The Situation
As Senior Marketing Operations Manager at Integrate, I inherited a Marketo database where only 44% of contacts were actually marketable — reachable, consented, and not sitting on a bounce or suppression list. The rest was bounces, duplicates, and contacts who had gone cold years earlier but were still counted as "the database" for campaign planning and reporting purposes.
The Diagnosis
A database that's mostly unmarketable doesn't just underperform — it actively distorts everything built on top of it. Campaign performance looked worse than it was because half the sends were going nowhere. Reporting overstated reach. And nobody had a clear inventory of which records were the problem, so cleanup kept getting deprioritized in favor of new campaign work.
The Approach
I ran a full audit of the database — hard bounces, soft bounce patterns, duplicate records, and contacts with no engagement in 12+ months — and built a remediation plan that combined suppression list cleanup, deduplication, and a re-engagement program for cold-but-recoverable contacts before they were suppressed for good. Alongside the cleanup, I put governance in place so the database wouldn't drift back to the same state: intake standards for new records, and a recurring hygiene cadence instead of a one-time fix.
The Result
The marketable share of the database went from 44% to 89%. Campaign performance metrics became meaningfully more trustworthy overnight, simply because they were now being measured against contacts who could actually receive and act on them.
What This Doesn't Claim
This result reflects the percentage of the database classified as marketable before and after the cleanup and governance work described above. It is not a claim about overall database size or contact growth.