Best Approach for Marketing Contacts

Marketing & Content Hub Tips, Tricks & Best Practices
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1

Hi,

Can anyone of you please help me with the best approach to take care of the marketing contacts? I would like to know the best practices to make sure I do not exceed the marketing contact limits, would be great if anyone can help me with it.

Thanks

2

Hi @KaKaRoT,

Happy to help here. These are the contacts that – in my opinion – you can safely mark as non-marketing contacts.

  • Unsubscribed from all email is True OR
  • Email is unknown OR
  • Invalid email is True OR
  • Email hard bounce reason is known OR
  • Email subscription: has opted out of Marketing information*

* or your main marketing subscription type in case it’s named differently.

If you’re working with large numbers of contacts and have a database that has been marketed to over multiple years, you can also include contacts that have, for example, a Create date more than 2 years ago and a Last marketing email click date more than 1 year ago, assuming that they don’t engage anymore. This depends a lot on what your general email marketing and re-engagement strategy looks like.

Best regards!

3

Hi @karstenkoehler,

Thanks for your input. So would you suggest having a workflow as the below contact enrollment trigger to mark the existing contacts as non-marketing contacts?

  • Unsubscribed from all email is True OR
  • Email is unknown OR
  • Invalid email is True OR
  • Email hard bounce reason is known OR
  • Email Subscription: has opted out of Marketing information (Or your main marketing subscription type, in case it’s named differently)
  • Contact name includes “test” word

Does it make sense?

Thanks

4

Yes, @KaKaRoT, exactly.

If you’re planning on marking test contacts as non-marketing contacts, I’d recommend adding an additional date filter, e.g. “Email contains any of test AND Create date is more than 14 days ago”, as there might be internal users who run tests with marketing emails and whose tests won’t work if you mark them as non-marketing contacts too soon.

Best regards!

5

Hi @karstenkoehler,

Thanks for your super quick response. So do you mean instead of having,

  • Contact name includes “test” word

I should have the below one for test contacts,

  • Email contains any of test AND Create date is more than 14 days ago

Correct me if I have mistaken.

Thanks

6

Hi @KaKaRoT,

You can also filter out contacts with “test” in their name, sure. Both works. In any case, tests might be internal tests and you marking a contact as non-marketing immediately might prevent successful testing (e.g. a marketer testing a new nurturing workflow) – hence the suggested delay.

In addition to filtering for “test”, you could also filter out John Does, Jane Does, names containing “abcd” or “1234” etc.

Hope this helps!

7

Hi @karstenkoehler, does this logic works for setting contacts as non-marketing contacts through workflow?

  • Everything below will be AND with Marketing Contact Status is any of “Marketing contact”
    • Unsubscribed from all email is True
      OR
    • Email contains any of test AND Create date is more than one week
      OR
    • Invalid email is True
      OR
    • Email hard bounce reason is known
      OR
    • Email subscription: has opted out of Marketing information (Or your main marketing subscription type, in case it’s named differently)
      OR
    • Contact name includes “test” word, this will be for both first name and last name AND Create date is more than one week
      OR
    • Lead Status is any of “Spam/Bad Data” AND Create date is more than one week
8

Hi @KaKaRoT,

Yes, it does!

Keep in mind that people names and company names might include ‘test’ naturally, e.g. a person named Esther Wyatt might have an email address wyattesther@acme.com. It’s hard to always accomodate for all edge cases but you could create a list with the criteria above first to understand whether these seem to occur at all or not.

Best regards!

9

This is really helpful. What about who SHOULD be a marketing contact? We would love to be able to set up a workflow where all leads and customers are become marketing contacts but the problem is, out customers have multiple contacts on the account and not all need to be marked marketing contacts. Please advise.

10

I was looking for how to be able to have the best approach for marketing contacts, thank you both for your dialogue, because I was able to clarify my doubts

11

Hey @KaKaRoT, there are no hard and fast rules on when you should set contacts to non-marketing, but in general if someone has unsubscribed for all email or hard bounced, there is no need for them to marketed to and thus would be a good use case. @karstenkoehler has also shared great examples of what non-marketing contacts could look like for you.
Regarding best practices to make sure you do not exceed the marketing contact limits, here are some suggestions:

  1. Ensure that only select, approved users have permissions to set contacts as marketing - you don’t want someone to be accidentally setting contacts to marketing in bulk, and exceeding your contact limit!
  2. Review your defaults for marketing contact statuses - for instance, HubSpot forms set your contacts to marketing by default. However, you do have the option to change some defaults to non-marketing instead.
  3. Regularly monitor the current number of marketing contacts in your account by creating a saved view and filtering for the property Marketing Contact Status is any of Marketing Contact. Consider also creating custom reports that monitor the number of marketing contacts in your account and adding them to a dashboard for easy viewing.
  4. Keep in mind that if you wish to change marketing contacts back to non-marketing contacts, this can be done by setting them to non-marketing but the change is not immediate and will only take place upon your account’s next update date. However, when you set contacts as marketing, this will be immediate. See more here
  5. Keep in mind that at anytime if you exceed your contact tier, you’ll be automatically upgraded to a new contact tier and will be billed for that contact tier. You cannot decrease your tier until your renewal.

If you found this useful, feel free to mark this as a solution. Cheers!

Kind regards,

Jacqueline

HubSpot Support