Downgrading from "marketing contact" to "non-marketing contact" should go into effect immediately
Right now you can upgrade someone to a "marketing contact" and have the change go into effect immediately, but when you do the reverse, the change goes into effect once a month, at the end of the month.
This is not idea.
If I'm downgrading someone to a "non-marketing contact" it's because I explictly do not want them to receive marketing emails, starting from today. If this doesn't go into effect immediately, i run the risk of pissing off email recipients and being flagged as spam.
If Hubspot is worried about how this would affect billing, don't be: billing should be based on the number of contacts who were tagged as "marketing contacts" at any point during the month, not just on the last day of the month. Overall, Hubspot will likely be able to bill more. And while I can't speak for everyone, I can say that I personally have no issue with paying a bit more to ensure that I don't accidentally send marketing emails to folks who don't want to receive them.
Completely agree. It's very inconvenient to have to wait to have the non marketing contacts take effect. If I'm marking a contact as non-marketing it's because there is a legitimate reason why I do not want to be marketing to that contact.
We reviewed and managed our marketing contacts to ensure we remained within our allowance. However, as the changes from marketing to non-marketing contacts don't implement immediately, in our case delayed by about 2 weeks, we went over our limit, even though it was clear we would be under if the changes were applied immediately.
We have had to pay additional £££ for the next tier of marketing contacts which we do not need due to a system imposed delay even though we had managed our data correctly and in good time. Not very impressed with this as HubSpot were quick enough to trigger the invoice even though it was clear we wouldn't exceed our existing marketing contact tier limits.
Clarification: we only exceeded our marketing contact tier after we had done our housekeeping and reduced the number of contacts we wanted to market to. We only exceeded our limit due to the delay in the changes we'd made being once a month. Charged immediately for exceeding the limit but we would never have exceeded that limit if our changes had been applied immediately they were actioned. HubSpot not missing out on any revenue here in this example as we would have remained within our contracted limits.
i still think my suggestion above is solid: changes go into effect immediately, and hubspot bills based on the highest number of marketing contacts i've had on any day during the billing period. this will keep me from accidentallly marketing to people i don't want to market to, and hubspot will still be compensated fairly.
Completely agree - this change should take effect immediately so the prospect / client doesn't get marketing comms once their status is changed. This is a big problem...HubSpot is supposed to make stuff like this easier. I don't want to have to create unnecessary static lists or remember individuals that need to be specifically excluded from things until the cycle resets. Agree with dcleaver47 suggestion - seems very straightforward.
i'm coming back 18 months later to say that i STILL think this should be implemented. changes to marketing contact status should go into effect immediately. no one wants to accidentally email someone who doesn't want to hear from them. hubspot does not have to worry about billing here: just bill based on the total number of people who were marked as "marketing contacts" at any point during the month. i truly do not mind paying a bit extra if that's how it works out for this peace of mind.
While I understand we paid for the marketing contacts (MC) for a current month, I'm afraid I fail to comprehend why we're being charged extra after clearly indicating we have no intention of engaging with marked MCs who do not meet our criteria. My team recently created workflows for this very reason, and to be honest, this comes across as a rather blatant anti-consumer move to have such a "strategic" disregard in the rule applying until a later period. As noted from previous comments, you will instantly convert a contact to a chargeable MC without any hassle. However, your customers are told to expect a delay since you "cannot" fulfill the reverse? It seems quite convenient for you that there's no immediate action upon our moving further away from potentially paying the higher tier.
Is this something your competitors do? If so, then why not perform the alternative and make it a selling point against them? Hubspot, I've used your services throughout my career for years, and I have to say that I am EXTREMELY disappointed in this sort of foul practice from you.
Does anyone have a good workaround for this? I was trying to see if I could make an active list that could check for an upcoming status change but I'm not finding anything useful. Is a static list that you manually add people to the only way?
I'll give them this much, @KTorgerson: HS did constantly notify us when we were getting close to hitting/exceding your limit of contacts. But as far as putting something in place to prevent exceeding your MC limit is up to you. My team manually made a workflow that opts people out of being an MC once they haven't engaged with any of our content for a specific period of time, but HS also offers some guidence in how to set one up if you need some guidence. Hope this helps!
Just coming to say it's now 2024 and HubSpot still have not made any changes to this ridiculous and money-hungry billing process they have...
This is my solution to easily stop your account from going over the limit if you need to: If you notice the account is about to reach the limit, it doesn’t matter how many contacts you mark as ‘non-marketing’ - because that won’t take effect until the end of the month. But on the other hand, if you go over the marketing contact limit at any stage during the month, the account will IMMEDIATELY get charged for the next tier.
There is also NO way of seeing what the marketing contact status property is used in, not like the other properties. So if you need to prevent any new contacts from getting added as a marketing contact, then you will need to manually go through every single workflow, form and integration setup and remove it….
This is both time-consuming and problematic if something gets missed and the client asks us to prevent the automatic upgrade from happening.
So I think the only solution going forward is that you make it best practice to ONLY set a contact as a ‘marketing contact’ in 1 x workflow, and set the trigger as when they fill out ANY form. And then in all other workflows you need to set their trigger as that form submission AND the contact is a marketing contact, and DO NOT turn on ‘set contact as marketing contact’ in any of the forms.
This will centralise control of marketing contacts and you can easily switch the WF on and off if you need to.
