Our best practices for managing marketing contacts
Managing marketing contacts
You can mark Bounced and/or Unsubscribed contacts as non-marketing using the 'Manage marketing contacts' option in your Usage and Limits settings.
There are a few key processes we need to be aware of and get in place around Marketing Contacts.
These are covered in our HubShots episode here: https://youtu.be/YX26sVaqrrk?t=403
Process 1: Always Import Contacts as Non-Marketing
When importing, we recommend NOT marking contacts as marketing contacts on import.
We recommend importing as non-marketing.
And then marking as marketing contacts as needed.
The reason for this is so that no workflows get unintentionally triggered by the contact import, and accidentally send emails out to all the new marketing contacts that have been imported.
We are careful with workflow triggers for this reason, i.e. workflow triggers based on a property being 'known' and then sending an email to the contact is bad practice.
When you are trying to send an email to a list, it will tell you if there are contacts who are non-marketing.
At that point, we recommend manually reviewing and marking as marketing contacts as needed before sending the email.
Process 2: Setting Marketing Contacts in Workflows
There is a workflow action to set contacts as marketing contacts in workflows:
We recommend caution with this and should only really be done if the contact submitted a form and you want to send emails to them.
Process 3: Marketing Contact Permissions
Be careful who in the team gets access to set marketing contacts in the portal.
This is a user permission.
We recommend most users should not be able to set contacts as marketing contacts.
Process 4: Manual weekly or monthly process to review marketing contacts
We recommend a weekly process if you are getting close to your marketing contact limit, or monthly if you are not so close.
Go to your Usage and Limits settings.
Click manage marketing contacts.
And mark bounced contacts as non-marketing.
And mark unsubscribed contacts as non-marketing if you don't want to use them for ad audiences.
If you want to use them for ad audiences, leave them as marketing contacts.
Process 5: Consider other contact sources
Consider if you want contacts who come in via a HubSpot support tickets to be marketing or not.
Consider if you want contacts from integrations to be marketing or not. You can usually control this on the integration settings for each connected app in your portal.
This HubSpot KB article also covers the basics of marketing contact management: