How to automatically set departed contacts to Non-Marketing in HubSpot

First, check this applies to you

Marketing contacts only exist on accounts using HubSpot's marketing contacts pricing. If your account has it, every contact carries a Marketing contact status property and your bill is based on how many are marked as marketing. If your account does not have it, there is no such property, nothing on this page applies, and departed contacts cost you nothing beyond the deliverability damage.

Worth being precise about what the status actually does, because it is widely misunderstood. Setting someone to non-marketing stops HubSpot marketing email from going to them and takes them out of the billed count. It does not stop one-to-one sales email, and it does not stop sequences — those still send. It is a marketing-send and billing change, not a suppression list. If you need the person to stop being contacted at all, that is a different action.

Why an app cannot do this directly

The restriction is one-directional, and the asymmetry is the part worth knowing. HubSpot documents several ways to set a contact *as* marketing — including through an integration — because that direction only ever increases what you are billed for. Going the other way is fenced off: HubSpot's own guidance lists the contacts index, an active list, a workflow and an import as the routes for setting contacts as non-marketing, and an app writing the property is not among them.

There is a second, nastier version of the problem that we hit while building against the API: sending a marketing-status change in an ordinary contact update can come back as a clean success while the value on the record does not move. That is our own observation rather than documented behaviour, and it is the reason ReplyCircuit does not attempt the write. A green tick that changed nothing is worse than no tick at all — you would stop checking, and keep paying.

So the working pattern is two-step, and it is the same pattern HubSpot itself points people to: write a normal CRM property you are allowed to write, and let HubSpot's own automation act on it.

No public study puts a number on how much of a marketing contact tier is spent on people who have left. Every figure above is a HubSpot mechanic you can verify in their own documentation, not an estimate of ours.

The one-time workflow (how teams do it today)

Confirm you can do this: the "Set marketing contact status" action lives in workflows, which need Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise. On Starter, skip to the next section.

In HubSpot, go to Automation and create a contact-based workflow. Give it a name you will recognise in a year — something like "Departed contacts to non-marketing".

For the enrolment trigger, choose Lead Status is equal to "No Longer With Company". That is exactly the value ReplyCircuit writes when a reply says the person has gone; if you set departures some other way, point the trigger at whatever property you actually use. Leave re-enrolment off — a contact only needs to leave once.

Add a single action: "Set marketing contact status", and choose Non-marketing contact. Do not add an email or task step here. Keep this workflow doing one thing so that when it misfires, you know exactly why.

Turn it on and choose to enrol existing contacts that already meet the trigger, so the departures already sitting in your database get cleared out too, not just the future ones.

Check one thing before you walk away: if you have an existing workflow that sets Lead Status back to something like "Connected" whenever a contact replies, add an exclusion for "No Longer With Company" so it cannot undo the departure.

If you are on Starter: the bulk route

No workflows does not mean no fix — it means the same job, batched. Build a saved contact view filtered to your departure marker: Lead Status is "No Longer With Company", or whatever value you use. Add "Email hard bounced is true" as a second view; hard bounces and departures overlap heavily.

Once a month, open that view, select all, and use the bulk action to set the selected contacts as non-marketing. It is a few clicks for as many records as you have, and it is the same underlying change the workflow makes.

Do it before your update date rather than after. A contact set to non-marketing the day after your renewal has still been paid for the whole of the coming term.

What to expect afterwards

HubSpot does not remove the contact from your marketing tier the instant the workflow runs. The record shows as non-marketing straight away, and the billed count updates at your next update date. That is normal HubSpot behaviour, not a delay in the workflow — so measure this quarterly against your renewal, not daily against the record.

If you do not know when that date falls, it is shown in your account's marketing contacts usage — Settings, then Account Management and Account Defaults, under the marketing contacts section, alongside your current count against your tier. Put it in a calendar reminder a week early; that week is the whole difference between clearing departures now and paying for them for another term.

The contact stays in your CRM, fully searchable, with its whole history intact. That matters more than it sounds: the departed person's record is what tells you the account had a relationship, who owned it, and which deal it belonged to. Deleting them to save a slot destroys that. Setting them non-marketing keeps every bit of it and costs nothing.

ReplyCircuit re-reads Lead Status a few seconds after writing it and flags it on the review card if something in your portal changed the value back. That is the failure mode that would otherwise be invisible: the workflow never fires, nobody notices, and the contacts stay billable for another term.