Struggling to figure out who HubSpot counts as a “marketing contact” and why it matters for your budget? You’re not alone! It’s a key concept that impacts how you use HubSpot’s Marketing Hub and, crucially, what you pay. Simply put, a HubSpot marketing contact is any individual in your database whom you actively engage with through your marketing campaigns – think emails, ads, or personalized content. These are the VIPs of your marketing efforts, the folks you’re trying to attract, convert, and nurture into loyal customers.

Before October 2020, HubSpot’s pricing model meant you paid for every single contact in your CRM, regardless of whether you were actively marketing to them. That could get pretty pricey, especially if you had a huge database with lots of inactive or unengaged leads. But they changed things up! Now, you only pay for the contacts you’re actively marketing to, which is a must for businesses looking for more flexible and cost-effective solutions. You can actually store up to 1 million non-marketing contacts in your CRM for free! This shift means you have more control over your budget and can focus your resources on the people most likely to engage with your brand.

Table of Contents

Understanding Marketing Contacts: The Core Idea

Imagine your CRM as a big address book. Not everyone in that book is someone you’re sending a monthly newsletter to, right? Some might be past clients, vendors, or just people you met once at an event. HubSpot’s “marketing contact” designation helps you sort this out.

These are the contacts you’ve decided are ripe for marketing activities. They’ve likely shown interest in your business, perhaps by filling out a form, downloading an e-book, or subscribing to your blog. They’re the ones you’re sending your personalized emails to, targeting with ads, or including in your automated marketing workflows. Basically, if a contact is going to receive a marketing email, see an ad campaign you’re running through HubSpot, or get pulled into an automated lead nurturing sequence, they’re considered a marketing contact.

Marketing Contacts vs. Non-Marketing Contacts

This distinction is super important. Here’s a quick breakdown:

Marketing Contacts: These are the contacts you actively engage with through HubSpot’s marketing tools. They count towards your monthly billing limit, so you pay for them. They’re your leads, prospects, and engaged customers.
Non-Marketing Contacts: These are all the other contacts in your CRM that you don’t actively market to. They don’t count towards your billing limit, meaning you don’t pay extra to store their information. This could include partners, vendors, inactive customers, or even internal staff.

The beauty of this system is that it allows you to keep a comprehensive record of all your relationships in one place your HubSpot CRM without breaking the bank for contacts you’re not actively selling to or nurturing.

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What Does HubSpot Marketing Hub Do for Marketing?

Now that we know what a marketing contact is, let’s talk about the playground where they hang out: the HubSpot Marketing Hub. Think of the Marketing Hub as your all-in-one mission control for everything inbound marketing. It’s designed to help businesses of all sizes attract the right audience, convert leads, and nurture relationships without needing a dozen different tools.

HubSpot itself is a comprehensive platform offering various “hubs” like Marketing, Sales, Service, CMS, and Operations, all built on a unified CRM Customer Relationship Management foundation. This means all your customer data flows freely between departments, giving everyone a complete view of the customer journey.

Here’s a peek at what the Marketing Hub helps you do:

Content Creation and Optimization

One of my favorite things about the Marketing Hub is how it simplifies content. You can:

Blog & SEO Tools: Create engaging blog posts, optimize them with built-in SEO recommendations, and plan your content strategy to rank higher in search engines. This is all about attracting your audience naturally with valuable content.
Landing Pages & Forms: Build professional, high-converting landing pages and lead capture forms without needing a developer. These are crucial for turning website visitors into leads.
Website Management CMS: Build and manage your entire website and blog seamlessly, leveraging SEO suggestions to optimize your content.

Email Marketing & Automation

This is where your marketing contacts really shine. The Marketing Hub gives you powerful tools to: What is HubSpot CRM?

Email Marketing: Design professional, personalized emails with drag-and-drop ease. You can send mass emails but still make them feel individual with personalized calls-to-action and content.
Marketing Automation Workflows: Set up automated workflows for lead nurturing and scoring. This means you can automatically send follow-up emails, assign leads to sales reps, or trigger other actions based on a contact’s behavior. This saves a ton of time and ensures no lead falls through the cracks. In fact, marketing automation tools can increase qualified leads by 451%.

Social Media Management

HubSpot helps you manage your social media presence and campaigns:

Social Media Scheduling: Schedule and publish content to various social networks directly from the platform.
Ad Management & Retargeting: Manage and optimize your digital advertising efforts, including creating, launching, and monitoring social media ad campaigns. You can even create lookalike audiences from your contact lists to find high-potential prospects.

Analytics and Reporting

Understanding what’s working and what’s not is crucial. The Marketing Hub offers:

Reporting Dashboards: Track and analyze your campaigns, website traffic, lead conversion rates, and customer engagement levels all in one place. You can get detailed insights into email click-through rates, bounce rates, and open rates.
A/B Testing: Optimize your marketing assets by testing different versions of emails, landing pages, or calls-to-action.

How Marketing Contacts Impact Your HubSpot Pricing

Here’s the deal: HubSpot’s pricing for Marketing Hub is tied directly to the number of marketing contacts you have. It’s a tiered pricing model, meaning as your number of marketing contacts grows, you might move into a higher pricing tier.

When you sign up for Marketing Hub Starter, Professional, or Enterprise, you choose a contact tier that sets a limit on how many marketing contacts you can have. Understanding HubSpot Standard Views: Your Secret Weapon for Organized Data

Starter Plan: Often includes 1,000 marketing contacts. Additional contacts might be priced per 1,000.
Professional Plan: Typically starts with 2,000 marketing contacts. Additional contacts are often sold in bundles e.g., 5,000 contacts.
Enterprise Plan: Usually includes 10,000 marketing contacts, with larger bundles for additional contacts.

The Upside of This Pricing Model

This “pay-as-you-grow” model with marketing contacts is actually pretty smart:

Cost Efficiency: You only pay for the contacts you’re actively engaging with. This prevents you from paying for a large database of inactive contacts, optimizing your marketing spend.
Flexibility: As your business grows and your marketing efforts expand, your HubSpot plan can scale with you. If your marketing contact list exceeds your current threshold, HubSpot will automatically upgrade your capacity to the next level. While this means a higher bill, it ensures your campaigns aren’t suddenly cut off.
Clearer Budgeting: Knowing that your marketing costs are directly tied to your active marketing audience helps you budget more effectively and see a clearer ROI on your marketing investments.

Important Considerations: Automatic Upgrades and Downgrades

HubSpot is pretty good about letting you know when you’re approaching your marketing contact limit. You’ll get notifications at 75%, 90%, and 98% of your tier limit. If you go over, your tier will automatically increase.

However, you can’t just downgrade your contact tier whenever you want. Usually, you have to wait until your contract renewal date to decrease your tier. This is why proactive management of your marketing contacts is crucial.

Managing Your HubSpot Marketing Contacts Like a Pro

Given the pricing implications, effectively managing your marketing contacts is essential for maximizing your HubSpot investment. It’s all about keeping your list clean and focused on your most engaged prospects. Unlock the Power of Video Marketing with HubSpot

How to Identify and Segment Marketing Contacts

HubSpot gives you the power to define who becomes a marketing contact. This can happen in a few ways:

Manual Selection: You can manually mark a contact as “marketing” or “non-marketing” in their contact record.
Automated Workflows: This is where the magic happens! You can set up workflows that automatically change a contact’s status based on their actions. For example, if someone fills out a specific lead generation form or clicks on a certain marketing email, a workflow can automatically set them as a marketing contact. Conversely, if a contact hasn’t engaged with your emails in a long time, you might set up a workflow to change them to a non-marketing contact.
Forms and Imports: When a new contact is created through a HubSpot form or imported into the system, you can define their initial marketing contact status.

Best Practices for Contact Management

Define Clear Criteria: Before you start, decide what actions or properties qualify a contact as “marketing” for your business. This might vary depending on your sales cycle and engagement definitions.
Regularly Review and Clean Your Lists: Don’t just let your marketing contact list grow indefinitely. Periodically review your contacts. If someone hasn’t opened an email in months, or if their email address is bouncing, consider moving them to non-marketing status. This improves your email deliverability and engagement rates.
Leverage Segmentation: Use HubSpot’s list segmentation features to create highly targeted groups. This ensures your marketing messages are relevant, increasing conversion chances and customer satisfaction.
Monitor Your Contact Tier: Keep an eye on your HubSpot account’s billing page or your reporting dashboard to see how close you are to your marketing contact limit. This helps you make informed decisions before an automatic upgrade kicks in.
Understand Tool Interactions: Be aware that certain HubSpot tools like marketing emails and ad targeting only work with marketing contacts. This reinforces the importance of correct classification.

By proactively managing your contacts, you ensure that your marketing efforts are focused on the most valuable leads, and you keep your HubSpot costs in check.

What is Inbound Marketing and How Does HubSpot Support It?

You can’t talk about HubSpot without mentioning inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is a methodology that HubSpot pioneered, focusing on attracting customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them, rather than interrupting them with traditional ads. It’s about earning attention, not buying it.

The inbound methodology works in four key stages: Understanding the Basics: What Exactly is a HubSpot Sales Pipeline?

Attract: Drawing in the right people your target audience with valuable content like blog posts, social media, and SEO-optimized website pages.
Convert: Turning those attracted visitors into leads by offering compelling resources like e-books, webinars, or tools in exchange for their contact information via forms and landing pages.
Close: Nurturing those leads into customers through personalized emails, automated workflows, and CRM insights that help your sales team connect at the right time.
Delight: Keeping customers happy and turning them into promoters of your brand through ongoing support, valuable content, and community engagement.

HubSpot Marketing Hub is built from the ground up to support this inbound philosophy. It provides all the tools you need to:

Attract: With blogging, SEO tools, and social media management.
Convert: With landing pages, forms, and lead capture tools.
Close: With email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM integration.
Delight: Through ongoing communication and content.

What is Content Marketing HubSpot?

Content marketing is a fundamental part of inbound marketing, and HubSpot provides a robust platform to execute it. HubSpot content marketing is about strategically creating, publishing, and distributing high-quality, valuable content to attract, engage, and convert your target audience, all within the HubSpot ecosystem.

HubSpot’s tools make it easier to:

Identify Audience Needs: Define buyer personas to understand who you’re marketing to and what their challenges are. This drives your content creation.
Keyword Research & SEO: Use HubSpot tools to identify relevant keywords your potential customers are searching for, helping your content rank higher. This is critical for organic visibility.
Content Creation: Produce various types of content—blog articles, videos, infographics, whitepapers, e-books—directly within HubSpot’s CMS. HubSpot even has tools like a blog ideas generator to help you brainstorm.
Content Promotion & Distribution: Schedule social media posts, manage email campaigns, and target ads to distribute your content effectively to your marketing contacts.
Performance Analysis: Track content performance with built-in analytics, measuring website traffic, engagement, and lead conversions. This helps you understand what resonates with your audience and optimize future content.

HubSpot itself is a prime example of successful content marketing. they built their brand by providing tons of free, educational content through their blog and HubSpot Academy, attracting users and demonstrating the value of their tools. Vimeo HubSpot Integration: Your Ultimate Guide to Smarter Video Marketing

Benefits of Using HubSpot Marketing Hub with Marketing Contacts

When you fully leverage the HubSpot Marketing Hub and smartly manage your marketing contacts, you unlock several powerful advantages for your business:

Unified Customer View: Everything from their first website visit to their latest email interaction is tracked in one CRM, giving your marketing, sales, and service teams a complete picture of each contact. This means better personalization and more relevant conversations.
Increased Efficiency through Automation: Automating repetitive tasks like email nurturing, lead scoring, and contact segmentation frees up your team to focus on strategy and creating more impactful campaigns.
Improved Lead Generation and Nurturing: With powerful tools for forms, landing pages, and personalized communication, you can capture higher-intent leads and guide them effectively through their buyer’s journey. Leads nurtured with targeted content can even produce over 20% increase in sales opportunities.
Optimized Marketing Spend: By only paying for the contacts you actively market to, you ensure your budget is allocated efficiently, focusing on the most engaged prospects and avoiding wasted resources.
Data-Driven Decision Making: Comprehensive analytics and reporting give you insights into what’s working, allowing you to refine your strategies and prove the ROI of your marketing efforts.

Essentially, HubSpot Marketing Hub, with its focus on inbound principles and smart contact management, helps you build meaningful, lasting relationships with your audience, leading to sustainable growth. It’s about making your marketing more human, more helpful, and ultimately, more effective.

Frequently Asked Questions

What exactly is the difference between a “contact” and a “marketing contact” in HubSpot?

A “contact” in HubSpot refers to any individual or company stored in your CRM database. A “marketing contact” is a specific subset of these contacts—they are the individuals you actively engage with through HubSpot’s marketing tools, like sending marketing emails, including them in ad audiences, or adding them to marketing automation workflows. You only pay for marketing contacts, while you can store non-marketing contacts for free.

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How does HubSpot determine if a contact is a marketing contact?

HubSpot classifies a contact as a marketing contact based on their engagement with your marketing efforts. This can be done manually by you in the contact record, or automatically through actions like submitting a form, clicking a marketing email, or being added to an advertising audience. HubSpot also allows you to set up automated workflows that change a contact’s marketing status based on specific criteria or behaviors.

What happens if I go over my marketing contact limit?

If your number of marketing contacts exceeds the limit of your current HubSpot Marketing Hub subscription tier, HubSpot will typically provide notifications as you approach the limit e.g., at 75%, 90%, and 98%. If you do exceed it, your account will automatically be upgraded to the next contact tier, and you will be billed accordingly for that higher tier. This ensures your marketing activities aren’t interrupted.

Can I change a marketing contact to a non-marketing contact?

Yes, you absolutely can! You can manually change a contact’s status from marketing to non-marketing within their record in HubSpot. You can also create automated workflows to do this based on certain conditions, such as if a contact has been inactive for a specific period or has unsubscribed from your communications. This is a crucial practice for managing your costs and keeping your contact list clean.

Do non-marketing contacts still get included in reports or appear in my CRM?

Yes, non-marketing contacts still exist within your HubSpot CRM. You can view their full history, manage their properties, and use them for sales or service activities. They won’t be included in your marketing reports or campaigns by default, but their data is fully accessible for other purposes. They simply don’t count towards your marketing billing tier. Unpacking ‘Voice’ in HubSpot: Your Ultimate Guide to Smarter Conversations

Is it possible to email non-marketing contacts in HubSpot?

No, generally you cannot send marketing emails to contacts marked as non-marketing contacts within HubSpot. This is by design, as the “marketing contact” status is specifically tied to the use of HubSpot’s marketing tools like email campaigns and ad targeting. If you need to send an email to a non-marketing contact, you would typically need to change their status to a marketing contact first.

How often should I review my marketing contacts list?

It’s a good practice to review and clean your marketing contacts list regularly. Many businesses do this quarterly or semi-annually, but it really depends on your lead volume and engagement rates. The goal is to ensure you’re only paying for and actively marketing to engaged prospects, which helps optimize your budget and maintain good email deliverability.

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What is a HubSpot Marketing Contact? Your Ultimate Guide to Smarter Marketing