Optimising Marketing Contact Limits in HubSpot: A Complete Guide

Effective contact management is essential for businesses leveraging HubSpot’s marketing and CRM capabilities. HubSpot’s marketing contact limits directly impact how businesses execute campaigns, segment their audiences, and manage costs. Without an optimised approach, companies risk exceeding limits, paying for inactive contacts, and reducing the efficiency of their marketing efforts.

Understanding how to stay within HubSpot’s contact limits while ensuring effective lead nurturing and customer engagement requires strategic planning, automation, and regular data maintenance. This guide provides insights into managing HubSpot’s marketing contacts, reducing unnecessary costs, and maximising the efficiency of marketing campaigns.

Understanding HubSpot’s Marketing Contact Limits

HubSpot categorises contacts into two primary groups:

• Marketing Contacts: These contacts receive marketing emails, workflows, and advertising campaigns. They contribute to HubSpot’s marketing contact limit and pricing structure.
• Non-Marketing Contacts: These contacts are stored in the CRM but do not receive marketing communications. They do not count towards HubSpot’s marketing contact limit, making them cost-effective for businesses managing large databases.

Why Contact Limits Matter

HubSpot’s pricing structure is based on the number of marketing contacts. Businesses that do not effectively manage their contacts may find themselves exceeding their plan limits, leading to higher costs.

By implementing proactive contact management, businesses can optimise marketing contact usage, reduce waste, and ensure campaigns are focused on high-value leads.

Best Practices for Staying Within HubSpot’s Contact Limits

1. Regularly Audit and Clean Contact Lists

A cluttered contact database increases costs and reduces marketing efficiency. Over time, contacts become inactive, outdated, or irrelevant, unnecessarily using up marketing contact space.

Steps for Effective Contact List Maintenance:

• Identify inactive contacts who have not engaged with emails or campaigns within a specific timeframe (e.g., six months).
• Remove or archive duplicate contacts to maintain data accuracy.
• Use validation tools to detect invalid, bounced, or outdated email addresses.
• Convert inactive contacts to non-marketing status, reducing marketing costs without losing valuable CRM data.

Regular audits ensure that only engaged and relevant contacts remain part of marketing lists, keeping costs under control while improving deliverability and engagement rates.

2. Segment Contacts to Prioritise High-Value Leads

Not all contacts should be treated equally within marketing campaigns. By implementing lead segmentation, businesses can prioritise engaged leads while filtering out less active contacts.

Segmentation Strategies for Contact Optimisation:

• Engagement-Based Segmentation: Classify contacts based on open rates, click-through rates, and form submissions.
• Lifecycle Stage Segmentation: Group contacts as Leads, Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs), or Customers.
• Behavioural Segmentation: Identify contacts who frequently engage with marketing efforts versus those who remain inactive.

By focusing marketing efforts on highly engaged contacts, businesses can reduce unnecessary email sends, improve personalisation, and stay within their HubSpot plan limits.

3. Automate Marketing Contact Management

HubSpot provides automation tools to streamline contact management and optimise marketing contact usage.

How to Use Automation to Manage Contacts:

• Set Up Engagement Workflows: Automatically track and monitor engagement levels. If contacts become inactive, they can be flagged for review or converted to non-marketing contacts.
• Create Re-Engagement Campaigns: Before marking contacts as non-marketing, implement an automated email sequence to attempt re-engagement.
• Use Lead Scoring to Prioritise Contacts: Assign scores based on engagement level, email interactions, and sales activity to ensure only qualified leads remain in marketing campaigns.

Automation reduces the manual effort required for contact management, ensuring businesses maximise efficiency while maintaining an optimised CRM database.

4. Convert Unengaged Contacts to Non-Marketing Status

HubSpot allows businesses to change contact classifications on a monthly basis, meaning that contacts who are no longer engaging can be shifted to non-marketing status.

When to Convert a Contact to Non-Marketing Status:

• If a contact has not engaged with emails, ads, or workflows for over six months.
• If a lead has not moved through the sales funnel despite repeated outreach attempts.
• If a contact is purely transactional or informational (e.g., past customers, suppliers, or internal team members).

By proactively managing contact classifications, businesses can optimise marketing spend while maintaining access to valuable CRM data.

5. Use Smart Lists to Manage Marketing Contact Allocation

HubSpot’s smart lists provide an effective way to automatically segment contacts based on predefined criteria.

Examples of Smart Lists for Contact Optimisation:

• Engaged Contacts List: Contacts who have interacted with emails, content, or lead magnets within the past 90 days.
• Inactive Contacts List: Leads who have not opened or engaged with marketing content within the past six months.
• High-Intent Leads List: Contacts who frequently visit the website, download content, or submit forms.

Using dynamic segmentation, businesses can ensure that marketing efforts are focused on engaged, high-value leads, keeping contact limits optimised.

Additional Strategies for Staying Within HubSpot’s Marketing Contact Limits

Beyond segmentation and automation, businesses should implement long-term marketing strategies that support efficient contact management.

1. Improve Lead Capture Strategies

Rather than adding every new lead to a marketing list, businesses should qualify leads first to ensure only engaged contacts receive marketing emails.

How to Optimise Lead Capture:

• Use progressive profiling in forms to collect incremental data before adding contacts to marketing lists.
• Implement double opt-ins to ensure only genuinely interested subscribers are included in marketing lists.
• Create lead nurturing sequences that move new leads through an engagement funnel before designating them as marketing contacts.

Optimising lead capture strategies prevents unqualified leads from using up valuable marketing contact space.

2. Monitor HubSpot Contact Usage Monthly

HubSpot provides reporting tools that allow businesses to track marketing contact usage in real time.

How to Monitor Contact Usage Efficiently:

• Regularly review contact reports to identify trends in engagement and marketing list size.
• Use data visualisations to track how contact usage fluctuates over time.
• Set up alerts and notifications for when marketing contact numbers approach plan limits.

Consistently monitoring contact usage prevents businesses from exceeding their plan while maintaining optimal engagement.

Final Thoughts: Selecting the Right HubSpot Partner in Australia

Optimising HubSpot’s marketing contact limits ensures that businesses can maintain an effective marketing strategy while staying within budget. By implementing contact audits, lead segmentation, automation, and strategic list management, businesses can ensure that only high-value leads contribute to their marketing contact quota.

Through automated workflows, engagement tracking, and smart segmentation, businesses can maintain a high-performing CRM database while preventing unnecessary marketing costs.

By consistently monitoring contact usage, adjusting non-marketing status, and refining lead capture strategies, businesses can leverage HubSpot’s marketing capabilities efficiently while ensuring a cost-effective approach to contact management.