One of the big confusions when getting started with a HubSpot portal is the notion of “Marketing Contact”. If you have a growing business, it's also a safe bet that these Marketing Contacts represent the majority of your HubSpot spend.
But then, what are Marketing Contacts? How do they differ from other contacts? How to manage them? And especially how to make the most out of this limitation.
Summary
Marketing Contacts are specific to HubSpot and should be distinguished from Non-Marketing Contacts.
In your database, each contact will be either “Marketing” or “Non-marketing”.
The idea proposed by HubSpot behind this classification is to allow us to identify and segment the relevant contacts upon receipt of our Marketing communications.
In other words, you will only be able to include in your marketing communications (email, advertising audiences, etc.) contacts identified as “Marketing Contact”.
“Non-marketing” contacts, on the other hand, will still benefit from the basic activity tracking and information gathering features of your HubSpot portal but cannot be contacted by Marketing assets.
But then why did HubSpot come up with this difference?
Officially to force us to restrict our communications to only engage with the most qualified leads.
Another reason could be related to an economic reason. Indeed, HubSpot allows you to import as many contacts as you want but will charge you according to the number of Marketing Contacts present on your portal, therefore the number of people you want to reach at the same time.
Knowing this, it is important to understand how this feature presents itself in order to avoid some unpleasant surprises and get the most value from it.
“Marketing Contact Status” is a HubSpot native “single Checkbox” property for managing your Marketing Contacts.
The fact that this functionality is managed by a property allows us to modify its value either manually or by automation (Workflows).
Depending on your subscription, you are limited to a certain maximum number of Marketing Contacts. If you exceed this limit, you automatically increase your HubSpot bill by adding “Additional Marketing Contacts” ($225 for 5000 contacts per month).
Attention : when managing your Marketing Contacts, adding new contacts is immediate, but switching Contacts to Non-Marketing will only be effective from the following month. Take this information into account during your updates so that you are not surprised when you receive your invoice.
This limitation forces us to prioritize our marketing efforts by sorting our leads. There are three main factors to define our Marketing Contacts.
Marketing communications are primarily elements of Nurturing. However, not all your leads need the same attention.
An unqualified lead will no longer need to be contacted after receiving a rejection email. In the same vein, a “lost” lead (who has completed their Buyer Journey without having made a purchase from you) is no longer intended to be contacted. You can then set these two examples to Non-marketing Contact.
In the opposite, a lead interested in your services but needing more information should be prioritized in your campaigns and should be a priority in your Marketing Contacts list.
The Lead Status and the Buyer Journey is different for each company, it's up to you to define the relevant criteria beforehand.
Now that you have defined your criteria based on the buyer journey of your leads, you can further refine your selection based on the engagement of your leads.
For instance, by favoring contacts who interact with your content and campaigns and by removing people who have never opened one of your emails.
An effective method to automate this measurement of engagement is to define and configure a Lead Scoring based on engagement which will instantly judge the relevance of a lead to be Marketing Contact or not.
The last method mainly applies to people carrying out prospecting campaigns. Instead of contacting 10,000 leads at once, you can do smaller prospecting batches and rotate leads for less engaged leads.
So you can refine your campaigns as you go along and ensure progressive qualified lead generation.
Defining these Marketing Contact criteria theoretically is essential, however if you have to spend your days checking these criteria and assigning your contacts manually, your productivity will suffer a lot.
Thanks to the Workflow tool you can create entry conditions to become a Marketing Contact on one Workflow and define exclusion conditions on another in order to always have the most optimized version of your Marketing Contacts database.
Simply select this Workflow action:
If you want to develop your HubSpot knowledge and find all the workflows created and presented by HS Simple, do not hesitate to request your free access to the workflow box. A private web page listing all the workflows requested by the community with an explanatory video and a simple action plan in the form of a “to-do list”.