How to make sure a list of contact only receive one newsletter

[EmilyHanMo]

Hi,

We are planning to create a monthly newsletter to our investors and board of directors. So every month they see what is going on in our company. 

However, we don´t want anybody else to send them any emails. 

For example, other marketing colleagues or sales colleagues, they may pull list from our database by filtering their location and job title, for example: located in California and is CEO. Then they send promotional emails to the list. 

If I import our investor and board of directors list as contacts in Hubspot, I am afraid they maybe included in those mailing lists and may receive some comercial emails by error.

A colleague used to use another tool and she said that she has had this situation before and the way she solved for it was adding tose sensitive contacts to a Master Exclude List that by default won’t be included in email communication unless she explicitly checked the box to include “Master Exclude list”.

Does this functionality exists in Hubspot?

Thanks. 

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @EmilyHanMo,

Happy to help here. I see two ways to approach this.

Exclusion list. This is the one you already mentioned. There is no central place where this would be implemented (if it was, it would also affect your monthly investors and directors newsletter). In other words, this would be an exclusion list that you would have to make sure is implemented in all marketing emails. This can be done in the Send or schedule tab in emails.

I'd recommend creating a list called, for example, "Exclusion list for marketing emails" which then includes contacts from your monthly investors and directors newsletter list but also contacts with competitor email domains and any other group of contacts you want to exclude.

The main challenge is that someone could simply forget to use this list. Whenever I implement a process like this, it comes with a four-eye-principle where another user has to check a marketing email before it goes out, also paying attention to the exclusion lists used. Depending on how your team is set up, you could also use approvals for this: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Releases-and-Updates/Bringing-Admins-Peace-of-Mind-with-Approvals/b...

Subscriptions. If you create a subscription type for your monthly investors and directors newsletter, you could opt your recipients into that subscription type and opt them out of all other subscription types:

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/contacts/how-do-subscription-preferences-and-types-work

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

Once a contact is opted out, HubSpot will automatically exclude them from email sends where this subscription type is chosen.

The only risk here is users accidentally opting contacts into subscription types or choosing the wrong subscription type. I would consider this risk less likely than users forgetting about an exclusion list.

Let me know if you have questions about these approaches.

Best regards!