TL;DR
- Most teams don’t fully trust their CRM data—and with good reason.
- 28% never clean their lead data, and another 12% do it only once a year.
- Only 9% verify emails as part of their daily process, mostly sales teams.
- 50% say their database is not clean or only somewhat clean—yet most of them still never clean it.
- The biggest blocker is time (64%), followed by low priority and data spread across tools.
- 36% wait for high bounce rates before cleaning data—when damage is already done.
- Teams that verify regularly are far more confident in their lead quality and outreach.
- Clean databases correlate strongly with monthly or more frequent verification.
- Lack of ownership and unclear processes make verification easy to neglect.
- Bottom line: email verification works best when it’s easy, automated, and clearly owned—waiting for bounces is already too late.
Do you trust every single lead saved in your CRM?
If you do, you’re in the minority.
Many teams are well aware that their lead data needs cleaning and verification, and they understand that unverified data costs them time and money.
Still, ongoing verification remains a challenge—mostly because it’s time-consuming and because there’s rarely a dedicated person responsible for maintaining data accuracy.
To better understand this struggle, we asked 155 founders, salespeople, and marketers about the state of their lead data and about how they approach data cleaning and email verification.
Here’s what we learned.
Summary: High-level findings
- 28% of respondents never clean their lead data, and 12% do it only once a year.
- Only 9% include email verification in their daily process—73% of those are salespeople.
- 50% say their database is not clean or only somewhat clean. Still 59% of those respondents never clean their leads.
- 64% cite time as the main barrier to regular verification, followed by 24% who say it’s not a priority and 21% who find it hard because their data is spread across various tools and platforms.
- 36% only consider cleaning their data after seeing high bounce rates.
Lesson 1: Too many teams neglect regular email verification
28% of respondents say they never clean their lead data, and 12% say they only do so once a year.
Verification is basic email hygiene, but only 9% of respondents include it in their daily processes—73% of them are salespeople. Founders and marketers should follow suit! A quick run through an email checker gives you 80% of the deliverability benefits with 20% of the effort.
Our experiments show that after two months, a fully valid list can turn risky to use, with 5.5% of email addresses no longer being valid. This suggests that even quarterly cleanups may not be frequent enough, with monthly or weekly cleanups being the ideal frequency, depending on your circumstances.
Lesson 2: Regular verification removes uncertainty from outreach
It just makes sense: the more effort you put into keeping your lead data clean and your email addresses verified, the more confident you can be when reaching out. Email outreach is difficult enough without having to second-guess your data sources.
As the survey indicates, those who invest effort in email verification are more confident in the overall quality of their lead lists.
50% of respondents say their database is either not clean or only somewhat clean. And it’s no wonder if 59% of those respondents never clean their leads.
On the other end are the 18% who say their database is very clean, and 71% of them clean it at least once a month.
Lesson 3: If verification is time-consuming, then you’re less likely to do it
Email verification is either a habit that’s easy to follow or a chore that gets neglected for months or years.
Among the reasons respondents don’t clean their data regularly, most pointed to the fact that it’s time-consuming (64%).
Time was by far the biggest issue for the respondents, followed by 24% who simply do not consider it a priority, and 21% who cite the difficulty of having data spread across different tools.
This shows that verification needs to be made easy, both when you’re cleaning a list, and when you’re assessing the validity of individual emails as you go.
Paid Hunter plans offer automatic monthly re-verification of saved leads to make it convenient. Credits can also be used to verify email lists in bulk or connect to your CRM, as well as for individual email checks on the fly.
Lesson 4: A process and clear ownership may help
There’s also a smaller but interesting cohort of respondents who said they don’t know how to clean their lead data (12%) or that there’s no clear ownership of the process in their team (9%).
The latter makes sense as 20% of respondents said nobody owns email verification on their team, and 19% said that the responsibility is shared or that it’s unclear who owns it.
While automated verification like with Hunter’s paid plans may help, establishing clear ownership can bring peace of mind to the entire team at the cost of a couple of hours of work per year for one team member.
Lesson 5: Don’t wait until your emails start to bounce
For 36% of respondents, high bounce rates are a trigger to consider a lead data clean-up.
While it’s understandable, it’s also a waste of time and resources that’s easily avoidable with email verification.
As long as you stick to a simple set of best practices, keeping your bounce rate well under 2% is solved by verifying your mailing list shortly before engaging it.
Wrapping up
Our survey shows that many teams still neglect data quality at their own peril.
If your emails are not generating the expected response, and you feel like you can’t trust your leads, then email verification is an easy answer. It doesn’t solve everything, but it does instantly flag the high-risk, no-reward risky contacts.
