How to Make Someone a Marketing Contact in HubSpot

Managing your contacts efficiently is a critical aspect of maximizing your HubSpot investment.

With HubSpot’s “Marketing Contacts” feature, your business is able to designate specific individuals as marketing contacts, allowing for more targeted campaigns and optimized resource allocation. 

If you're new to HubSpot or are looking for ways to streamline your marketing efforts, understanding how to effectively manage marketing contacts can make a big difference. By leveraging this feature, you can better control your marketing costs while focusing on the contacts most likely to engage with your campaigns.

But how exactly do you make someone a marketing contact in HubSpot? In this guide, we’ll walk you through the process of assigning marketing contacts, both manually and automatically.

What is a Marketing Contact?

A marketing contact in HubSpot is any individual who is actively being marketed to. These are the contacts who will receive marketing emails, targeted ads, and other forms of communication from your business. The important aspect of this feature is that HubSpot only charges for marketing contacts - those that you’re actively engaging with through your marketing channels.

Non-marketing contacts, on the other hand, are stored in your database but don’t count toward your marketing contact limit. These individuals might be sales leads, customers who’ve already converted, or contacts that you don't actively market to but still want to keep in your CRM.

Being able to distinguish between marketing and non-marketing contacts allows you to reduce unnecessary costs for your business and ensure that your marketing resources are focused on the right people.

What is the Value of Assigning Marketing Contacts?

When purchasing a Marketing Hub with HubSpot, your business will have selected a contact tier (which can be down or upgraded) to set a limit to the number of contacts that you will engage with through HubSpot’s marketing tools each month.

The contacts included in this tier are marketing contacts. These are the only contacts that affect the cost of your subscriptions, therefore assigning marketing contacts helps your business operate more cost-effectively.

Instead of paying for every contact in your CRM, you're only charged for those you’re actively targeting with marketing campaigns.

This feature is especially valuable for businesses with large databases but only a portion of contacts are relevant to current marketing efforts. For example, you might have customers from past campaigns, inactive users, or leads you’re not ready to market to yet. By assigning marketing contacts, you keep your campaigns focused, maintain a cleaner database, and avoid marketing fatigue among contacts who aren’t currently interested in your products/services.

In addition, assigning marketing contacts enhances the precision of your marketing efforts. With clear data on who is being marketed to, you can track and analyze your campaigns more effectively, ensuring you’re reaching the right people and making data-driven marketing decisions.

How to Manually Set Marketing Contacts

Manually setting a contact as a marketing contact in HubSpot is straightforward. Here’s how you can do it:

1. Navigate to the Contacts Section: Go to your HubSpot dashboard and click on “Contacts” to view your full list of contacts.
2. Select a Contact: Choose the individual contact you want to designate as a marketing contact. You can search for a contact by name or filter your contact list to find specific leads or customers.
3. Set as Marketing Contact: Once you’ve selected a contact, open their profile, and you’ll see an option that says “Marketing Status.” Click on this and choose “Set as Marketing Contact.”
4. Confirm the Change: After making the designation, confirm the change to ensure the contact is now classified as a marketing contact.

Repeat this process for any additional contacts you want to manually assign. While this method works well for a few contacts, it can become time-consuming for larger lists.

How to Automate Marketing Contact Designations

For businesses dealing with a large number of contacts, manually assigning marketing contacts can be inefficient. Thankfully, HubSpot offers an automation feature to streamline the process. Here’s how to automate marketing contact assignments:

1. Create a Workflow: HubSpot allows you to create workflows that automatically designate contacts as marketing contacts based on specific criteria. Navigate to the “Workflows” section from the HubSpot dashboard.
2. Define Criteria: Set up criteria to trigger the marketing contact designation. For instance, you might want to mark a contact as a marketing contact once they’ve filled out a form, subscribed to a newsletter, or reached a certain lead score. This ensures that only engaged contacts are targeted with marketing communications.
3. Add an Action: In your workflow, add the action “Set as Marketing Contact” to automatically classify these contacts once they meet your predefined criteria.
4. Activate the Workflow: Once you’ve customized your workflow to match your business needs, activate it. From here, HubSpot will automatically mark contacts as marketing contacts without you having to lift a finger.

By using workflows, you ensure that contacts are assigned accurately and efficiently, saving time and reducing the potential for errors. You can learn more about workflows in our blog, What Are HubSpot Workflows (and How to Build Them).

How to Manage Marketing Contacts

Managing your marketing contacts is crucial for ensuring your campaigns are targeting the right audience while keeping costs in check. Here are a few ways to effectively manage your marketing contacts in HubSpot:

1. Regularly Review and Update Contacts: Make a habit of regularly reviewing your marketing contacts to ensure they’re still relevant to your campaigns. HubSpot provides insights into engagement levels, so you can decide whether certain contacts should remain in your marketing database or be designated as non-marketing.
2. Segment Your Audience: Use HubSpot’s segmentation tools to create specific lists of marketing contacts based on engagement, behaviour, or demographics. By doing this, you can send more targeted campaigns that are likely to convert.
3. Use Suppression Lists: If you’re running specific campaigns, create suppression lists to exclude non-marketing contacts or contacts who have previously unsubscribed from marketing emails. This helps you focus on qualified leads and avoid unnecessary costs.
4. Monitor Performance: Keep an eye on your marketing contact metrics. HubSpot provides detailed reports that show the performance of your marketing contacts, including how engaged they are and how well your campaigns are performing. Use this data to optimize future campaigns.

Need help maximizing the ROI you get from your HubSpot subscription? Then let’s chat. SummitBound’s team of HubSpot and Inbound Marketing experts would love to help.