We need a way to selectively disable email open and click tracking for specific contacts or countries (for example, France and Italy), while keeping tracking enabled for everyone else.
Right now, the only practical lever is the global tracking setting in Marketing email settings. Or create duplicate emails using the beta (per email) solution
What’s missing is a technical enforcement layer so that when someone opts out of tracking, HubSpot actually does not embed tracking pixels for that contact, even if global tracking is turned on.
+1, and want to flag a related gap for one-to-one sales email (not just marketing email). Even the per-email tracking checkbox available in the Gmail/Outlook extensions doesn’t exist in the native CRM record compose window.
On accounts with “Send emails to contacts with legal basis” enabled, the two concepts also get entangled: you must set “Legal basis for processing contact’s data” before you’re allowed to send at all, but doing so automatically re-enables open/click tracking for that contact. There’s no way to separate “I have a lawful basis to email you” (GDPR Art. 6, e.g. legitimate interest) from “I have consent to track your opens” (the ePrivacy-based consent CNIL/Garante now require for the pixel specifically).
For sales teams sending 1:1 emails to France/Italy who document legitimate interest to justify sending but don’t collect separate pixel consent, there’s currently no compliant way to keep emailing those contacts from the CRM without also tracking them — short of disabling tracking account-wide or routing sends through Gmail/Outlook instead of the native composer.
+2. As a HubSpot partner I was flooded with notifications last week about the France/Italy regulations. France takes effect mid-July, so one of my clients is really under pressure as a U.S. company with very few customers and email subscribers to come up with a workable solution that isn’t going to cause us a ridiculous amount of extra work. An urgent need right now is to give contacts a one-click option to opt out of email tracking. We should be able to add this to the footer of emails at our discretion (e.g., as smart content that would only be shown to lists of contacts in the affected regions). Please please please implement this. We absolutely cannot and will not disable tracking account-wide for such a small number of affected contacts.
(I’d love to know how HubSpot customers in the EU are running email marketing campaigns if they run up against these issues.)
Totally agree with everything stated above. This is an urgent requirement that needs fixing now before the new reg comes into force.
A very small proportion of our contacts are in Italy and France. Tracking is one of the most valuable features of HubSpot. We don’t want to have to turn off tracking for everyone, just to address compliance with a very few.
I cannot see where I can toggle tracking on and off when sending 1:1 emails on my version (Starter subscription of HubSpot).
As suggested we need a new property that can be set at the company level to turn tracking on and off.
It’s very messy. I use my own UTM parameters to track how an email does at the back end but in order to even toggle on and off the tracking for email, the beta wont let you do this unless you enable the HubSpot UTM tracking which overwrites my tracking (and there’s is minimal).
I looked into our account this morning to see whether there was a region-based toggle in Settings > Marketing > Email > Tracking for this issue, but discovered there is not currently one. Hubspot support recommended we formally request the following product enhancement:
As an integration partner, we manage several HubSpot accounts, and some of our clients are affected by this change. Currently, they would have to disable tracking globally for the entire account. However, this means losing valuable data from contacts for whom tracking would be legally permitted.
Therefore, we also believe that there should be a contact-level setting that allows tracking to be disabled for specific contacts or segments, rather than for the entire account.
This would allow us to specifically obtain tracking consent through forms, for example, from contacts in the affected countries, while tracking for contacts from other countries could continue as before. From our perspective, this would be a very helpful and important improvement.
To clarify:
I would like this property at the contact NOT company level. Sorry for error in my previous comment.
I would then create a segment and edit the property from there. We created our own country property as a dropdown select field type rather than use the HubSpot free text Country/Region property that came as standard, so would not want the tracking property to be based simply on the country/region single-line text field that comes as standard in starter subscription.
@NinaMoore we have the same issue. As far as “Hubspot support recommended we formally request the following product enhancement”, how/where we can we submit that recommendation?
Absolutely! We need a way to select by country in a bulk email to not include tracking to selected countries. Right now the solutions are very labor intensive.
HubSpot should have had the ability to disable email open/click tracking on the contact level based on the country the contact is in well before this regulation went live. This is table stakes for a platform used by hundreds of thousands of customers globally to send emails every day.
Now, they’re making us choose between tracking nobody at all and accepting the risk of maintaining tracking just because they didn’t develop a solution.
Completely agree with all comments here. Globally turning off email tracking is not an option. But sending emails twice (once for a France/Italy segment, and then again for the rest of the audience) is also not practical.. There must be a way to obtain consent for email tracking and/or disable email tracking for specific contacts/countries. We (HubSpot and its customers) are not ready for these changes that are immediately around the corner.
As others have said, disabling tracking altogether is a joke solution, especially if France and Italy are a small portion of your database. The same goes for setting up your own custom consent flows or duplicating every one of your emails.
A HubSpot-native way for contacts to manage tracking consent would still be meh, as businesses wouldn’t want to present that option outside of France and Italy.
@NinaMoore’s solution in this thread is the only real answer:
Totally agree with everything here. Hubspot should have been more proactive here, as lots of us feel like sitting ducks right now as there is no way to be compliant in the platform without impacting global settings. This should have been implemented in May, one month after the French guidelines went into effect. No excuses!
It is also worth noting that any country-specific segmentation solution should allow individual contacts to opt in to or out of tracking.
More broadly, the solution should account for evolving data protection requirements. Regulations introduced in one EU country can often influence wider regional standards, so it would be sensible to future-proof the functionality by making it available across all countries, with rules based on either contact location or IP-derived country data.
Using a workaround and duplicating our marketing emails is simply not feasible, let alone all of our email workflows. So, this definitely needs to be a feature.
@NinaMoore I agree with this idea, except that I would prefer that the tracking toggle is at a more granular contact level, not just at country/region level. We then can use segments to filter and set the tag based on the grouping we prefer. We have setup our own custom fields for identifying geographical locations.
Agree with @NinaMoore idea, except that I would prefer that the tracking toggle is at a more granular contact level, not just at country/region level. We then can use segments to filter and set the tag based on the grouping we prefer. We have setup our own custom fields for identifying geographical locations.