Clean, Enrich, Validate

Prepare your List for activation by making rows consistent, complete, and usable.

Importing data creates the list for the rest of the loop. The goal is simple: get rows into a consistent structure and land the data in a grid that is ready for cleaning, enrichment, grading, and activation.

Preparing your list for activation

1

Normalize

2

Dedupe

3

Enrich

4

Validate

This order keeps the work focused on clean, unique rows, which typically reduces credit usage and improves downstream match performance. As the List matures and your inputs improve, the workflow often becomes lighter because fewer rows need fixes.

Sheet and audience operations

Normalize

• Standardize names, emails, phones, and company fields.

• Normalize casing, spacing, punctuation, and common variations.

• Align values to consistent formats so filters and matching work predictably.

• Fix obvious issues early so later steps do not amplify them.

Normalization is the cheapest way to improve downstream results because it makes later operation more accurate.

Dedupe and identity resolution

• Identify duplicates using common keys like email, domain, or name plus company.

• Collapse duplicate rows into one best record per person or account.

• Preserve the most complete values when conflicts exist.

• Reduce wasted work by ensuring enrichment runs on the cleanest version of each row.

Dedupe before enrichment whenever possible. Enriching duplicates increases cost and creates conflicting “truth” across rows.

Enrich

• Fill missing columns that matter for segmentation, matching, and routing.

• Complete key identity fields when they are absent or incomplete.

• Add business context like company attributes when relevant.

• Use Custom Columns to populate a field from prompts that reference other columns.

Enrichment tends to be the most credit-intensive operation, so it is most effective after the list has been normalized and deduped.

Email validation

• Check whether email addresses look deliverable and usable for activation.

• Flag risky or low-confidence emails so they can be filtered out.

• Improve match performance by focusing on strong identifiers.

• Reduce spend on rows that are unlikely to match or convert.

Validation is most useful right before matching and activation, when the goal is to exclude weak identifiers rather than fix formatting.