Understand marketing contacts

When purchasing a Marketing Hub subscription, you select a contact tier to set a limit on the number of contacts you’ll engage with through HubSpot’s marketing tools each month (e.g., marketing emails, ads). The contacts included in this tier are called marketing contacts, which are the only contacts that impact the cost of your subscription. Any contacts you don’t plan on marketing to are called non-marketing contacts. Non-marketing contacts don’t count towards your contact tier, and you’re not charged for these contacts.

This article outlines using marketing contact properties and their connection with marketing tools. Learn more about marketing contacts billing.

Please note: the following information applies only to Marketing Hub Starter, Professional, and Enterprise accounts with marketing contacts. Older Marketing Hub accounts may not have marketing contacts. Learn how to check if your HubSpot account has access to marketing contacts or request marketing contacts for your account.

Check your access to marketing contacts

All new Marketing Hub accounts include marketing contacts. If you purchased your Marketing Hub subscription prior to the introduction of marketing contacts, you may not currently have access. To check whether your Marketing Hub subscription includes marketing contacts:

1. In your HubSpot account, click your account name in the top right corner, then click Account & Billing.
2. In the Overview tab under the Products & Add-ons section, check whether your Marketing Hub subscription shows Marketing Contacts.
3. If your subscription says Marketing Contacts, you have access to marketing contacts.

4. If your subscription doesn’t say Marketing Contacts, you don’t have access to marketing contacts. If you’d like to gain access, reach out to HubSpot support (Starter), or your Customer Success Manager (Professional or Enterprise only).

Understand marketing contact properties

There are a set of default contact properties that display information about a contact's marketing status. For example, you can create reports or lists using these properties to monitor the number of contacts changed by a workflow. Learn how to check a contact's property value.

• Marketing contact status: indicates if the contact is currently a marketing or non-marketing contact.
  
  • When it is Marketing contact, the contact is a marketing contact and does count towards your contact tier in this period.
  • When it is Non-marketing contact, the contact is a non-marketing contact and doesn’t count towards your contact tier in this period.
• Marketing contact until next update: indicates if a contact will be considered a marketing or non-marketing contact upon the next update date.
  • When the value is Yes, the contact is currently a marketing contact, but will be set as a non-marketing contact on the next update date.
  • When the value is blank, the contact’s current status will remain the same after the update date.
• Marketing contact status source type: indicates the tool (e.g., a workflow) that set the latest value in the contact's marketing contact status. 
• Marketing contact status source name: indicates the ID of the specific user, activity, or tool that set the latest value in the contact's marketing contact status.

Learn more about HubSpot's default contact properties.

Marketing tools that require marketing contacts

The following marketing tools in your HubSpot account will only work for contacts set as marketing:

• Marketing emails, including follow-up emails after form submissions.
• Contact list audiences in the ads tool.
• Marketing actions in workflows, such as Send email and Add to or Remove from ads audiences.

Please note: other types of emails can be sent to any of your contacts regardless of marketing status, including sales one-to-one emails, sequences, registration emails, ticket kickback emails, transactional emails, and customer feedback surveys.

Next steps

To manage your marketing contacts, you’ll need to be aware of the following:

• Review default marketing statuses for different tools. 
• Set contacts as marketing. 
• Set contacts as non-marketing.
• Prevent users from updating the marketing status.