Best Practices for Bulk Opting-In Contacts for Email Marketing in Compliance with GDPR on HubSpot

[NJ_001]

Hello Community,

I hope this message finds you well. Our organization is at the exciting stage of implementing our email marketing strategy using HubSpot. We understand the paramount importance of adhering to GDPR guidelines and want to ensure that our process respects and complies with these regulations fully.

We have a list of contacts that have previously given us explicit consent to receive marketing emails. Our challenge now is to efficiently opt-in these contacts in HubSpot for email marketing purposes, in a way that is both time-efficient and in full compliance with GDPR requirements. The manual process of opting-in each contact individually is not feasible for us due to the volume of contacts.

We are looking for advice, best practices, or insights on how to perform this action in bulk. Specifically, we're interested in:

1. Bulk Opt-In Process: Is there a feature within HubSpot or a recommended method to bulk update the opt-in status of contacts who have already given explicit consent?
2. GDPR Compliance: How can we ensure that our bulk opt-in process is fully compliant with GDPR? Are there specific fields or documentation we need to maintain within HubSpot to prove consent?
3. Best Practices: Any tips or best practices for managing opt-ins and maintaining GDPR compliance within HubSpot would be greatly appreciated.

We are eager to learn from your experiences and insights. If anyone has gone through a similar process or has expertise in this area, your guidance would be invaluable to us. Additionally, if there are any resources, guides, or tools within the HubSpot ecosystem that you recommend, please share them.

Thank you in advance for your help and support. We are looking forward to becoming an active part of this community and contributing our learnings as well.

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @NJ_001,

You're already on a good track here, seeing which kind of questions you're asking.

If you haven't yet, enable the GDPR settings: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/privacy-and-consent/how-do-i-turn-on-gdpr-functionality-in-my-hubspot-...

Make sure to review all the consequences before doing so.

Once these are enabled, you get a description field when bulk opting in contacts which is great for added context: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/records/manage-your-subscription-preferences-and-types#update-subscrip...

These are the main aspects.

In terms of additional tips, here's what I'd recommend:

• Don't forget to also maintain the "Legal basis for processing contact's data" contact field.
• Considering setting up a contact-based workflow to set a date property value when a contact receives an opt-in in a specific subscription type. This makes reporting in the future a lot easier.
• Remember that it's not possible to filter on how a contact received an opt-in. If you want to be able to distinguish (explicit consent vs legitimate interest), you would have to create a custom property for that.

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!

[NJ_001]

Hi @karstenkoehler,

Thanks again!

This helps a lot will make sure to follow these steps.