HubSpot’s new ‘Marketing Contacts’ feature allows you to distinguish between marketing and non-marketing contacts.
In other words, you can specify which contacts you want to market and sell to, and which ones you don’t.It’s a neat feature because it allows you to use your budget and resources more efficiently. Instead of spending your money marketing to irrelevant contacts, you can ensure you only pay to target the contacts you want.
In this article, we’ll explore the idea of marketing and non-marketing contacts in HubSpot, dive into the differences between them, and show you how to get started.
What are Marketing Contacts?
When you set a contact as a ‘marketing contact’ in HubSpot, you’re able to perform certain tasks with them that you can’t do with ‘non-marketing contacts’.
The flip side is that marketing contacts count towards your contact tier, which means you pay when you contact them.
By making a distinction between marketing and non-marketing contacts, you can ensure you save money by only paying to target contacts you want to target.
It’s easy to change and update contacts in settings, which we’ll cover in a moment. First, let’s look at what you can do with marketing contacts.
What Can You Do with Marketing Contacts?
Workflows
All marketing actions in workflows (for example, sending emails and adding/removing from ads audiences) only work with marketing contacts.
Marketing Emails
If you mark a contact as non-marketing, they won’t receive your marketing emails. If you want to change that, you can go into Saved Views and set your non-marketing contacts as marketing.
Ads
Non-marketing contacts won’t be sent to the ad network when you create a contact list audience for your ads. As above, you can change this by going into your list and changing them to marketing contacts.
How to Set the Marketing Status of Your Contacts in HubSpot
There are a number of ways to set the marketing status of your contacts, and the method you choose will depend on your circumstances.
Let’s start with how to do it in bulk for your existing contacts. You can do this manually or automatically.
Setting Marketing Status in Bulk — Manually
You can set contacts as marketing or non-marketing straight from the contacts section of your HubSpot account. Here’s how:
- Go to Contacts > Contacts
- Select the checkboxes by the contacts you want to set as marketing contacts
- Click the ‘More’ dropdown menu at the top of the table and select ‘set as marketing contacts’
- You’ll see a dialog box — just enter the number of contacts you’re updating and click ‘Confirm’
Setting Marketing Status in Bulk — Automatically
In the Workflows tool, you can automatically set contacts as ‘marketing’ based on their property values. Here’s how:
- Go to Automation > Workflows
- In your HubSpot account, navigate to Automation > Workflows.
- Create your contact-based workflow and set up your enrolment triggers for the contacts you want to set as marketing automatically.
- Add an action and in the Property management section, select the Set as a marketing contact action.
- Once you've turned on your workflow, contacts who meet your enrolment triggers will be set as marketing contacts when they pass through the Set as a marketing contact action.
Setting the Default Marketing Status for New Contacts
The easiest way to set the marketing status for contacts is to do it as soon as they’re created. You can do this in a few different ways, and it depends mostly on how the contacts were created.
Set Default Marketing Status for Contacts Created Manually
All contacts created manually will be non-marketing by default, so you’ll need to update their marketing status to ‘yes’ after the contacts have been created using one of the above methods.
Set Default Marketing Status for Contacts from Chatflows
Chatflows are live chats or chatbots for use on your website or Facebook messenger.
When a new user chats with your business through these channels, it sometimes creates a contact record for them.
For each chatbot or live chat, it’s possible to set the default marketing status of the new contacts they recruit. For example, you can make it so every new contact acquired through Facebook messenger is a marketing contact by default.
Here’s more info on how to do that.
Set Default Marketing Status for Contacts from Forms
When a visitor submits to a HubSpot form and they are new to your business, they will be created as a new contact record. For each HubSpot form, you can set the default marketing status of a newly created contact that submits to a form.
When a new visitor submits a HubSpot form, they’ll be created as a new contact record. You can choose the default marketing status of new contacts for each form. Here’s how.
Set Default Marketing Status for Contacts from Imports
When importing contacts, you can set the contacts in the file as marketing contacts or non-marketing contacts by changing the settings in the Details step. Here’s how.
HubSpot’s Marketing Contacts feature looks set to be a useful tool for businesses when it comes to organising their contacts, interacting with them more effectively, and saving valuable resources.
To find out how Kongo can your business use HubSpot more effectively, get in touch.
