Why Your Lead Data Is Decaying Faster Than You Think

Every B2B database is rotting. Not slowly. Rapidly. The average B2B contact database decays at 30-40% per year. That means if you bought a list of 1,000 leads twelve months ago, 300-400 of those entries are now wrong.

Why Data Decays So Fast

People change jobs. The average tenure for a VP-level contact in tech is 2.3 years. For director-level, it is 2.8 years. For individual contributors, it is even shorter. Every job change invalidates the email address, the title, and potentially the company information in your database.

Companies change too. They get acquired. They shut down. They rebrand. They move offices. They grow from 50 employees to 200, or shrink from 200 to 50. Revenue figures shift every quarter. The company you researched six months ago is not the same company today.

Email addresses are especially fragile. When someone leaves a company, their email address stops working within days. There is no forwarding. There is no notification. The address just starts bouncing. If you are sending to a list that is even three months old, you are guaranteed to hit dead addresses.

The Cost of Sending to Bad Data

The direct costs are obvious: you paid for leads you cannot use. A 1,000-lead list at $0.50 per lead costs $500. If 30% are unusable, you just wasted $150 on ghost data.

But the indirect costs are far worse.

Domain reputation damage. When your bounce rate exceeds 5%, email service providers start flagging your sending domain. Above 10%, you are likely landing in spam for everyone on that domain, including the valid contacts. Recovering a damaged domain reputation takes weeks to months. Some domains never fully recover.

Wasted campaign infrastructure. You are not just paying for the data. You are paying for the sending infrastructure, the copywriting, the sequence design, and the time to manage replies. All of that investment is wasted when 30% of your list is dead.

Opportunity cost. Every bounced email is a slot that could have gone to a real prospect. If you are sending 500 emails per week and 150 of them bounce, that is 150 real conversations you are not having. Over a quarter, that adds up to nearly 2,000 missed opportunities.

What "Verified" Actually Means

Most data providers claim their data is "verified." What they mean is that at some point in the past, someone ran the email addresses through a verification tool. That verification might have happened last week. It might have happened last year.

Real verification means checking every data point immediately before delivery. Not last month. Not last quarter. This week.

At VerifiedByTed, every lead is verified within 7 days of delivery. Every email address is SMTP-verified. Every contact's role is confirmed as current. Every company is confirmed as active and operating. That is the difference between "verified" as a marketing claim and verified as a measurable guarantee.

What You Should Do

If you are running outbound campaigns on data older than 30 days, you are likely sending to a list that has already degraded meaningfully. The solution is not to buy more data. The solution is to buy better data, verified closer to the moment you actually send.

Stop buying database exports. Start buying individually verified leads.