What Percentage of Small Business Contacts Remain Valid After 12 Months? | InfoGlobalData

The broader implication is straightforward: the population of companies being targeted is constantly changing.

A Small Businesses Email List therefore needs two forms of maintenance:

• Contact-level maintenance: Is the person still at the organization?
• Company-level maintenance: Does the organization still operate under the same identity?

Ignoring either one can reduce campaign accuracy.

3. Email addresses can become risky without being obviously "dead"

ZeroBounce's 2026 report identifies invalid addresses as the most prevalent type of risky email data and catch-all addresses as another major category. It also detected more than 10 million bounces that could be prevented through typo detection and more than 5 million disposable addresses during 2025. (ZeroBounce)

That means list hygiene is not simply a matter of removing addresses that have already bounced.

A healthy Small Businesses Email Database should distinguish among:

• Invalid addresses
• Deliverable addresses
• Catch-all addresses
• Disposable addresses
• Abuse or complaint-prone addresses
• Other risky records

How Much Has Email Data Decay Changed?

The latest numbers show that the problem is persistent rather than temporary.