Spring Cleaning for HubSpot: Data Hygiene Best Practices

Regularly cleaning your HubSpot database is essential for maintaining data quality, improving segmentation, optimizing reporting, and boosting campaign performance. Here’s a clear and strategic step-by-step plan to clean your HubSpot database—designed especially for Marketing and RevOps teams:

Steps to clean your database:

Audit Your Database

Export current contacts, companies, deals, and custom objects.
Check for:
- Inactive or unengaged contacts
- Missing or inconsistent field values (e.g., job titles, lifecycle stages)
- Duplicate contacts and companies
- Obsolete lists, workflows, forms
Tools to use:
- HubSpot Lists, Workflows, Property History, Export CSV

Define Data Standards and Governance

Set formatting rules for key fields like:

Job Titles (e.g., CMO vs Chief Marketing Officer)
Country names (e.g., “United States” vs “USA”)
Lifecycle stages, lead statuses

Create a Data Dictionary: document field purpose, format, owner, and update method.

Store in: Confluence, Notion, or HubSpot Notes

Segment and Tag Problematic Data

Create Active Lists for:

Contacts with missing emails
Contacts with bounced or unsubscribed status
Contacts with no activity in 12+ months
Duplicate emails or companies
Spam submissions or invalid data (i.e.., abc@xyz.com, phone = 123456)

Use filters to isolate issues for bulk updates or deletions.

De-duplicate Contacts and Companies

Go to Contacts > Actions > Manage Duplicates
Review contacts one by one
For bulk updates/merges, use HubSpot’s AI matching tool, or integrate with:
- Insycle (strong for bulk deduping & standardization)
- Operations Hub workflows for automated rules

Standardize and Normalize Key Fields

Use Workflows or Operations Hub to:
- Convert job titles to consistent terms
- Format phone numbers, states, addresses, titles, and other common fields
- Capitalize names properly
- Set missing lifecycle stages based on activity

Example:
If Job Title contains “VP Marketing” → set to “VP of Marketing“

Clean Up Dead or Stale Contacts

Set a timeline rule for inactive contacts (no email opens, clicks, or form fills in 12 months).
- This should generally be based on your customer and product lifecycle.
Consider:
- Suppressing inactive contacts from emails
- Employing a re-engagement campaign
- Mark as non-marketing contacts if still unresponsive
Segment and mark as non-marketing contacts (consider exporting and deleting) all contacts with:
- No email address
- Hard bounce
- Invalid or test domains

Archive or Delete Unused Assets

Audit and inventory:

Old, outdated templates
Workflows that are turned off
Forms with no submissions and not in use
Landing pages not visited in 12+ months

Archive or tag with “Deprecated – Do Not Use”

Maintain Ongoing Hygiene

Set a quarterly data review schedule.
Build workflows to:
- Auto-format fields
- Assign lifecycle stages based on activity
- Alert you to stale or empty contact fields

Document and Train Teams

Document your data cleaning process.
Share with any HubSpot users.
Set rules for:
- Manual contact entry
- Imports
- Property use
- Naming conventions
- Folder organization