How do you measure ROI in a CRM system? The answer might not be immediately obvious, but with HubSpot Marketing Contacts, you can finally surface those all-important numbers and prove your CRM's worth.
You're worried about hitting your contacts capacity. Maybe you have more than one CRM system or even Excel files in a bid to make life easier. You may also have unsubscribed/ bounced/non-target contacts in your CRM. If you've answered yes to any of these, the new HubSpot pricing model will feel like a breath of fresh air.
'Marketing Contacts' is a new pricing model from HubSpot that means users only need to pay for contacts in their HubSpot CRM if they are marketing to them – so any other contacts you store are free! If you've been looking for a CRM with better ROI, this could be the answer.
Read on to learn more about Marketing Contacts.
How does the new HubSpot Marketing Contacts pricing model work?
Marketing Contacts is available to new customers in all paid tiers of Marketing Hub from 21st October 2020. (If you are an existing customer of Marketing Hub Starter, Professional or Enterprise, you'll be able to switch your subscription to include this, if you choose to.)
You'll only pay for contacts in the CRM that you're marketing to, i.e. you're sending them marketing emails and targeting ads to them.
You can store up to 1 million non-marketing contacts in your portal.
Simply select the contact as 'marketing' or 'not marketing'. Its status will update at the start of the next month (or your contract renewal).
If you want a more detailed look at Marketing Contacts, there's more information from HubSpot here.
What are the advantages?
Getting a big chunk of the space in your CRM basically for free sounds pretty good in itself. However, there are additional reasons why this is a big win for your budget and your operations.
You probably aren't using your CRM just for marketing contacts.
You'll previously have been paying to store other types of contact, regardless of whether they're customers, suppliers, vendors, one-off tickets, etc, as well as your own staff.
So you have to store a ton of important contacts, but only some of them will ever generate revenue for you. Marketing Contacts is a way for your CRM to offer a lot more ROI.
Don't forget that you'll likely have contacts who have unsubscribed from your marketing. Even if you need/want to keep their details, you won't have to pay for it anymore. (Simply deleting the contact would remove it from traffic analytics too, thereby skewing your reporting figures.)
Keeping all of your contact data in one place means your sales and service activities can run smoothly while enjoying frictionless connections with marketing. HubSpot's Marketing Contacts model means you can achieve this without getting hung up on the costs.
If you've previously used multiple CRMs, you now have an extra incentive to consolidate your data.
You might have gone down the route of having multiple platforms because of capacity worries. Maybe it's down to cost: other teams were filling up your CRM, but you were paying for it.
The problem is that this splits up the information you store and limits your visibility over your data as a whole.
Sharing a single system has many advantages in terms of operational efficiency, but the gains are so much greater if you choose a platform specifically designed for the purpose. One of the great advantages of HubSpot is that it's designed as an ecosystem — interconnecting platforms, functions, and integrations that can work together to increase your efficiency and effectiveness.
Find out more about consolidating data in our case study: how CRM implementation helped Globeducate standardise and simplify its processes.
We tell clients that thinking about their CRM first is a really great way to run marketing, sales, and services that keep customers coming back. There's no reason to completely separate these elements out, and in many, many cases, it makes better sense to bring them together.
Going through all of your contacts to select marketing or non-marketing may sound time-consuming, but it doesn't have to be.
HubSpot has some automatic time-saving tools that mean that you don't have to categorise all of your contacts manually.
You could use an automatically-generated list of bounces and unsubscribes, or mark up new contacts as marketing using forms, integrations, and simple workflows.
This leads us to another best practice for marketers – housekeeping.
On the face of it, Marketing Contacts is a great way to pay for your CRM. However, it also highlights one of the most important practices in CRM usage, and that's keeping your data clean.
Evidence suggests that between 10 and 25% of contacts in a B2B database contain errors. Marketing Contacts represents a golden opportunity to ensure the data you're storing is truly valuable and relevant to your business — especially if correct classification could save you a big chunk of change!
Check out our 7 simple steps for how to clean your CRM data here.
Who's eligible for HubSpot Marketing Contacts?
Marketing Contacts will certainly make HubSpot an attractive option for new customers, who will start on this pricing model by default.
As mentioned above, if you're an existing customer, you have the choice to upgrade to Marketing Contacts or stay on your current pricing.
The new model means you'd pay slightly more on your flat rate (Marketing Hub Professional is being slightly increased to start from £729 a month). However, there are other features to add value:
- Scaled contact pricing (where contacts get cheaper the more you buy. This feature used to be limited to Marketing Hub Starter but will now be in Professional and Enterprise too)
- Larger contact bands
This more strategic pricing means you'll enjoy the cost benefits alongside more flexible, customisable CRM usage. We've got to say, there's a big feel-good factor too! Being able to store a huge number of contacts for free is great, but it also incentivises and enables growing your business.
How do you measure ROI in your CRM system?
When it comes to situations that hold your business back, your CRM shouldn't be one of them. It just shouldn't be a factor in whether your business is able and willing to grow! Therefore, from capacity to cost, Marketing Contacts offers a great solution.
If inflexible CRM billing is currently forcing you to use multiple platforms, this new model hands you another great reason to consolidate and organise your data.
Marketing Contacts is a much more flexible, user-friendly way to use your CRM, centralising your marketing data without paying for contacts that are only used by sales or service. Best of all, it also encourages businesses to adopt better working practices: healthy data, a (powerful, intuitive) shared platform, and sales and marketing working together. Don't you just love it when a new approach ticks all your boxes?
If you have questions about better ways to manage your CRM via HubSpot – or how you can get started with Marketing Contacts in your existing portal – get in touch.
