Set up marketing contacts

HubSpot charges you based on how many marketing contacts you have, not how many total contacts sit in your CRM. This distinction matters more than most teams realise when they're getting started.

A marketing contact is one you can send marketing emails to, include in ads audiences, and target with marketing automation. A non-marketing contact is free but can only receive one-to-one sales emails and sequence emails. The difference is purely a billing and permissions distinction: the contact record itself looks the same.

Understanding this system early prevents two common problems: paying for contacts you never market to, and accidentally hitting your contact tier limit because you imported 10,000 contacts as marketing when you only needed 500.

How the billing works

Your HubSpot Marketing Hub subscription includes a set number of marketing contacts (e.g. 1,000, 2,000, 10,000 depending on your plan). You can have unlimited non-marketing contacts in your CRM at no additional cost. You only pay more when your marketing contact count exceeds your tier.

To check your current usage, click your account name (top right), then Account and Billing, then the Usage and Limits tab. You'll see how many marketing contacts you're using out of your total tier.

The marketing contact count updates on a fixed schedule. For yearly subscriptions, it updates on the first of each month. For monthly subscriptions, it updates on your renewal date. If you change a contact to non-marketing today, that change won't reduce your count until the next update date.

The golden rule: import as non-marketing

When you import contacts into HubSpot, always import them as non-marketing. This is the same advice from the CRM foundations playbook, but it bears repeating in the marketing context.

Here's why: if you import 5,000 contacts as marketing, you're immediately billed for all of them. If you later realise only 1,000 are actually prospects you want to email, you can't switch the other 4,000 to non-marketing until the next update cycle. You've paid for a month of contacts you didn't need.

The reverse direction is fast. A simple workflow or a bulk action can convert non-marketing contacts to marketing in minutes. Start conservative, then selectively upgrade the segments you actually plan to market to.

When to mark contacts as marketing

Mark a contact as marketing when you're ready to include them in at least one of these:

Marketing email campaigns. Ads audiences (retargeting lists synced to Google, Meta, or LinkedIn). Workflows that send marketing emails.

If a contact will only receive one-to-one sales emails, sequences, or transactional communications, they don't need to be marketing contacts.

Four ways to manage marketing contact status

During import. When running an import, there's a checkbox to "Set contacts as marketing contacts". Leave it unchecked unless you're certain every contact in that file should be marketable.

Individual changes. On any contact record, you can change their marketing status. This is useful for one-off adjustments but doesn't scale.

Bulk changes. From the contacts index (CRM > Contacts), select multiple contacts, click "More", then "Set as marketing contacts" or "Set as non-marketing contacts". Good for managing a few hundred at a time.

Workflows. The most powerful method. Create a workflow that automatically sets contacts to marketing when they meet specific criteria (e.g. filled out a form, reached a certain lead score, matched your ICP). And another workflow that sets bounced or unsubscribed contacts to non-marketing to save costs.

A workflow that saves you money

One of the first workflows I build for every client is a "bounced email cleanup" workflow. The enrollment trigger is: marketing emails bounced is greater than or equal to 3. The action is: set marketing contact status to non-marketing.

When someone's email bounces three times, they're unreachable. There's no reason to keep paying for them as a marketing contact. This simple workflow has saved clients hundreds to thousands per year depending on database size.

Marketing contacts are a billing mechanism, not a data model. Every contact in your CRM can hold the same data regardless of marketing status. The distinction only affects what marketing tools you can use to reach them, and what you pay.

Import as non-marketing by default. Use workflows to selectively upgrade and downgrade. Check your Usage and Limits page monthly to stay on top of your tier.