managing old or expired contacts

[elizabeth10]

Is there a way to filter and remove outdated or expired contacts from Hubspot without losing all of the conversations and data that went along with them? Can I flag certain contacts as dormant so they don't count towards our billable contacts? Any insight would be much appreciated. Thanks!

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @elizabeth10,

HubSpot has the marketing contact status feature for this: "In HubSpot, you store and manage information about your potential customers in contact records. However, you may not need to market to all of them. If so, you can use marketing contacts and pay for only the contacts you want to market to."

Here's how you can set contacts as non-marketing: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/contacts/set-contacts-as-non-marketing

If you want to reduce the number of marketing contacts, here are a few ways you could approach this:

• Email is unknown: These contacts can by definition not be contacted.
• Unsubscribed from all email is true: Unless these are opportunities or customers, you cannot reach out to them again before they submit a form again (which is when they would be created anew as contacts).
• Sends since last engagement is greater than 10: These contacts are eligible to receive email communication but not opening any of your emails. You could try to re-engage these contacts. If they remain inactive, you could consider deleting them.
• Marketing email confirmation status is not equal to any of User clicked confirmation or Customer marked confirmed: If have a double opt-in in place, these are contacts who have not confirmed their email address and must (in some countries) be deleted.
• Email hard bounce reason is known: Emails to these contacts have bounced. Emails in the future will not go through. Either check for a new valid email address or consider deleting.
• Invalid email is equal to True: This email does not follow the correct syntax. If you can correct it, perfect, if not you won't be able to use it anymore.

Hope this helps!

[Blokeoverthere]

I 'kinda' have this question too except I want to be able to look at the historical data without having to run filters and deep dive thinking Im doing marketing to it.

So its less about thinking of them as a marketing contact and how I deal with a 'John Smith', who worked at C0k3 (I cant say the correct word because "The message body contains C0ke, which is not permitted in this community. Please remove this content before sending your post.")  that I was quoting and working with and now they work at Pepsi, but my business still needs to see the deals associate to John Smith / C0k3 

[BérangèreL · Accepted solution]

Hi @Blokeoverthere and welcome!
We are thrilled to have you here!

Thank you for asking the Community!

I have found similar threads that might help you:

- The solution from @karstenkoehler on this post "Best Practice for Managing Old Contacts"
- The solution from @Jonas_De_Mets on this post "Contacts Changing Companies / Retain Info"
- The solution from @AdamLPW on this post "How to keep your contacts up to date"
- The solution from @MFrankJohnson on this post "Best practice for contacts who have left a company?"

I hope this helps!

Have a fantastic day!

Best,
Bérangère

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @elizabeth10,

HubSpot has the marketing contact status feature for this: "In HubSpot, you store and manage information about your potential customers in contact records. However, you may not need to market to all of them. If so, you can use marketing contacts and pay for only the contacts you want to market to."

Here's how you can set contacts as non-marketing: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/contacts/set-contacts-as-non-marketing

If you want to reduce the number of marketing contacts, here are a few ways you could approach this:

• Email is unknown: These contacts can by definition not be contacted.
• Unsubscribed from all email is true: Unless these are opportunities or customers, you cannot reach out to them again before they submit a form again (which is when they would be created anew as contacts).
• Sends since last engagement is greater than 10: These contacts are eligible to receive email communication but not opening any of your emails. You could try to re-engage these contacts. If they remain inactive, you could consider deleting them.
• Marketing email confirmation status is not equal to any of User clicked confirmation or Customer marked confirmed: If have a double opt-in in place, these are contacts who have not confirmed their email address and must (in some countries) be deleted.
• Email hard bounce reason is known: Emails to these contacts have bounced. Emails in the future will not go through. Either check for a new valid email address or consider deleting.
• Invalid email is equal to True: This email does not follow the correct syntax. If you can correct it, perfect, if not you won't be able to use it anymore.

Hope this helps!