Nobody deletes a CRM contact
So the database only grows, and the share of it that is still real only shrinks. At 2% monthly decay, a record untouched for a year is roughly one in four dead.
This costs you three ways. Reps spend time on addresses that cannot receive mail. Marketing sends land on dead addresses and drag your domain reputation down. And every pipeline forecast built on total contact count is built on a number that is not true.
How it works
- 1Export your contacts from HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive or wherever they live.
- 2Bulk verify, or wire the API into your enrichment job and re-verify on a rolling schedule.
- 3Push results back as a field. Now email status is filterable and every list build can exclude the dead.
A quarterly routine that actually gets run
| Cadence | Action |
|---|---|
| At creation | Verify every new contact by API at form fill or import |
| Monthly | Verify contacts touched in the last 30 days before any send |
| Quarterly | Full-database bulk verify; mark invalids rather than deleting |
| Annually | Archive contacts invalid for two consecutive quarters |
Mark rather than delete. An invalid address does not mean the person is gone, only that the address is. That record is a re-enrichment candidate, not garbage.
This is affordable to do properly
A one-time 500,000-credit pack costs $299 and covers five quarterly passes over 100,000 contacts, about $60 a pass. Credits never expire, so buying a block up front and drawing it down each quarter works well.