A Practical Guide to Marketing vs Non-Marketing Contacts in HubSpot

In HubSpot, managing your contacts efficiently is key to running cost-effective and targeted marketing campaigns. One essential feature is the ability to categorise contacts as marketing or non-marketing. Understanding this distinction helps you control your HubSpot bill while keeping your database clean and organised. Here are the differences, how to set them, and why they matter.

What Are Marketing vs Non-Marketing Contacts?

Marketing Contacts

Marketing contacts are people you can reach with marketing emails and ad audiences built from your HubSpot data. These are the leads and customers you aim to nurture or retain using your marketing tools. Think of them as the contacts that consume your marketing resources.

Non-Marketing Contacts

Non-marketing contacts stay in your CRM for sales, service and reporting, but you can't send them marketing emails or include them in ad audiences. These could be outdated leads, unsubscribed customers, suppliers or internal team members. HubSpot doesn’t count non-marketing contacts toward your marketing contact tier, so categorising contacts accurately keeps costs down.

Why is it Important to Know the Difference?

The distinction between marketing and non-marketing contacts directly impacts your HubSpot subscription cost. Marketing Hub is billed based on the number of marketing contacts in your database, so properly categorising your contacts prevents unnecessary expense. Note that setting contacts as non-marketing doesn't take effect immediately. HubSpot applies the change on your next marketing contact update date, which you can check in your account's billing settings. Moreover, this segmentation ensures targeted marketing and a cleaner database.

Where to Set Marketing Contacts in HubSpot

Setting Marketing/Non-Marketing Contacts Manually

Here’s how you can successfully set a contact as marketing/non-marketing:

1. Navigate to Contacts in your HubSpot account.
2. Use the checkboxes to select the contacts you want to update. You can choose multiple contacts for bulk editing.
3. Once selected, go to the More dropdown menu.
4. Choose Set as marketing contacts or Set as non-marketing contacts depending on your goal.

For detailed steps, check out HubSpot’s guide on setting marketing contacts and non-marketing contacts

If doing this by hand isn't realistic, workflows can automate the process. Workflows are particularly useful for setting contacts based on specific criteria, saving time and ensuring accuracy.

Automating Non-Marketing Contact Updates

To automate the classification of non-marketing contacts:

1. Go to Automations > Workflows in HubSpot.
2. Create a contact-based workflow and build the enrollment criteria from conditions like these. Most of them are reasons on their own, so add them as separate filter groups (OR) rather than requiring all of them at once:

• Lifecycle stage: Is none of Customer, Evangelist, or is empty.
• Invalid email address: Is true.
• Opted out of marketing information: True.
• Email hard bounce reasons: Includes “mailbox full,” “spam,” or “unknown user.”
• Lifecycle stage: Is any of Other.
• Unsubscribed to all emails: Is true.
• Email: Is unknown.
• Engagement:
  • No associated deals.
  • Last activity date is more than 180 days ago.
  • Last email open date is more than 180 days ago.
  • Last marketing email open date is unknown.

Then add the Set marketing contact status action and choose non-marketing. Once the workflow is live, HubSpot will set contacts meeting these criteria as non-marketing, saving you from manual updates. Test your filters on a list first so you don't remove contacts you still want to market to.

Industry-Specific Considerations

While the criteria listed above are common for non-marketing contacts, it might not be applicable for all types of businesses. Your business or industry may have unique requirements. For instance:

• In B2B, you might set suppliers, partners and internal contacts as non-marketing.
• In ecommerce, you might set customers who haven't bought or engaged for a year as non-marketing.
• In education, enquiries from past intakes who never enrolled might be non-marketing.

By customising workflows to fit your needs, you can ensure that your database remains cost-efficient and targeted.

Prefer to listen? I talk through HubSpot Audit in Decoding Growth, Episode 6.

If you're paying for marketing contacts you never email, we can help you clean them up and keep them that way. See how we manage CRMs.