It's common to under-estimate the amount of work and attention to detail that's essential to maintaining a database. Allow adequate resources for the task, if you want to do it properly or you will risk insulting people by getting their names or titles wrong, or by missing them out.

Surprisingly, there are few low-cost, off-the-shelf tools designed specifically for maintaining contacts. After years of working with databases, we wrote our own: check it out here.

See also programmed contact marketing.