails from senders with high engagement rates. By purging inactive contacts, you’ll improve your sender reputation and increase the chances of your emails landing in the inbox.
3. Improved Metrics: When you remove inactive contacts from your database, you’ll see improved efficacy in your email campaign metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates since you’re targeting engaged leads.

If only there was a way to constantly cleanse my database of zombie contacts…

Don’t worry, we have you covered.

The Challenge

For Yardley Inserts (a US-based manufacturer of metal insert fasteners), a legacy CRM migration brought a full database of leads with unknown levels of engagement. As a part of our standard recurring marketing maintenance program we identified that the client was at about 95% of their available limit of marketing contacts, and they would soon be paying extra for marketing contacts that might be outdated, unwanted, and unnecessary.

Yardley needed a strategic plan to assess their contact database to determine who was still a viable marketing lead and who wasn’t.

We had two key goals

1. Reactivate at least 5% of their unengaged audience
2. Identify and purge those who can’t be raised from the dead to optimize Yardley’s marketing spend

How We Did It

Our Targeting Strategy

To identify the contacts who needed to be re-engaged or purged from Yardley Inserts’ database, we identified subscribers and leads who hadn’t visited the website and didn’t open an email in over a year. We specifically excluded customers, SQLs, and MQLs from the campaign to avoid catching qualified leads who, while not engaging with marketing, could potentially be having conversations with sales.

The Workflow

Once we identified the target contacts, we built a simple 3-email re-engagement campaign. The first email reintroduced the prospects to the brand, the second email shared key resources delivering value and reinforcing brand differentiators, and the third email provided a hard ask – can we help you?

Contacts who engaged with the emails or made a return visit to the site were considered to be re-engaged and qualified to stay in our marketing database. Those who didn’t engage were added to a list of contacts we plan to purge to reduce unneeded marketing spend.

Automation Time

To keep the database continuously healthy and minimize the accumulation of marketing zombies again, we set up the re-engagement campaign as an active workflow. This allows us to conduct a quarterly review of the database and remove outdated and/or inactive contacts.

The Results

With its initial launch, the campaign exceeded both the client’s expectations and ours. We reengaged 15% of our target audience eclipsing the established goal of 5%. We also removed over 3,000 unwanted contacts from their CRM, providing our client with more capacity for new lead growth.

Mark Broich, Vice president of Administration for Yardley Inserts, was delighted with the results of this campaign:

How to Maintain a Consistently Healthy Contact Database

If you don’t have a program in place to ensure your database remains in optimal health, why not build a campaign now? It improves email efficiency, saves you time/money, and can help you avoid compliance risks. This is also a key part of platform migration projects to make sure you have clean data in any new instance.

Pro tip: Make this process evergreen so it’s constantly running behind-the-scenes in your marketing automation platform. To do so…

1. Define the undesirable characteristics of an unengaged audience
2. Use this as the enrollment criteria for a Hubspot workflow, Pardot Engagement Studio program or Marketo Smart Campaign.
3. Schedule a recurring task to analyze the results and purge the leads who fail to reactivate during the campaign on a regular (we recommend quarterly) basis. (Note, if you are using HubSpot Marketing Contacts, we recommend having a monthly process in place for analyzing marketing vs. non-marketing contacts to avoid any price increases)
4. Wave goodbye to those zombie contacts

At SmartAcre, we can help you develop a strategic plan to maintain a healthy email database, migrate platforms efficiently, work smarter, and get the most value out of your marketing budget. Book a meeting to tell us about your marketing challenges – it isn’t a sales pitch, we will share immediate ideas like this one.

About Yardley Inserts

Yardley Inserts is a US-based manufacturer of metal insert fasteners that was founded in 1946 and is headquartered in Yardley, Pennsylvania. Yardley Inserts produces a variety of threaded inserts, such as helical, knurled, and press-in inserts, as well as studs, standoffs, and other fasteners. The company’s products are known for their high-quality construction and reliability, and are used by many leading manufacturers around the world.