Valentina Akpan: Founder, Rellatech. Admin and technical virtual assistant for businesses and startups with teams.
The hardest part of pitching a CRM cleanup is showing the value upfront. Owners can see that their Keap account is messy, but they can't picture what 'clean' looks like or what it changes operationally.
Below is a representative before-and-after from a recent Keap Max Classic cleanup handled as part of my Keap and Infusionsoft consultant work. Numbers are anonymised but the proportions are typical of what I see across coaching and service businesses.
Before: the account on day one
- ●Contacts: 14,200, with an estimated 18 percent duplicate rate
- ●Tags: 612, of which 41 were actually applied to contacts in the last 90 days
- ●Published campaigns: 78, with only 19 receiving new entries in the last 60 days
- ●Active Zaps touching Keap: 23, with 6 in an error state nobody had noticed
- ●Email deliverability: 73 percent inbox rate (the rest going to spam or promotions)
- ●Average time to identify an active customer: 4-6 minutes of clicking
What the cleanup actually did
- ●Deduped contacts using email plus a manual review of close matches
- ●Archived 6,800 contacts with no engagement in 24+ months
- ●Deleted 480 unused tags, merged 47 duplicates, renamed the survivors into a four-category taxonomy
- ●Paused 51 stale campaigns, rebuilt 8 critical ones, deleted the rest
- ●Fixed or removed the 6 broken Zaps, added one error-alert Zap
- ●Set up a saved search per lifecycle stage so customer identification is one click
After: the same account 30 days later
- ●Contacts: 6,950 active (the 14k included a lot of ghosts)
- ●Tags: 84, all in active use, all grouped by category
- ●Published campaigns: 19, every one of them with recent entries
- ●Active Zaps: 18, with monitoring on every one of them
- ●Email deliverability: 91 percent inbox rate within 30 days
- ●Average time to identify an active customer: under 10 seconds
The deliverability bump is the underrated win. Cleaning out dead contacts and stale lists almost always lifts inbox placement, which means the same campaigns earn more without changing a single email.
What made the cleanup stick
- ●A documented tag taxonomy that the team actually uses
- ●A quarterly 90-minute audit blocked on the calendar
- ●The error-alert Zap so unnoticed failures stop going unnoticed
- ●A single 'how this account works' doc anyone new can read in 20 minutes
FAQ
Work with Rellatech
Keap and Infusionsoft (Keap Max Classic) work is a regular part of what I do. If any of the above sounds like your account, a short call is the fastest way to see whether it's a fit. Scope and pricing live on the Keap & Infusionsoft Consultant service page.
Contact MeNot ready for a call? Take the free operations assessment and I will send you a written breakdown within 24 hours.
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