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

AI can personalize a message, identify an account, prioritize a prospect, or generate a follow-up—but if the underlying company and contact information is wrong, automation simply makes the wrong process faster.

For SMB-focused outreach, the priority should therefore be:

Accurate data → segmentation → personalization → automation → measurement

rather than:

More contacts → more emails → more automation

How Data Decay Can Affect Email Deliverability

List decay is not merely a database-management problem. It can become a deliverability problem.

When outdated addresses generate hard bounces, marketers receive less useful campaign data and can expose their sending infrastructure to unnecessary delivery risks.

Validity's 2026 Email Deliverability Benchmark Report analyzed trillions of global inbox data points and found that inbox placement rates were rising globally during 2025. The report also emphasizes that changing mailbox-provider requirements and evolving AI-related behaviors make deliverability an ongoing optimization issue. (Validity)

The practical lesson is that marketers should not evaluate their Small Businesses Mailing List only by the number of records it contains.

Useful quality indicators include: