Omit contacts from mailing list

[DSS-Gary]

I have an Active List "Mailing List" that's just all contacts with a known email. But there are a few that I'd like to omit from this; they're irrelevant to most of my mailings. Vendors, certain partners, etc. Is there a built-in tag/property I should use for this, or is it best for me to create a "NoMailingList" property and use that in my active-list query? I saw "DoNotContact" but that seems overly severe and I don't know if other things in Hubspot might use that.

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @DSS-Gary,

You could use the Persona property and create new values for vendors, mendors and friends: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/contacts/create-and-edit-personas

Best regards!

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @DSS-Gary,

Do these contacts have anything in common that you can filter by?

Suppression lists are built by filtering for certain properties – however, these properties need to be filled with values fist. HubSpot will automatically populate some properties (e.g. "Sends since last engagement") but most properties will be empty containers until you import contact information (beyond first name, last name, email), generate or enrich contacts with website forms or bulk edit them. Your first step would be to identify the right contact properties to store the information you want to filter by or to create custom properties.

Once you've done this (identified the right "containers" and filled them with the information you filter by), you can start building lists. I'd recommend to create separate recipient and suppression lists (and not to include all criteria in one list). This allows for more modularity. For example, if you have a suppression list including all vendors, one for partners, then you can decide whether the next mailing should be sent to everyone but partners or to everyone but partners/vendors etc., see also here.

To answer your initial question, there is no property that will automatically do this for your. (HubSpot can't tell whether a contact is a vendor or partner if you've only imported first name, last name and email address.)

If there is only a handful of contacts, you could also manually create and maintain a static list, see here.

Hope this helps!

[DSS-Gary]

Thanks -- that's useful, especially about suppression lists (though I have to remember to use the right ones when I send out emails!). I would categorize some of my non-lead contacts as "vendors," some as "mentors," and some as "friends & family" (people I've emailed info about my startup to, just because they're interested). None of them are legit leads. I thought maybe I should add a new Lifecycle Stage for them ("Not a Lead"), but that doesn't seem right. Perhaps I need a custom property? What do most people do about this kind of categorization?