Master Your Marketing Contacts

Admin's Assignment

Build the Ultimate Marketing Contacts Dashboard

If you have the current version of Marketing Hub, staying in control of your HubSpot costs means staying in control of how many marketing contacts you have in the CRM. To avoid being surprised with a price hike that you're stuck with until your next renewal, you should be keeping an eye on:

• How many marketing contacts you have
• How this number is changing over time
• Where marketing contacts are coming from
• What's causing them to be marked as marketing contacts
• Whether all your marketing contacts are actually being marketed to

That's a lot to monitor, but it's easy if you have a dedicated marketing contacts dashboard. Build yours this week in under 30 minutes with the instructions below.

Step 1: Start with HubSpot's default marketing contacts dashboard (Dashboards > Create dashboard > Marketing contacts template). Optional: rename default reports for clarity and brevity.

Step 2: Add a text box to the top row of the dashboard with your current marketing contacts subscription limit.

• Find your limit by clicking your company name in the top right corner > Account & Billing > Usage & Limits > Contact Tier.

• Navigate back to your dashboard, click Actions in the top right > Add images, text, or video > Title: "Current Limit" > Content: your limit number. Then reposition/resize the new box and other modules as you prefer.

Step 3 (Professional & Enterprise only): Add a report that shows changes to marketing contacts over time. This report requires you to also add a property and workflow to datestamp when contacts became marketing contacts. If you're just now creating this, you won't be able to show historical data, but it will be very valuable going forward.

Create the datestamp property:

• Create a new contact property called 'Became a Marketing Contact Date' with a description of "All contacts that became marketing contacts prior to [TODAY'S DATE] will be marked as [TODAY'S DATE]" and a field type of 'Date picker'. You can uncheck the box for showing in forms, pop-up forms, and bots.

Create a workflow to manage the datestamp property:

• Create a new contact workflow.
• Set the trigger to: when filter criteria is met > Contact properties > 'Marketing contact status is known', and turn re-enrollment on with the box checked.
• Add a branch with the "One property..." type with the 'Marketing contact status' property and the box checked to create a separate branch for each value.
• For the 'Marketing contact' branch, add a 'Set property value' action to set the 'Became a Marketing Contact Date' property to the date of step.
• For the 'Non-marketing contact' branch, add a 'Clear property value' action to clear the 'Became a Marketing Contact Date' property.
• Turn the workflow on and be sure to select the option to enroll existing contacts.

Create the report to show changes to your marketing contact volume over time:

• Create a new single object - contacts report with 'Became a Marketing Contact Date' as the only property in the data step.
• Replace the 'Create Date' filter with a filter for 'Became a Marketing Contact Date', set the timeframe to whatever you'd like but remember that you won't have historical data if you've just set up the datestamping.
• Change the chart type to 'Line' and drag the 'Became a Marketing Contact Date' and 'Count of Contacts' properties to the 'Displaying' box.
• Optional: change the frequency (I like monthly) and/or check the 'Cumulative' box under display options.
• Save the report with a descriptive name and add it to your Marketing Contacts dashboard.

Step 4: Create a report that will show the number of marketing contacts in your CRM that have unsubscribed from all your email communications.

• Create a new single object - contacts report with 'Opted out of all email' as the only property in the data step.
• Change the filter to 'Create Date is All time' and add a filter for 'Marketing contact status is any of Marketing contact' and another filter for 'Opted out of all email is any of Yes'.
• Change the chart type to 'Summary' and drag the 'Count of Contacts' property to the 'Displaying' box.
• Save the report with a descriptive name and add it to your Marketing Contacts dashboard.

Step 5: Create a report that will show the number of marketing contacts in your CRM that have had emails hard bounce.

• Create a new single object - contacts report with 'Email hard bounce reason' as the only property in the data step.
• Change the filter to 'Create Date is All time' and add a filter for 'Marketing contact status is any of Marketing contact' and another filter for 'Email hard bounce reason is known'.
• Change the chart type to 'Summary' and drag the 'Count of Contacts' property to the 'Displaying' box.
• Save the report with a descriptive name and add it to your Marketing Contacts dashboard.

Step 6: Create a report that will show the number of marketing contacts in your CRM that are unengaged.

• If you do not already have an 'Unengaged contacts' list, create a new marketing email, navigate to the 'Send or schedule' tab, then click the blue "unengaged contacts" link. HubSpot will then create this list and you can delete the marketing email.

• Create a new single object - contacts report with 'Last marketing email open date' as the only property in the data step (you can use any property but I find the last open date property to be most helpful when drilling down into the table view of this report).
• Change the filter to 'Create Date is All time' and add a filter for 'Marketing contact status is any of Marketing contact' and another filter for 'List membership is any of Unengaged contacts'.
• Change the chart type to 'Summary' and drag the 'Count of Contacts property' to the 'Displaying' box.
• Save the report with a descriptive name and add it to your Marketing Contacts dashboard.

Step 7: Create a report that will show the number of marketing contacts in your CRM that have never received any marketing communications from you.

• Create a new single object - contacts report with 'Became a Marketing Contact Date' as the only property in the data step (you can use any property but I find the became a marketing contact date property to be most helpful when drilling down into the table view of this report).
• Change the filter to 'Create Date is All time' and add a filter for 'Marketing contact status is any of Marketing contact' and another filter for 'First marketing email send date is unknown'.
• Change the chart type to 'Summary' and drag the 'Count of Contacts' property to the 'Displaying' box.
• Save the report with a descriptive name and add it to your Marketing Contacts dashboard.

With this dashboard, you can now easily see everything you need to rest easier knowing you've greatly reduced your chances of getting hit with an unexpected price increase due to unplanned marketing contact overages.

Update Of The Week

Email - New Bot Open & Click Rate

You probably already know that many of the email opens and clicks HubSpot reports to you aren't real. From every email automatically being opened on Apple devices to phishing detectors checking your links, there are lots of ways for your emails to get opens and clicks that have nothing to do with your audience actually reading and engaging with your email.

But with the public beta HubSpot released this week, you can now get a better idea of just how much of your open and click rates are driven by bots. HubSpot hasn't told us yet exactly how it's coming up with these numbers, but I'm hoping we get more info once this feature comes out of beta.

For now, I recommend enrolling in the beta and seeing what the numbers show you for your next few sends.

To get a rundown of all HubSpot's May updates + some practical and creative use cases for them, join me on June 5th for our monthly New & Now webinar!

On Your Radar

Upcoming Pricing Changes

There are two big pricing changes on the horizon that all HubSpot admins should be aware of:

Commerce Hub - June 24th

HubSpot will be increasing the rates it charges when payments are made via Commerce Hub, which will include a new platform fee for payments processed by HubSpot.

If you're already using HubSpot payments by June 20, 2024, the new fee for HubSpot payments won't kick in until June 24, 2025. So if you already know your company plans to move to HubSpot payment processing, I highly recommend getting that set up now and processing your first payment before June 20th.

Nobody likes a fee increase (myself included), but I do feel that the Commerce Hub features are worth the increased cost. Our team processes the majority of our payments through HubSpot, and plan to continue doing so.

Here's a breakdown of all the fee changes:

Service Hub Enterprise - June 24th

The price for new Service Hub Enterprise customers and additional seats for existing Service Hub Enterprise customers will increase to $150/seat on June 24th (up from $130/seat). Pricing for any seats purchased prior to June 24th will remain at $130/seat now and at your renewal. This means that if you're considering adding Service Hub for the first time or you think you'll be in need of additional seats soon, acting before June 24th will get you locked into some savings.

This price increase corresponds with a huge number of updates and improvements to Service Hub in recent months that have transformed this hub into a great tool for customer success that stands its ground against top-tier competitors like Zendesk and Salesforce Service Cloud. We've seen quite a few companies make the move to add Service Hub recently and I'm confident this will be a big trend in the coming months.

If you've been on the fence about Service Hub, I'd be happy to show you around on a demo and talk through some use cases - let's chat!

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Happy HubSpotting,

The Orange Admin