CAI Contact Database Cleanup Strategy — Multi-Phase

Overview

Citrus America's HubSpot database has grown to 10,700 total contacts, of which 8,200 are classified as marketing contacts. At $5,000/quarter ($20,000/year), the current HubSpot spend is driven largely by this inflated marketing contact count. A multi-phase cleanup was approved to reduce costs, improve email deliverability, and establish a manageable, well-segmented contact base.

This plan was agreed upon in the ^[1] HubSpot Connect meeting and is being executed by the Asymmetric team in coordination with Miriam Framson.

The Problem

Key issues driving the problem:
- Undeliverable emails in the database cause bounce rates that damage sender reputation and deliverability.
- Unengaged contacts are being included in newsletter sends, which suppresses open rates and skews engagement metrics ("gray matter" problem).
- No systematic hygiene process has been run since late summer of the prior year.

Cleanup Plan — Three Phases

Phase 1: Email Hygiene Run

Owner: Karly Oykhman
Status: In progress (contact export underway)

• Run a bulk email hygiene/validation pass across all contacts in HubSpot.
• Identify emails that are undeliverable, invalid, or bouncing.
• Action: Delete the email address field for undeliverable contacts (do not delete the contact record itself). This prevents accidental sends while preserving name/company data for potential re-enrichment.
• Output: A list of contacts with no valid email, flagged for Miriam's review.

"Let's do a bulk hygiene run just to clean up the emails that are in there... delete the email. You can still leave the name in there, but delete the email. That way you don't accidentally send to it." — Mark Hope

Phase 2: AI-Assisted Enrichment & Segmentation

Owner: Mark Hope / Asymmetric team
Status: Proposed, pending Phase 1 completion

• Pull all contacts via the HubSpot API and run AI analysis to:
• Classify contacts by likely industry (e.g., grocery, restaurant, K-12) based on email domain.
• Flag contacts with zero engagement history (never emailed, never responded).
• Identify contacts that may be enrichable (missing phone, LinkedIn, etc.).
• Use Hunter.io for targeted data enrichment on high-priority contacts only (cost-justified only for contacts showing prior interest).
• Output: A segmented contact list with engagement tier and industry classification, sent to Miriam for directional review.

"We can go into the API, pull all your contacts out and have AI look at your contacts and say what it knows about each one... it could also look at the domains of each and say, this looks like a grocery, this looks like a restaurant." — Mark Hope

Phase 3: Reclassification & Cost Reduction

Owner: Miriam Framson (direction) + Karly Oykhman (execution)
Status: Pending Phases 1 & 2

• Based on Miriam's review of the segmented list:
• Reclassify unengaged, non-pipeline contacts as non-marketing in HubSpot to remove them from the billable marketing contact count.
• Delete contacts with no email, no engagement, and no identifiable business relevance.
• Retain pipeline contacts and engaged contacts as marketing contacts.
• Target: Reduce marketing contact count from 8,200 toward the 2,000–5,000 range, enabling a HubSpot subscription tier reduction.

External Email Strategy (Future Consideration)

For contacts reclassified as non-marketing, Asymmetric proposed an AWS SES-based external email workflow:

• Non-marketing contacts remain in HubSpot but are emailed via an external service (AWS SES).
• Email activity (opens, clicks) is logged back to HubSpot contact records via API — functionally invisible to the end user.
• This allows large-scale prospecting/nurturing without incurring HubSpot marketing contact fees.
• Status: Miriam is reviewing this as a potential future cost-saving measure. No implementation decision made yet.

"We create a separate structure where we can send nurturing emails and all that stuff outside of HubSpot... from your perspective, it's invisible. You won't even know what's happening." — Mark Hope

See also: ^[2]

Newsletter Targeting Change (Immediate)

Separate from the full cleanup, the team agreed to an immediate change to newsletter targeting:

• Before: Newsletters sent to all marketing contacts, including unengaged.
• After: Newsletters sent to engaged contacts only.
• Rationale: Sending to unengaged contacts ("gray matter") suppresses open rates and damages sender deliverability scores.

This change takes effect for the next newsletter send.

Key Decisions

• ✅ Bulk email hygiene run approved and assigned to Karly.
• ✅ AI-assisted segmentation approach approved in principle.
• ✅ Miriam will review and provide direction on any reclassification or deletion decisions — no contacts will be deleted without her sign-off.
• ✅ Newsletter targeting narrowed to engaged contacts only, effective immediately.
• 🔲 AWS SES external email strategy: under Miriam's review, not yet approved.

Action Items

Related

• ^[3]
• ^[4]
• ^[5]
• ^[2]