HubSpot's reformed pricing model for the Marketing Hub now requires users to pay only for the contacts they've labeled as marketing contacts, instead of the total number of contacts.
"This new model propels businesses to discern their key marketing targets. It also triggers a strategic reevaluation of their marketing process, as they determine the contacts for whom marketing efforts would bring the most value," explains Deanna Schwarz, a Principal Onboarding Specialist at HubSpot's Advanced Onboarding Team.
As businesses increasingly adopt HubSpot as a growth platform rather than merely a marketing automation tool, non-marketing teams began accumulating contacts in the CRM databse. Despite this, contacts not engaged in marketing communications shouldn't contribute to the Marketing Hub's cost. HubSpot's updated pricing model prevents overspending and urges businesses to strategize their CRM contact base.
Marketing Vs. Non-Marketing Contacts
As the name indicates, marketing contacts are people who you’re actively marketing to. They’re the only contacts who can receive marketing emails and paid ads. Additionally, you can only use marketing workflow actions like “send email” or “add to ads audience” with marketing contacts. Non-marketing contacts are every other contact in your CRM that won’t receive marketing communications.
“There are a ton of other emails that can reach your contacts that are set as non-marketing,” Deanna says. “If you set someone as non-marketing, it doesn’t mean you can’t communicate with them as a business; it’s just very prescriptive about what type of email you are sending.”
As Deanna states, non-marketing contacts can still receive sales emails, chat transcripts, registrations, ticket kickbacks, transactional emails, customer feedback surveys, etc.
Identifying Marketing Contacts in Your HubSpot CRM
When defining who should be a marketing contact for your company, it can be helpful to start with who shouldn’t be: contacts who’ve opted out, who are unengaged, who are completely unqualified, etc.
Identifying potential marketing contacts involves auditing your marketing process, drawing parallels with a lead scoring approach. A crucial initial question when defining your marketing contacts is, "If you release a new product or launch a new service, who needs to know?"
“That’s the first question I ask: Who needs to know about any of your changes?” Deanna says.
Other questions to consider include:
- Who do you send marketing emails to? Who do you target ads at? Since both of these features can only be used on marketing contacts, it’s important to ensure your definition includes everyone who needs these types of communications.
- Do you have an upsell or cross-sell motion? This will help you determine whether customers need to be included in marketing contacts.
- How often do you launch new campaigns? This will indicate how frequently you need to re-evaluate your contact classification.
- How many weak leads does sales think you send to them on a regular basis? Thinking through this can help you understand if you need to tighten or loosen your qualification criteria.
“It’s a very similar conversation to the marketing-to-sales handoff,” Deanna says. “The types of questions are very similar because they’re indicative of who’s going to be valuable to have in our CRM.”
When Should New Contacts Be Set as Marketing Contacts?
If you have marketing contacts enabled in your HubSpot portal, new contacts will automatically be created as marketing and non-marketing. For imports, conversations, integrations and forms, you can adjust the creation settings, but contacts created from the contacts home, the mobile app, email logging, the meetings tool and email extensions will be set as non-marketing by default. You can adjust the setting manually at the contact level, and you can also create workflows to set the property.
When it comes to managing marketing contacts in HubSpot, Deanna suggests that “you should treat a marketing contact management system in HubSpot the same way you manage your MQL system in HubSpot, meaning that the best practice is to have one workflow that has all the enrollment criteria, and the only action in the workflow is to say ‘set as a marketing contact.’”
This single source of truth creates flexibility and ease of auditing. However, for contacts coming from forms, integrations, conversations, and imports, consider whether automatically designating them as marketing is beneficial for your business.
Contacts from Forms
The setting for whether contacts created through forms are automatically marketing or non-marketing is universal. That means it’ll apply to either all of your forms or none of your forms, so you need to carefully examine the quality of contacts coming from forms when making the decision.
How much of your traffic and form fills come from good-fit contacts? If a large portion of your traffic is poor fit and those visitors are filling out forms, it might be better to default to non-marketing and let your workflow qualify everyone.
Contacts from Integrations
By default, integrations are set as non-marketing, but you have the ability to change that for every integration you have. Choosing the best option for your business will rely on your understanding of how each individual integration is being used.
For example, if you have a HubSpot-Salesforce integration, you need to know why you’re using each tool and which direction the sync is going.
“If you are pushing data to HubSpot and HubSpot is your marketing CRM, everything should be created as a marketing contact because it only lives in HubSpot if it is a marketing contact by definition,” Deanna says. “If you have a bi-directional sync to keep them both up-to-date and keep parity between the systems, that’s when you’re going to have to be more granular about ‘if it’s created from Salesforce and meets these other criteria, then set it as a marketing contact.’”
On the other hand, if you have integrations for advertising platforms like Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads and Facebook Ads, it makes sense to automatically add associated users as marketing contacts, since you won’t be able to target them with future ads if they’re set as non-marketing.
Contacts from Conversations
Because HubSpot’s conversations tool can be used for both marketing chat flows, customer support chat flows and live chat, contacts created from it are set to non-marketing by default. If you only use it for marketing conversations and the majority of the contacts sourced from chat are high-quality, then you can change the default.
However, if your marketing, sales and service teams all use the tool, it’s probably best to rely on a workflow to set contacts as marketing and non-marketing. You can include qualification questions in your marketing chat flows to help aid the process.
The Takeaway
While this change to marketing contacts is all about pricing on the surface level, it also prompts HubSpot users to re-examine their marketing strategies. To identify who should be a marketing contact in your CRM, you need to closely examine how you’re communicating with your audience.
Who do you want to actively guide down the funnel? Who will receive value from your marketing communications?
You shouldn't be relentlessly dispatching automated emails to stale contacts. HubSpot's marketing contact pricing model offers companies a financial motivation to maintain a clean and updated database.
