GDPR - Retaining suppression lists and stripping down contact details

[Hawk-Steve]

Hi all

I just read this note regarding the GDPR.

ICO Direct Marketing Guidance
Version: 2.2 19th May 2016
“Organisations should maintain a ‘suppression list’ of people who have opted out or otherwise told that
organisation directly that they do not want to receive marketing. Note that individuals may ask an organisation to remove or delete their details from a database or marketing list.
However, in most cases organisations should instead follow the marketing industry practice of suppressing their
details. Rather than deleting an individual’s details entirely, suppression involves retaining just enough information to
ensure that their preferences are respected in the future” (Para 190-192).

It's good that we can still use this system, as many of us will have multiple systems that don't always integrate with each other. Human error will lead to an unsub getting back into hubspot's marketing mailing list somehow.

So my aim is to use a workflow to add an unsubscriber to our 'Suppression - UnSubscribed' list and strip out all the contact's information besides an email address or identifier. Although I want the contact information removal to be automated and immediate, is a workflow the best way to do this? Bulk exporting, removing details and importing is not suitable.

Thanks in advance

Steve

[edjusten · Accepted solution]

Hi @Hawk-Steve  While the workflow process you've created here would work in concept, HubSpot currently does not have a one-step function to clear all  properties in a contact record (save the email address). You would literally have to create an individual  step to clear each property.  Even if you did do that, there would not be a way to clear deafault HubSpot-populated properties such as Original Source, First page seen, or other similar properties. 

FYi - HubSpot has released its GDPR product roadmap. Find out more here:
https://www.hubspot.com/data-privacy/gdpr/product-readiness

Thank you, 

Ed Justen

[clioi]

Hi @edjusten, what's the best way to set up a workflow to automatically delete a contact that has not been active on our website in a while?

[edjusten]

Hi @clioi  At this time there is not a workflow action to delete a contact. You can work around this building a workflow to identify contacts who have not visited your site, and having the workflow mark a custom property which will then trigger the contact to be added to a list. You can then periodically visit the list and delete manually. 

To do this take the following steps: 

Create a workflow

- Create a custom checkbox property called Cotnacts to delete

- Create a new workflow using the enrollment trigger Page View > Contact has not visted URL containing  . . . .  and add you root domain URL

- Click Refine to add a date range (please note - In the last XX days is not an option here. For this to work effectively you will not have select a specific date range, run the workflow, disable the workflow, then return to run the workflow at a later time to discover more contacts) Save the enrollment triggers.

- Click Add an Action

- Scroll down to Contact Proeperties and select Set Contact Preoprty Value

- Select the property  you created above

- Set New property value to YES

- Save the workflow and run it to get your first group of cotnacts

Create a Smart List

- Go to the List tool and create a new list

- Select Contact Properties as the list cireteria 

- Select the new property created above 

- Select Is Equal to > Yes 

- Click Done and name the list

Once the list completely populates, you can tick the check box in the header rows to select all list members, then click Delete. 

This process is not exactly fully automated, but can help you identify and delete unengaged contacts at periodic times. 

Please let me know if you have further questions. 

Ed

[Hawk-Steve]

Hi edjusten

Thanks for the information. I can see this getting unwieldy if we have to individually:

-Copy the email address

-Remove the contact from the CRM

-Add the email back into the CRM

-Add the email to the suppression list.

Looks like there needs to be some extra features added to workflows to allow this.

Steve

[TO]

Have a look at PieSync which does 2 way synchronisation between cloud based contact management systems.  There is a short video explaining it on my website if you want to see what it does.