Database Clean-Up

[Anonymous]

We REALLY need to clean out our database. Due to a deleting accident (a story I won't get into), all of our leads only have a history of 6 months. Any suggestions on how to best identify inactives, or any best practice clean-up suggestions?

[Anonymous]

Michelle,

I've seen a lot of different approaches, depending on what you're trying to clean up:

• Spend some time on merging duplicates, as they don't really help anyone
• Look for leads with no email address, obviously bad addresses, hard bounces, etc and either add to a static list for tracking them as dead or delete them
• Look for leads with no lead-created activity in the past 3 to 6 months, e.g. clicks on emails, form fillouts, web visits, etc. Similarly, add them to a static list or get rid of them.

I general, I prefer to add folks to supression static lists rather than delete the leads, but hopefully the above is useful.

[Anonymous]

Whats the motivation to clean up inactives?  As Erik mentioned its far better to suppress your bad leads than to delete them.

"Better the bad lead you know than the bad lead you don't know" -Irish Proverb

[Anonymous]

We are very close to exceeding our 100,000 lead threshold. I need to import some large lists of leads, so I need to clean out the 'bad leads' so that I can import some potentially good leads.