topic Re: Setting contacts as non-marketing immediately in CRM

Setting contacts as non-marketing immediately

hohmann — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 20:46:25 GMT

Please consider changing marketing contacts to non-marketing contacts immediately and not at the end of the month. Once we identify that a contact should not be sent any marketing, we want that change to go into effect immediately and not with delay. There is no justifiable reason for HubSpot to delay this (except for profit of course). This should apply to any business. There is always a good reason to remove someone from receiving marketing. Why would that person still get emails until the end of the month? We are a contemporary art gallery, and we have artists sign up, and they will not buy, so we don't want them to receive invitations/newsletters. Since they will automatically get them, we now have to add another field to mark them with no marketing, just so we can filter them out. This is so much extra work. Also, I keep asking my assistant to remove someone from marketing, but I can't tell whether she did it because the change won't take effect for weeks.

Re: Setting contacts as non-marketing immediately

karstenkoehler — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 04:46:50 GMT

Hi @hohmann,

I understand why you're asking for this – but it would completely undermine the billing model. It could be abused to set a contact as marketing, send an email, set them as non-marketing immediately, and repeat the same steps for every single marketing send.

If that was allowed, everyone that's aware of this hack would do it, leading to less revenue from HubSpot from marketing contacts – and that would inevitably lead to much lower marketing contact limits for everyone.

In other words, it would just be a matter of shifting the goal post.

In terms of your specific case, have you considered simply setting the forms to not mark submitting contacts as marketing contacts? (options tab of the form editor) You could review the contact, then decide whether they should be marketing contact and keep the ineligible ones as non-marketing contact.

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/records/default-marketing-statuses-for-created-contacts#hubspot-forms

Best regards

Re: Setting contacts as non-marketing immediately

hohmann — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 18:12:35 GMT

I understand that, but that would be an easy fix to add one additional option in the field, so that you have non-marketing contacts, marketing contacts and contacts that are lined up to be removed from marketing contacts.

But the fact that you cannot tell when you are looking at a contact whether or not they are lined up to be removed and that they still get marketing until the next billing cycle even when you have removed them from marketing is a real flaw in the system.

Re: Setting contacts as non-marketing immediately

GLeeGA — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 12:22:47 GMT

Still somewhat of a "newbie" to Hubspot, but was shocked while cleaning up marketing contacts this morning to see the system is setup this way. Karsten, I understand your argument - I would encourage Hubspot to reconsider how it bills. I recognize it could be a huge shift in underlying software to do this, but if I set a contact to "marketing" at any time in the billing cycle, that should debit against my allocated allotment. And if I set it to non-marketing, it should credit the same.

Reconciling at the end of the billing cycle is a bit of a mess and actually encouarges customers to SPEND FOR MORE in the middle of a billing cycle if they determine their allotment is gone. Great for Hubspot. Not so great for customers.

Re: Setting contacts as non-marketing immediately

BérangèreL — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 18:38:19 GMT

Hi @GLeeGA and thanks for sharing your perspective and suggestions around marketing contact billing.

Feedback like yours is really valuable as we continually review our processes. I’ll make sure your points are passed along to the product team for consideration.

If you’d like a deeper dive into managing marketing contacts or have questions about optimizing your usage, I’m happy to point you toward additional resources or discuss best practices!

Thanks,
Bérangère