Creating and using lists with a mix of permissioned and unpermissioned contact records

Marketing & Content Hub Lists, Lead Scoring & Workflows
1

Hi,

I’m trying to confirm a couple of unknowns around lists and how they interact with HubSpot permissions.

I need to send a mail via the marketing hub to a group of contacts who all have the same criteria in their contact record (set in a contact property). However, I do not have permission to view all of those contacts (i know there are around 50, but I only have permission to view the record for 20 of these).

My question is threefold:

  1. If I create a list on that contact property, will it include all contacts, or only those that I have permission to see (does someone with full permissions need to create the list in the first place)?
  2. If i send a mass mail to a list in which I do not have permission to view all the individuals - will it actually send to everyone on the list, or only my permissioned contact? (Am I able to send the mail effectively?)
  3. If i subsequently want to track email performance, will I be able to view things like opens/clicks for contacts I don’t have permission to see in the email report? (Am I able to monitor the list effectively)

Note that we have explicit permission to contact all these people, this is more about how my individual permissions in HubSpot will impact the actual operational act of sending and monitoring the email.

2

Hi @Mark_Porter,

Great questions. I tested this a while ago. In my test, the email to your list of 50 would be sent, even though you had only permissions to view 30 of them. Different story with partitioned lists (see here). The email would be only sent to the 30 contacts, if it was partitioned to the correct team or user. However, that requires perfect and constant partioning for each new list. HubSpot does currently not have a feature to find unpartitioned lists so there would always be the risk of error.

(Since my test was done a while ago, things might have changed. Testing is fairly complex since it requires multiple users with different roles, a lot of test contacts and a lot of test sends. If you are planning on relying on it, I’d recommend running a test yourself.)

In any case, I found the list behavior described above too unreliable. I’m managing an enterprise portal in a marketing operations capacity. We’re now using mandatory exclusion / suppression lists for each email send, making sure that any contact not owned by a user or team is suppressed in that email send. It’s not ideal, but every user can remember the golden rule of not sending an email without the mandatory suppression list.

Regarding your third question, last I checked I was able to download the email performance csv file for all recipients – not just the ones I have contact access to. All a user needs is access to the email tool, not even any contact access. From a permissions standpoint that’s a nightmare. (Similar issue by the way with the import tool. Regardless of your contact access, you can download all source files of imports uploaded by others users.)

Best regards!