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
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1
Export your contacts from HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive or wherever they live.
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2
Bulk verify, or wire the API into your enrichment job and re-verify on a rolling schedule.
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3
Push 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
100,000 contacts costs $75 to verify. Run it quarterly and that is $300 a year to stop the database your entire go-to-market depends on from lying to you. Credits never expire, so buying a block up front and drawing it down quarterly works cleanly.
Can I write results back to HubSpot or Salesforce?
Yes — through the API in your existing sync job, or by importing the annotated CSV against a custom field.
Should I delete invalid contacts?
Mark them. Deleting destroys the account history you will want when that person resurfaces at a new company.
How does this affect lead scoring?
Make deliverability a gate rather than a score input. An unreachable contact should not be an MQL at any score.
Is verification GDPR-safe?
Verification is a technical check on an address you already hold and is generally treated as legitimate-interest data hygiene. Confirm with your own counsel.
What about catch-all-heavy databases?
Enterprise domains are frequently catch-all. Segment them, and do not let unknown be scored as invalid.
Verify your database — 100 free credits to start, no card required.