Avoid reaching your Marketing Contact Limit
Are you approaching your marketing contact limit in HubSpot? If so, you’re likely facing the possibility of a price increase.
In this guide, we’ll highlight why Marketing Contacts are beneficial, how you can continuously reduce your marketing contacts, and how to instantly decrease your count by deleting contacts or merging duplicate records.
To manage your marketing contact count effectively, start by reviewing your current usage:
- In your HubSpot account, click your account name in the top right corner,
- Select Account & Billing.
- Navigate to the Usage & Limits tab to see your marketing contact usage over time.
As you can see in the image below, I was getting very close to my limit and needed a solution fast.
What are Marketing Contacts in HubSpot?
Before optimizing your contacts, it’s important to understand what Marketing Contacts are and why they are a good thing.
Previously, HubSpot charged for all contacts stored in your CRM, which often forced businesses to delete valuable records just to cut costs. With the introduction of Marketing Contacts, you can now keep all your contacts while only paying for the ones you actively market to.
Marketing Contacts allow you to:
- Send marketing emails, including automated follow-ups.
- Build targeted audiences for ad campaigns.
- Use contacts in marketing workflows, such as Send email and ad audience actions.
Step 1: Identify Non-Marketing Contacts
Not every contact in your database needs to be a Marketing Contact.
To determine which records should be excluded, ask yourself: Who am I actually marketing to?
At Koalify, we use the following criteria to identify contacts that should NOT be considered Marketing Contacts:
- Email is unknown
- Unsubscribed from all email is equal to True
- Email hard bounce reason is known
- Exclude from Newsletter is any of Yes
- This is a custom property that I use to mark contacts that should not receive newsletters (suppliers, competitors)
- This is a custom property that I use to mark contacts that should not receive newsletters (suppliers, competitors)
Step 2: Automatically set as Non-Marketing
Once you’ve identified the contacts that should not be labeled as Marketing Contacts, you can create a HubSpot workflow to update them automatically
Trigger Enrollment for Contacts
Group 1: Marketing contact status = Marketing Contact AND Email is unknown
Group 2: Marketing contact status = Marketing Contact AND Unsubscribed from all emails = True
Group 3: Marketing contact status = Marketing Contact AND Email hard bounce reason is known
Group 4: Marketing contact status = Marketing Contact AND Exclude from Newsletters = Yes
Actions
-
Update subscription type to exclude from Marketing Emails | Marketing & Product Information.
Until then, affected contacts will still be labeled as Marketing Contacts.
Step 3: Instantly decrease Marketing Contacts
If you need to immediately lower your Marketing Contact count, there are two effective options:
1) Delete irrelevant contacts
Over time, your database may accumulate junk contacts—spam form submissions, incorrect imports, or outdated records. A quick cleanup can instantly reduce your count. Need help? Check out our guide on How to Delete Irrelevant Contacts for step-by-step instructions.
2) Merge duplicate contacts
At Koalify, we are all about merging, so we couldn’t leave this one out. We often see portals with over 10% duplicate contacts, unnecessarily inflating marketing contact counts. Learn how to combine manual and bulk deduplication methods to decrease the number of Marketing Contacts in HubSpot.
At Koalify we are all about merging so could not leave this one out. we often see portals with over 10% duplicate contacts. Focus on the low hanging fruit (newly created records or certain duplicats) and learn how you can combine manual and bulk deduplication.
This approach helped me reduce our Marketing Contacts to 1,900, giving us a comfortable buffer before our next review date on March 1st, when over 400 records will be updated to non-marketing contacts.
Conclusion
Keeping your marketing contact count in check is essential to avoiding unnecessary costs. By consistently reviewing and optimizing your database, you can ensure that you’re only paying for contacts that truly matter.
We hope this guide helps you manage your HubSpot contacts more effectively!
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out.