"Left the Company" database cleanup

[Anonymous]

Does anyone have any ideas for automating (or somewhat automating) clean-up for leads/contacts who have left the company? Is there any good way to handle these other than

- manually reviewing auto-replies occasionally and then updating in Salesforce, or
- monitoring with a smart list & marketing suspending those who have not opened emails in a certain time period?

In the latter case, you don't know if it's truly a "dead" email address, or if the person is disengaged....


Thanks!
Alison

[Kimi_Heskett1]

I keep a spreadsheet in a shared location with others who may be receiving the auto-replies. Have them just copy and paste in the email addy as they come in. Once a week I import that list and then can mass update data values from there. Not totally automated but easier than doing each of them one off. 

[Anonymous]

Some firms have a "Left Company" checkbox or Status which sales people can use. If you set that, you can then set Email Invalid = True automatically or keep those people in a Suppression List.

You might also check First and Last Names for STARTS WITH "zzz" variants because a lot of sales people (especially the more experienced) will do that to drop these people to the bottom of their alphabetical list.

[Cecile_Maindron]

I manually unsubscribed the people who have left company and add as unsub reason "has left company". If there is a method to speed up process, I'm interested!

[Anonymous]

Great ideas - thanks! I had been leaning toward something that can be automated both by me and by an action taken by the AE in Salesforce, so a combination of the upload to update Email Invalid values and checkbox for AE's to mark "Left Company" that triggers Email Invalid seems like a good practice.

[Anonymous]

Its tough to do much with these automatically, but you also can't ignore them..

Some autoresponders will have a "from" address from a central email administrative account, and embed the departed name in the body of the message.  If you don't read the message you'll  unsubscribe, delete or mark invalid the admin address, and continue to send messages to the invalid one.  

Some messages include the name of the replacement in the message--might be a way to grow your database--but again, you have to read the message itself to figure that out.

It also makes sense to look through the normal out of office responses.  You might find a few who have been "on vacation" for months (or years) and should be taken off the list.

The importance of this lies in the fact that some firms are turning their departed employee email addresses as spam traps.  If you don't respond to repeated  "so-and-so has left the company" messages and remove that name from your lists, you might be blocked at that firm..