Data Hygiene: 4 Steps to Keep HubSpot Clean

Learn the best practices for maintaining data hygiene, including a practical 4 step process, to ensure the accuracy and effectiveness of your HubSpot portal.

Why Data Hygiene is Important

Data hygiene is a crucial aspect of managing your HubSpot portal. It involves keeping your data clean, accurate, and up-to-date. By maintaining good data hygiene practices, you can ensure that your HubSpot portal remains effective and provides you with reliable insights into your customer relationships.

When your data is clean and accurate, you can trust the information stored in HubSpot. This allows you to:

• Make informed decisions
• Personalize your interactions with customers
• Identify trends or patterns

On the other hand, poor data hygiene can hinder your ability to effectively mange your customer relationships like:

• Lead to errors
• Duplicate records
• Outdated information

By regularly reviewing and cleaning your data, you can ensure that you are only storing necessary and lawful information, protecting your customers' privacy and maintaining their trust in your business. Overall, data hygiene is important for the accuracy, and effectiveness of your HubSpot instance.

Data Hygiene 101

Before diving into the steps for maintaining data hygiene in your HubSpot portal, it's essential to understand the basics of data hygiene.

Definition of Data Hygiene

The definition of data hygiene is the process of modifying or removing data that’s inaccurate, duplicate, incomplete, incorrectly formatted, or corrupted within a dataset.

While deleting data is part of the process, the ultimate goal of data cleaning is to make a dataset as accurate as possible. This might require fixing spelling and syntax errors, identifying and deleting duplicate data points, correcting mistakes like mislabelled or empty fields, and standardizing how data is entered or combined from multiple sources.

Understanding Data Models

Data models play a crucial role in maintaining data hygiene. These models define the structure and organization of your data, providing a blueprint for how information is stored and accessed within your HubSpot portal. By carefully designing and implementing data models, you can ensure that your data is organized in a logical and efficient manner, making it easier to manage and analyze.

A well-designed data model takes into consideration the specific needs and objectives of your business. It considers the different types of data you collect, such as customer information, sales data, and marketing metrics, and determines the most effective way to structure and store this information. This involves identifying the relevant entities, such as contacts, companies, and deals, and determining the relationships between them.

4 Step Process to Clean Data

1. Audit

One of the key steps in maintaining data hygiene is conducting regular audits of your data. Data audits involve reviewing your data for errors, inconsistencies, and outdated information within these 6 areas:

• Analyze your data model
• Identify underutilized properties
• Audit for missing data
• Audit for cause(s) of missing data
• Audit records for unengaged contacts & duplicates
• Audit portal organization & cleanliness

Data audits involve a thorough review and analysis of your data to identify any errors, inconsistencies, and outdated information. This process is essential for maintaining data hygiene in your HubSpot CRM.

During a data audit, you should carefully analyze your data model to ensure that it aligns with your business needs and objectives. This includes evaluating the structure and organization of your data, as well as identifying any underutilized properties. By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your data model, you can make informed decisions about how to optimize and improve it.

In addition, a data audit should involve an assessment of missing data. This includes identifying any gaps or incomplete information in your CRM database. By understanding the cause(s) of missing data, such as data entry errors or system limitations, you can take steps to address these issues and ensure the completeness and accuracy of your data.

Another important aspect of a data audit is identifying unengaged contacts and duplicates. Unengaged contacts are individuals who have not interacted with your business for a significant period of time. Identifying and removing these contacts from your CRM can help streamline your database and improve the accuracy of your customer insights. Similarly, identifying and merging or deleting duplicate records is crucial for maintaining a clean and efficient CRM system.

Finally, a data audit should include an assessment of the overall organization and cleanliness of your CRM portal. This involves reviewing the structure and layout of your data, ensuring that it is logically organized and easy to navigate. By maintaining a well-organized and clean CRM portal, you can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your data management processes.

2. Clean

Cleaning your data is another crucial step in maintaining data hygiene in your HubSpot CRM. It involves several important tasks that contribute to the overall cleanliness and accuracy of your data including:

• Define your data model
• Archive properties
• Update records with missing data
• Clean up sources causing missing data
• Merge duplicate records
• Clean & organize portal

Defining your data model is essential for organizing and structuring your data effectively. This step helps ensure that your data is categorized and stored in a logical and coherent manner, making it easier to manage and analyze.

Archiving properties is another important aspect of cleaning your data. This involves identifying and removing any unnecessary or obsolete properties that are no longer relevant to your CRM system. By doing so, you can streamline your data and reduce clutter, making it easier to navigate and work with.

Updating records with missing data is crucial for maintaining the completeness and accuracy of your CRM database. This involves identifying any gaps or incomplete information in your records and filling in the missing data. By doing so, you can ensure that your CRM remains up-to-date and provides you with reliable insights into your customer relationships.

Cleaning up sources causing missing data is another important step in maintaining data hygiene. This involves identifying any sources or integration points that are causing data discrepancies or missing information. By addressing these sources and resolving any issues, you can improve the accuracy and consistency of your data.

Merging duplicate records is a critical task in data cleaning. Duplicate records can lead to confusion and inefficiencies in your CRM system. By identifying and merging duplicate records, you can eliminate redundancy and ensure that your data is accurate and free from duplicates.

Lastly, cleaning and organizing your portal is essential for maintaining a well-organized and efficient CRM system. This involves reviewing the structure and layout of your CRM portal, ensuring that it is user-friendly and intuitive. By organizing your portal effectively, you can enhance the productivity and effectiveness of your data management processes.

3. Standardize

Standardizing your data is a crucial step in maintaining data hygiene in your HubSpot CRM. It involves establishing consistent data formats, updating records regularly, and enforcing data quality standards including:

• Property Governance
• Document Data Sources
• Conditional Property Logic

One aspect of standardizing your data is property governance. This means defining and implementing guidelines for how properties should be named, formatted, and used within your CRM. By establishing clear property governance, you can ensure that your data is consistently structured and organized, making it easier to manage and analyze.

Documenting data sources is another important aspect of standardizing your data. This involves keeping track of where your data comes from and how it is collected. By documenting your data sources, you can establish transparency and accountability in your data management processes. This also helps you identify any potential issues or discrepancies in your data, allowing you to take corrective measures.

Conditional property logic is a powerful tool for standardizing your data. It involves setting up rules and conditions for how data should be entered and updated based on specific criteria. For example, you can create logic that automatically formats phone numbers in a consistent way or validates email addresses before they are saved in your CRM. By implementing conditional property logic, you can minimize errors and ensure that your data is consistently formatted and accurate.

4. Maintain

Maintaining your data involves not only establishing consistent data formats and updating records regularly but also enforcing data quality standards. Here are some additional strategies to consider for maintaining data hygiene in your HubSpot CRM:

• Determine your maintenance schedule
• Set up and review a data hygiene dashboard
• Clean duplicates, bounced, unsubscribed, and unengaged
• Fix integration sync errors
• Data management automation

Creating a regular maintenance schedule is essential for keeping your data accurate and up-to-date. This schedule should outline specific tasks and timelines for cleaning and updating your data.

Implementing a data hygiene dashboard can provide you with a centralized view of your data quality. This dashboard can display important metrics, such as the number of duplicates, bounced emails, unsubscribed contacts, and unengaged leads. It allows you to quickly identify areas that need attention and take corrective actions.

Regularly cleaning duplicates, bounced, unsubscribed, and unengaged contacts is crucial for maintaining data hygiene. By removing these records from your CRM, you can ensure that your data remains accurate and reliable.

It's important to regularly check and fix integration sync errors with data syncing between different systems or platforms. This can involve troubleshooting integration errors, updating API connections, or working with your IT team to resolve any technical issues.

With certain tasks, you can automate data management to help streamline your processes and ensure consistent data quality. For example, you can set up automated workflows to identify and flag records that require attention, such as incomplete or outdated information. Additionally, you can use automation to validate and standardize data inputs, reducing the risk of human errors.

Looking for more on Data Hygiene?

If you've found this blog post valuable, you won't want to miss our on-demand webinar on Mastering Data Hygiene in HubSpot: Unlock the Potential of Spotless Data. This webinar offers practical strategies to seamlessly incorporate the 4-step process into your everyday routine.