Solved: HubSpot Community - Best practice for lists and email communcations - HubSpot Community

[TK32_EEC]

Hi, Inside our CRM,  Each of our contacts is tagged as members (who receive all email communications), non-members (who receive select communications) and others. These others vary, but many should not receive mass eDMs. What's the best practice for ensuring these contacts are not being sent any mass comms but are still in CRM?

We thought of creating a YES/NO property labelled "Are they in the exclusion list?" and creating an active list with all contacts that have "YES" clicked and always making sure that all mass eDM comms have this active list in the exclusion section of the "TO" section inside the email editor. The other option we thought of was to edit their subscription option and "unsubscribe" from all comms. If there is any other practices we are missing let me know or is the above one's the best way to manage this?

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @TK32_EEC,

Best practice would be to work with subscription types here and leveraging HubSpot's built-in features – and not rely on custom properties. Custom properties are not evaluated when a marketing email is sent and exclusion lists can always be forgotten. Subscription status however will always be checked by HubSpot.

First off, consider enabling the 'Legal basis required' option in the GDPR settings: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/privacy-and-consent/how-do-i-turn-on-gdpr-functionality-in-my-hubspot-...

Once this is checked, only contacts with an opt-in for a subscription type will receive an email using that subscription type. This is a 'hard' setting and will stop any communication in its tracks when an opt-in is missing. Make sure to review all of your automated emails before enabling this.

While this seems harsh, it helps with not accidentally sending emails to contacts who are not opted into a subscription type.

(Alternatively, you would have to manually make sure that contacts are opted out of the subscriptions they're not supposed to receive.)

With the setting enabled, make sure that contacts are opted into the subscription types they should be receiving:

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/marketing-email/set-up-email-subscription-types

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/records/manage-your-subscription-preferences-and-types

Once you maintain these subscriptions for your contacts, HubSpot will only allow emails to contacts when they're opted in. Missing opt-in or opt-out mean that an email will be held back by HubSpot. No need for custom properties.

You can then also build contact lists based on the subscription status.

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!