HubSpot | Managing Subscriptions & Mailing Lists

Best practice for sending to mail lists and integrating subscriptions with other platforms

General

Before you start on your email marketing journey, you should ensure that you have your mailing lists setup.

You should always review the local digital communication acts for the contacts that you are sending to.

Be aware of GDPR rules and exclude contacts from the EU if they have not specifically opted-in.

Your Marketable List should follow these rules:

  • Relevant Lifecycle Stage: e.g. Marketing Qualified Leads, Sales Qualified Leads, Opportunities, Customers, Evangelists, Other (depending on what you use other for)
  • Have indicated that they are happy to receive email communications from your organisation (check your local digital communications legislation for requirements around this)
  • Exclude a list of any contacts that have opted out from all subscription types
  • Exclude a list of any contacts from the EU who have not explicitly opted-in
  • Exclude a list of potential scammers
  • Potentially exclude internal and partners (more important for smaller lists where internal and partners could obscure your reporting)
  • Potentially exclude a list of your competition
  • You may also wish to exclude new leads who are still being nurtured

Managing 3rd Party Platform Subscriptions

The resubscription process for HubSpot is quite challenging, where the end customer essentially needs to resubscribe online and double opt-in to resubscribe.

If you are integrating with 3rd party platforms it is recommended (unless impacted by GDPR) that you update the Subscription Types and then exclude these contacts from general mailings rather than a full opt-out / unsubscribe. 

Note: If you need to support GDPR regulations we recommend that you fully unsubscribe contacts, please check with your legal team to clarify.

Our recommended setup

  1. Create a new Contact single Checkbox property, {3rd Party Platform} | Unsubscribed
  2. Via your Integration Platform, map the 3rd party platform subscription status to this new custom property
  3. Create a Workflow which sets the status of all Subscription types to Opted out
  4. Create an exclusion list / add to your exclusion list any contacts who have all Subscription Types set as Opted out
  5. Ensure all future emails are only ever sent to your marketable list - which should exclude your exclusion list (a good practice no matter what)

Notes

You will need to ensure that if you add any new Subscription types that you update the Workflow and Exclusion list.

 

A list of EU countries (as of 22 Sep 2021)

Austria ;
Belgium ;
Bulgaria ;
Croatia ;
Cyprus ;
Czech Republic ;
Denmark ;
Estonia ;
Finland ;
France ;
Germany ;
Greece ;
Hungary ;
Ireland ;
Italy ;
Latvia ;
Lithuania ;
Luxembourg ;
Malta ;
Netherlands ;
Poland ;
Portugal ;
Romania ;
Slovakia ;
Slovenia ;
Spain ;
Sweden ;