Knowing the difference between marketing and non-marketing contacts in HubSpot and managing them accordingly can save you a ton of time and money. Here’s how we set up a workflow to manage our client’s contacts.
If your HubSpot plan has access to marketing contacts, it can be a challenge to manage your database to ensure you don’t exceed your marketing contact tier limit. Sometimes it’s worth upgrading your tier and paying the additional fee, but you don’t want to pay for more marketing contacts than you need.
How do you decide which contacts should be marketing, and which should be non-marketing? Here’s how we categorized and managed marketing contacts for a client.
What’s the difference between marketing and non-marketing contacts in HubSpot?
Marketing contacts are able to receive marketing communications - promotional emails, newsletters, etc. Non-marketing contacts, on the other hand, can only be sent transactional emails, which normally contain necessary information and are triggered by a customer action; order confirmation emails are a good example.
Contacts can be set as marketing manually, through an import, or automatically set through workflows (Professional or Enterprise subscriptions only) or forms. By default, any contact that fills out a form is set as marketing, but this setting can be disabled for any specific form.
How we determined which contacts should be non-marketing
While running lead generation campaigns, we had to be careful not to erroneously set contacts as marketing or non-marketing. Any contact created from a lead gen campaign was initially set as a marketing contact. This was the criteria we settled on for determining non-marketing contacts:
- Contacts that came into the CRM via the original source CONVERSATIONS, meaning the HubSpot email inbox. This helped to filter out contacts created by bots or prospectors, and prevent customers who emailed the brand with an inquiry, but didn’t subscribe to any communications, from being designated as marketable contacts.
- Sends Since Last Engagement is more than 5. This property counts an engagement when a contact opens or clicks a marketing email.
- Contacts that have never opened or clicked any email.
- Contacts that have unsubscribed from all email or hard bounced.
- Email is unknown.
How to set up the workflow
We set up a contact-based workflow and filled in all the above criteria.
Before turning on the workflow, be sure to enable re-enrollment as well so contacts will go through the automation again if they meet the criteria. There may be cases when a non-marketing contact is re-set to marketing through a form submission or other action, but then down the line becomes unengaged.
One more thing to keep in mind before activating this workflow is that contacts won’t be set to non-marketing immediately. The new contact status will take effect on the next update date, meaning that until that date passes those contacts will count towards your marketing contact tier limit. HubSpot allows users to set contacts from non-marketing to marketing instantly, but not the other way around.
For yearly subscriptions, the next update date is the first of each month. So any contacts set to non-marketing over the course of a given month won’t actually be considered non-marketing until the first day of the following month.
If you have a monthly subscription, the next update date is your monthly subscription renewal date.