Best practices to tag contacts as non-marketing

[JenBerenguer]

Hi folks, 

I wanted to start a thread to gather some insights on the criteria you use to tag contacts as non-marketing in your CRM. 

This is a question I am constantly asked and here are some of the recommendations I usualy give:

Think of a strategy and cadence to constantly review contacts and tag as non-marketing the ones you won't be engaging with ads or marketing emails.

This can be a manual or automated review.

Here is some criteria to consider:
- Contacts that have unsubscribed
- Hard bounces
- Low engagement or no engagement in the past X months
- Stakeholders/employees/partners stored in your database

It's important to define what engagement means for your company too. Here are some common indicators:

- Open/clicks/replies on marketing emails (Be mindful of the IOS update for open rates!)

- Page views 

- Sales activities (emails/calls/meetings)

- Ads interactions 

- Form submissions 

- Events attendance

How to change their Marketing Contact Status?

You can filter those and simply change their marketing contact status to 'non-marketing' in bulk or through a workflow. They will become non-marketing in the next update date (beginning of the following month or renewal date, whichever is closer).

You also have a property called 'marketing contact until next update'. These are contacts that are tagged as marketing but are set to become non-marketing in the next update.

I'd love to hear from other if this is how you manage your Marketing Contacts in HubSpot or what other criteria you use to define non-marketing individuals.

Thanks 🙂

[AMooney]

@JenBerenguer I love this. I have used it on multiple ocassions. You explain it really simply. It's great

[robertkreisler]

I wanted to follow up on this because the documentation seems to be in error and/or is just not clear.

Our objective was to import a spreadsheet of contacts that were intended to be strictly non-marketing (i.e. they do not receive any mass emails) and assign them to the correct account manager.  Unfortunately when importing the list, the option to select them as non-marketing was not presented as an option, so that recommendation was inaccurate, though I'm aware that the system operation may have changed over time.

The documentation clearly states that the default for imports is to assign them as non-marketing, meaning that we would have to manually mark them otherwise and/or (presumably) add them to a list, as shown in the screen shot here:

Unfortunately, that didn't happen.  Suffice to say, we have an embarrassing  problem on our hands now that these contacts who are highly sensitive and ought not to be receiving emails have just gotten our newsletter.

Can someone please point to how I can remove the contacts in question from our marketing list(s) so they no longer receive such announcements?

Thanks in advance!

[robertkreisler]

I just logged in to ask nearly this exact question.

We want to import a group of B2B contacts (i.e. OEM partners) that are to be assigned to one account manager and are NOT to be added to any of our other lists associated with end user marketing.  I'd like to avoid having to adjust them each manually and individually on a contact-by-contact basis after import to remove them from the marketing 'newsletter' list that everything is added to.  Is there an easy way to do that at the time of import?

Thanks in advance!

[JenBerenguer]

Yes, @robertkreisler Check this article here.

You should be able to determine the marketing contact status for new contacts at the time of the import. 🙂

[NicoleSengers · Accepted solution]

I like the above suggestions.

I would add that i think tagging career seekers as non-marketing automatically could help (unless you market to them while they are actively in the recruitment process) but consider removing them later.

In terms of when to change contacts from marketing to non-marketing, in a business that sells to repeat customers, look at the buying cycle and deactivate customers post-purchase and reactivate them when they are close to that window where they would buy again. That way you are using your customer database effectively and not wasting marketing contacts on people who are inactive.

[MiaSrebrnjak]

Thank you for sharing @JenBerenguer!

Hi @karstenkoehler, @NicoleSengers, @Jonno_Price, @ADMiller18, I wanted to get your thoughts on tagging CRM contacts as non-marketing. Are there any other criteria you'd consider aside from the ones that @JenBerenguer mentioned? Thank you!

Cheers
Mia, Community Team