Searchable list of 'Do Not Contact'

[rowanp]

I am currently importing company leads into Hubspot CRM, and we have quite a long list of companies we have already contacted who are not interested in our services. I don't want to import these companies and flood our lists because they don't really have a purpose besides letting employees know not to bother contacting them. Is there a way to have a running list of 'Do Not Contact' that can be searched for entry-by-entry and updated?

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @rowanp,

HubSpot keeps track of consent (or the lack thereof) on a contact level. There are different ways to approach this.

You could opt these contacts out entirely, see here. This will automatically suppress them from all future marketing emails from your account. When typing up a sales email, you'd see this:

This is usually the best option when contacts ask to never receive communication from you again. If you haven't imported these contacts yet, you can import them as an opt out list. This is almost always a better idea than not importing them: Once they're imported as an opt out list, HubSpot will prevent any communication to these contacts. Without these contacts in your CRM, a sales person might add these contact details to the CRM, not knowing that they have previously opted out. (They will not count towards your billable contact total.)

If these contacts have, in addition, asked to have their data deleted, you would perform a GDPR compliant delete after importing these contacts. HubSpot will keep anonymized data about the contact, again excluding them from any communication and preventing users to re-add the email adress to the CRM.

Alternatively, if these contacts have not asked to be opted out or deleted, if they've "just" let you known that they're not interested, you could keep them in the CRM. A lot of users including myself update the lifecycle stage and lead status of these contacts. It's best practice to set these contacts to Lifecycle stage is "Other" and Lead status is "Not interested". They would not be opted out, technically still be eligible for communication and you could try to re-engage them in the future. Until then, marketing could suppress them by building an exclusion list based on these criteria, sales would have to keep an eye out in the left sidebar and not reach out to contacts with Lead status is Not interested.

Hope this helps!

(This post does not constitute legal advice.)

[natsumimori]

Hi @rowanp ,

Thank you for reaching out to HubSpot Community.

I wanted to tag in some top Community contributors here: @rikkilear and @johnelmer , would you mind sharing your advice for @rowanp ?

[johnelmer]

@rowanp @natsumimori @karstenkoehler Perhaps I'm not understanding the question, but isn't this the purpose of HubSpot's new Marketing Contacts feature?

From https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-contacts

Only Pay for the Contacts that Count

We get it. There’s a million good reasons to have contacts in your CRM that you can’t market to. Bounces, unsubscribes, partners, sales contacts, one-off customer success tickets...the list goes on. But while the rest of your company grows your customer database, you shouldn’t get stuck with the bill.

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @johnelmer,

Marking a contact as a marketing contact means that they won't count towards your billable contact total. It doesn't say anything about their withdrawn consent, right to be forgotten, lead status etc. – it's tier management tool, not a privacy / consent tool.

Contacts who are opted out, don't have to be marked as non marketing contacts, they don't count towards the billable total anyway. Contacts who've asked to be deleted either. If they've let you known that they're not interested, then you could indeed mark them as non marketing contact in addition to updating their lifecycle stage and lead status.

Best regards!

[natsumimori]

Good point @karstenkoehler ,thank you for adding this!

[natsumimori]

Yup, I think Marketing Contacts feature is another option!