Your CRM is full of contacts, but when it comes to your next great marketing campaign, your team can’t email them all. Well, you could, but you may end up with an alarming spam rate. 

So if that’s the case, why is your marketing department footing the HubSpot bill for all kinds of emails? HubSpot wondered the same thing and came up with a solution: marketing contacts. 

What Are HubSpot Marketing Contacts?

According to HubSpot, marketing contacts are any of your HubSpot contacts that you’ve deemed for marketing purposes only – emails, ad targeting, and marketing actions in workflows related to email and ad audiences. You can set other contacts as non-marketing contacts and hold up to 15 million of these for free. However, you can’t target these contacts through email or ads though.

Other important things to note about marketing contacts include:

• Your team can change your contacts from marketing to non-marketing once a month. A common situation where you need to do this is when a user switches from an MQL to an SQL, meaning they’ll need to receive much different content.
• Specific contacts, like those created in the meetings tool or directly as a contact, cannot be customized to marketing contacts and are automatically set as non-marketing. You will be able to switch contacts made from import tools, live chats, bots, form submissions, and integrations from non-marketing to marketing, and vice-versa.
• You’ll only pay for the amount you need and not for everything in your system. This contact pay model has three plans: Starter, Pro, and Enterprise.
• You can buy just marketing contacts to use with your HubSpot CRM. No need for Marketing Hub (although we love it).

Why Consider Using Marketing Contacts?

Perhaps the most substantial benefit of marketing contacts is the pay model. Your marketing team will no longer be paying for sales and service teams as they add more contacts. Additionally, if your team is not ready to purchase Marketing Hub, you can still market effectively to your contacts.

Here are some more reasons to take the plunge:

• If you’re not using HubSpot for marketing automation, having marketing contacts can help keep your data consistent with your CRM.
• You can improve the customer experience by emailing the right content to the correct audience.
• You can align your sales and marketing teams and work together to determine who is non-marketing and marketing. You’ll also get a glimpse of how quickly people move from leads to customers.
• If you’re a heavy email sender, marketing contacts also make sense because it focuses on sending appropriate campaigns to specific users!
• Because it’s so simple to switch from marketing to non-marketing or purchase additional contacts, you can keep your lists clean.

What Else?

For existing Marketing Hub users, identifying your current contacts as marketing using automatically generated lists of bounces and unsubscribes from your sales or service departments takes just a few quick clicks. Your team can also categorize new contacts as they come in by setting up simple workflows to establish a user’s status. On top of this, for all marketing contacts customers, you’ll be able to add custom filters, create lists, and mark marketing contact properties like:

• Marketing contact until next update, indicating whether or not your contact will become marketing or non-marketing upon your next update
• Marketing contact status, indicating whether or not they are indeed marketing
• Marketing contact source type, indicating the tool that set the latest value in their status
• Marketing contact status source name, indicating the ID of the specific activity that set the latest value in their status

If you’re ever worried you’re reaching your contact tier limit as you ramp up your efforts, don’t worry. HubSpot will send you notifications of the count, or you can view it yourself under Accounts & Billing.

Need Help?

Marketing contacts is a relatively new feature for HubSpot, so there’s bound to be some lingering questions. Reach out if you’d like to go over anything we’ve outlined or something else entirely!