How to Clean Your Keap Database for Improved HR Campaign Deliverability

A well-maintained Keap database is the cornerstone of effective HR campaign deliverability, ensuring your critical recruitment messages, onboarding communications, and internal HR announcements reach the right candidates and employees at the right time. A cluttered or outdated database can lead to low open rates, high bounce rates, and a damaged sender reputation, directly impacting your talent acquisition and retention efforts. This guide provides a step-by-step approach to meticulously cleaning your Keap database, optimizing it for maximum deliverability and strategic HR engagement.

Step 1: Define Your HR Campaign Objectives & Data Requirements

Before initiating any cleaning process, clearly define the specific HR campaigns you intend to run and the data points critical for their success. Are you segmenting for specific job roles, geographical locations, skill sets, or employee tenure? Understanding your objectives helps identify which data is essential, which is redundant, and what might be missing. This initial strategic alignment prevents the deletion of valuable information and ensures that your cleanup efforts are purposeful. Consider the types of campaigns: candidate nurturing, new hire onboarding, internal training announcements, or alumni engagement. Each requires different data, making this foundational step crucial for efficient and impactful database hygiene tailored to your HR goals.

Step 2: Perform a Comprehensive Database Backup

Before making any significant changes to your Keap database, it is absolutely critical to perform a full backup. This precautionary measure safeguards your existing data against accidental deletion or corruption during the cleaning process. Keap offers functionalities to export your contact records, and it’s advisable to export all fields to ensure no data is inadvertently lost. Store this backup securely in an accessible location. Having a recent backup provides peace of mind and a safety net, allowing you to revert to a previous state if any unforeseen issues arise. This step, while seemingly simple, is non-negotiable for responsible data management and mitigating potential risks to your HR operations.

Step 3: Identify and Merge Duplicate Contact Records

Duplicate contacts are a major source of inaccurate data and can severely impact deliverability and lead to recipient frustration. Keap provides tools to help identify and merge duplicate records based on email addresses, names, or other unique identifiers. Systematically go through your contact list, identify instances where the same individual appears multiple times, and merge these entries into a single, comprehensive record. Prioritize the most complete and up-to-date information during the merging process. Eliminating duplicates ensures that your HR messages are sent once per recipient, improving campaign accuracy, reducing unsubscribe rates, and optimizing your Keap usage by maintaining a clean and singular profile for each valuable contact.

Step 4: Segment and Prune Inactive or Irrelevant Contacts

Not all contacts in your database are equally valuable for current HR campaigns. Identify and segment contacts who have shown no engagement (e.g., no opens, clicks, or form submissions) over a significant period (e.g., 6-12 months), as well as those no longer relevant to your current talent acquisition or employee engagement strategies. Consider archiving or removing these inactive or irrelevant contacts, especially if they are consistently causing bounces or spam complaints. This pruning significantly improves your email deliverability rates by reducing the volume of messages sent to disengaged or invalid addresses, thereby protecting your sender reputation and ensuring your valuable HR content reaches an active and interested audience.

Step 5: Standardize and Enrich Contact Data

Inconsistent data entry can hinder effective segmentation and personalization. Establish and enforce clear data entry standards for fields such as job titles, company names, lead sources, and custom HR-specific tags. Utilize Keap’s tagging and custom field capabilities to enrich your contact profiles with relevant HR information like candidate status, skill sets, department, or hire dates. This standardization and enrichment allow for hyper-targeted campaign segmentation, ensuring that your HR messages are highly personalized and relevant to specific groups of candidates or employees. Accurate and comprehensive data is vital for powerful automation and delivering a superior candidate or employee experience.

Step 6: Implement Ongoing Data Hygiene & Monitoring Processes

Database cleaning is not a one-time task but an ongoing commitment. Establish a regular schedule for reviewing and maintaining your Keap database, perhaps quarterly or bi-annually. This includes routinely checking for new duplicates, updating outdated information, and monitoring your email campaign reports for deliverability issues like bounces or spam complaints. Integrate data validation into your lead capture forms to prevent bad data from entering your system initially. Proactive and consistent data hygiene ensures that your Keap database remains an accurate, reliable asset for all your HR-related marketing and communication efforts, continuously supporting high deliverability and effective campaign performance.

If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: 10 Keap Automation Mistakes HR & Recruiters Must Avoid for Strategic Talent Acquisition