Solved: HubSpot Community - Best Tips for Email Marketing/Opt-In and Opt-Out? - HubSpot Community

[DLalonde]

Hello!

I have a few questions surrounding best practices and tips for Email Marketing, specifically for Opt-in and Opt-out procedures and the like!

My org uses Salesforce as a way to keep our client data, but we use Hubspot and integrate the two for marketing to our contacts from Salesforce. 

My following questions are:

1. Would it be safe to pull a list of SF contacts that aren't already opted out, and mark them as marketing contacts? Or would this be unwise? Many of our contacts in SF may anticipate emails related to events or programs, but haven't exactly signed up for emails.

2. For unengaged contacts, should. just mark them as non-marketing contacts, or should I mark them as still marketing contacts? What are best tips for unengaged contacts and how should I be filtering them?

3. Is there any safe practices to notify anyone in our SF database to subscribe to emails? I'm unsure which contacts in our SF database are actually opted in or not, and would it be wise to link our unsubscribe to a field in SF to mark them as opted-out?

If you need more information to help answer these questions, I can respond in the comments! I just would like to know some best practices so I can better manage this platform.

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @DLalonde,

Happy to help here. Before I answer, please keep in mind that this reply does not constitute legal advice. Some of your questions should be discussed with your legal team or a data privacy professional.

1. The short answer is: no. This is not safe. If these contacts are simply records in your CRM, that does not in itself constitute a legal basis or assumed legitimate interest. Most data privacy regulations require that there is either a documented explicit consent, provable legitimate interest or that the communication is part of the performance of a contract. The closest here would be assuming a legitimate interest. Whether that would hold up is something I'd recommend discussing with the people who would process a potential complaint by a recipient; your legal team or data privacy officer. A lot of companies simply go ahead in your situation and see a potential greater benefit than risk, but it cannot be considered safe.

2. This depends on what you're planning to send to these contacts. For some campaigns and initiatives, you might want to include unengaged contacts (e.g. major campaigns, re-engagement campaigns). For ongoing communications, you can use HubSpot's built-in suppression: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/marketing-email/what-is-graymail-and-how-can-i-avoid-sending-my-email-...

If you're talking about marketing contact status (the HubSpot billing feature, not be confused with consent), I'd recommend marking contacts as non-marketing where:

• Unsubscribed from all email is True
• Email is unknown
• Email hard bounce reason is known
• Invalid email is true
• Email domain is any of (your competitors' email domains)

3. This is something you would also have to discuss with a legal professional. HubSpot requires you to have a legal basis to reach out to contacts as per its acceptable use policy, as far as I know. You're not supposed to use HubSpot to ask for consent, a legal basis must already be present. If you're unsure which contacts are opted in and which aren't, that's a tricky situation without a quick fix. You would have to review your existing contacts and try to document previous touchpoints, legitimate interest and/or previous consent.

I know that these aren't the answers you were looking for and you'll find a few responses in this community where users claim that it's perfectly safe to proceed. Since GDPR, it's not. Eventually, it's an evaluation of risk. If you're sure that these contacts expect to hear from you, one option you might want to consider is simply sending them what you think they expect and, as is required by HubSpot anyway, including an opt-out link at the end of the email. If you're however not so sure whether this applies to all contacts, this is risky, especially if you're marketing to contacts in countries where there is a heightened awareness for data privacy. Working with your legal team or an internal or external data privacy officer is your safest bet.

Best regards!