How to reduce marketing contact volume in HubSpot
Learn how to manage & reduce HubSpot marketing contact volume to control costs without losing valuable data
One of the biggest fears for HubSpot users is exceeding their marketing contact volume.
Once you exceed your limit, you are automatically upgraded to the next tier of 1,000 (or 5,000, depending on your plan) contacts, and this increase is typically permanent for the remainder of your contract term.
Marketing contacts are billable contacts in HubSpot.
They’re the only contacts who can receive marketing emails and be included in advertising targeting segments. That makes them powerful but also expensive if left unmanaged.
What are HubSpot marketing contacts?
Marketing contacts are the records that count toward your HubSpot subscription cost.
The benefit of HubSpot’s system is that you can store non-marketing contacts in your database without paying for them.
These are people you want to keep on record but not actively market to, like job applicants, internal team members, or past customers.
How can I use marketing contacts in HubSpot?
If you want to communicate with someone through marketing channels, they must be a billable (marketing) contact.
The following HubSpot tools only work with marketing contacts:
- Marketing emails
- Ad audiences
- Workflow actions like Send email or Add to/Remove from ads audiences
How do HubSpot marketing contacts work?
You can set contacts as marketing or non-marketing at any time. This can be done manually in Contact Views or automatically through workflows.
Contacts are added to your billable count as soon as they are marked as marketing OR if they perform an action that triggers an automatic update (such as submitting a form specifically set to create marketing contacts).
If you mark a contact as non-marketing, their status changes to 'Non-marketing contact next month.'
They will officially stop counting toward your billable limit on your next subscription renewal date (which may be the first of the month or a specific mid-month anniversary).
This means you need to be careful.
Adding a large number of new marketing contacts will instantly increase your billable volume.
Removing them won’t take effect until the next month.
You can monitor your usage by navigating to Settings > Account & Billing > Usage & Limits, where you can also set up threshold notifications to alert you before you hit the next tier.
How to reduce HubSpot marketing contacts
When HubSpot notifies you that you are nearing your marketing contact limit, you have two choices.
- You can upgrade your marketing contact limit and keep database growth moving.
- Or you can reduce the number of billable contacts in your account.
If you go with option two, here’s where to start:
Unsubscribed and bounced contacts
Set up a workflow to mark unsubscribed or hard-bounced contacts as non-marketing, but first ensure they are not part of an active Ad Audience if you use HubSpot for cross-channel retargeting.
These contacts cannot receive marketing emails anyway, so there is no reason to keep paying for them.
Disengaged subscribers
If a contact hasn’t opened or clicked a marketing email in 6–12 months, they aren’t engaging. Create a workflow to automatically set them to non-marketing. If they reconvert or re-engage in the future, you can make them a marketing contact again.
New contacts
Make sure the default setting for new contacts is non-marketing. This way, integrations or non-marketing forms won’t automatically inflate your billable contact volume.
Don’t forget
These recommendations focus on email marketing. If you are also using HubSpot contacts for ad audiences, you’ll want to add extra criteria before setting contacts as non-marketing. Otherwise, you risk cutting people out of your targeting segments.
Since you’re using HubSpot, it will benefit you greatly to pay our Complete HubSpot Audit article a visit. It walks you through 19 steps you can take to ensure your system is operating as it should.
If you have unanswered questions, head over to HubSpot’s official article on marketing contacts.
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