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Marketing Contact Management

The difference between contacts and marketing contacts, who should be one, and how the suppression list keeps costs under control.

In the past you paid for every contact in HubSpot. As HubSpot evolved from a marketing automation tool into a sales tool this became expensive, which is why the concept of marketing contacts was introduced. Marketing contacts represent the leads that marketing is actively working on.

Marketing contacts vs. contacts

  • Marketing contacts: are paid for and limited depending on the subscription. Marketing can send them emails through the marketing tool and retarget them in ad campaigns.
  • (Non-marketing) contacts: are free. Sales can still send them manual or automated 1:1 emails.

Every contact in HubSpot is a ‘contact’, but not necessarily a marketing contact.

Who should be a marketing contact?

  • Someone who signed up for the newsletter, or who you want to reach by marketing email.
  • Someone who submitted a form and needs to receive a confirmation email (thank you for contacting us, here is your whitepaper, …).

Who should not stay a marketing contact?

Not every contact should be a marketing contact forever. Reasons to set a contact to non-marketing:

  • They unsubscribe.
  • Their email hard bounces (for example they moved to another company and the address no longer exists, or the lead was spam).
  • They submitted a form but we do not want to email them (competitors, blacklisted countries, …).
  • They are no longer actively receiving email — for example they became a marketing contact only to receive a confirmation email and never signed up for the newsletter.

To make sure we do not pay for these contacts, they are automatically set to ‘non-marketing’ via a suppression list.

What makes this confusing?

  • A list can still include contacts who unsubscribed or never subscribed to marketing emails, even though they will not receive the emails.
  • That list also includes hard bounced or unsubscribed contacts that we do not want to set back to marketing contact.

The solution

Add the suppression list to the ‘Don’t send to’ column of the email. Contacts that are set to non-marketing can then safely be set back to marketing when needed.