Resubscription Endpoint

[kaburke]

A lot of my customers have external email preference centres and as our API document here says, 'If you OPT OUT of all emails or a specific email subscription type for a recipient, there is NO UNDO for this operation'.

Users that have an external preference centre are consistently hitting this blocker and need the ability to resubscribe a contact that previous unsubscribed and has updated their preferences externally to HubSpot.

[JCromack]

So how do we make this a priority fix as external preference centres are becoming more popular.  Thanks for flagging - we keep seeing this problem as well and the workarounds are painful!  We can work easily with Salesforce and other CRMs and ESPs - Hubspot is challenging.

[PietZweegers]

We need this as well

[marcus_lambert]

As an ageancy we are seeing more and more Account portals with requirement to have Commincation prefs included with things like notification prefs.
This APi shoudl be opened op to allow resubscription. 

[AWillems]

We need this as well !! 

Our website is not hosted within Hubspot and our website forms are far more intuitive than the Hubspot forms, so we are using the Hubspot API's instead.

Also our NetSuite CRM system will be the master of the data and not the Hubspot marketing system. When we want to integrate Hubspot properly, a function like this is a minimum requirement and now as a developer I need to setup very clunky processes to work around the limitations.

[MarissaStone]

We also need this - seems a bit ridiculous that Hubspot doesn't support an external preference center given how companies have preference centers on their website or in account settings. It would be one thing if we were able to automate an import/export to overwrite those contact settings, but there isn't even an automation feature.

[D-S-T]

We have users that hit this all the time and it reflects poorly on our service. They meant to unsubscribe from one of our lists, not all. Please give us API access to resubscribe those who accidentally unsubscribed to all.

[pallenau]

This was raised in 2016 and has been upvoted numerous times between then and now (June 2022). Why has this not been fixed ? 

This is a deal breaker for us and we are now looking at alternate solutions, such as Salesforce and other CMSs, because HubSpot is unresponsive and cannot be adequately managed from an external subscriptions management page. It is rediculous to be forced to use workarounds and workflows to manage such a basic fundamental of a CMS. There is no reason to have such limits given that there are workarounds which over-ride the limits. Just implement the bloody solution HubSpot !

[BHutton]

Not having an API endpoint for this is a huge oversight. We are moving off of HubSpot as soon as we are able. This design flaw is significantly hurting us. We have an email preferences page that lets people sign up for a number of different email lists. We send content (not marketing) emails to about 375k users/day. We are not at all interested in spamming people.

Right now, we have 49,200 contacts who are unsubscribed from all email through hubspot and can never get another email from us without going through a super awkward workflow.

How did those people get unsubscribed?

• 81.7% of them used the "list-unsubscribe" header in their email client. You know, the thing at the top of an email that says "unsubscribe". They click that, expected to unsubscribe from a SINGLE content list, and end up globally opted out from all email from us. TERRIBLE! Two thirds of our users are on more than one email list. Hubspot needs to add in the ability to configure how those headers work, and certainly not globally and permanently opt someone out just because they use that button.
• 15.7% of them clicked a spam button. Did you know that any user that marks your email as spam will get globally unsubscribed? Hubspot is super aggressive about that. How many time have you accidentally marked an email as spam? That can get a user into the black hole.
• The remainder have somehow found their way to Hubspot's email preferences page, which we try hard not to let them get to.

Out of these 49,200 users that are in this black hole, we've found that 19.6% of them have actually tried to go resubscribe to something through our website. Of course, they are not getting any emails and they have no idea why. There is no good way for us to help these users at scale.

Hubspot is clearly taking an aggressive approach to fighting against unwanted email, but it is going way above and beyond what is necessary, to the point that it is harming both senders and (would be) recipients. Again, for this reason among others, we are moving off HubSpot as soon as we're able.

[TobiasWi]

This feature is absolutely neccesary together with the option to resubscribe contacts via workflow. We use the forms API to subscribe contacts to our newsletter over our website. Without the option via API and/or workflow there is no way to resubcribe them if they sign in a second time!

[smj-php]

My usecase is; when users 'register' at our site we allow them to subscribe to a 'newsletter' with an opt-in checkbox. We then call the subscription API and subscribe them.

After the user is registered, they have an 'edit profile' page where their subscriptions are listed, with option to enable or disable the subscriptions.

If a user who has previously subscribed to the 'newsletter', then decides to unsubscribe, we can achieve this via the Subscription API.

The problem with the API occurs when that same user attempts to subscribe to the 'newsletter' again. The request to the Subscription API will return;

Subscription 666999666 for asdf@asdf.com cannot be updated because they have unsubscribed

This makes no sense.

[JustinJoyce]

Please make this a priority, we also would like to avoid the super awkward workflow to resubscribe a contact. 

[AShapovalova]

We also need it ASAP!

[smj-php]

For anyone reading this, the way we got around it was to use "custom marketing contact" property to manage subscriptions, instead of the subscription API.

For example, we added a custom "has_subscribed_to_newsletter" property to the contact's properties. This allows us to manage the user's subscriptions in a sensible way.

[tanmoyAtb]

Hello, Our subscription preference center on the user profile page is also broken because of this requirements.

We have 3 types of subscriptions and users choose different types of emails depending on their use of our platform at the moment.
However, this is just not implementable with the current hubspot architecture.

Please make this a priority.

[digitallawyer]

This is really painful when trying to manage subscriptions through our app web interface. If we had known this before signing an enterprise agreement it would have affected our buying decision. Is this going to make it on the roadmap or not? I see a long history of people requesting this, but no action.

[GMatev10]

Just hit this as well. The threads above mention that some awkward put possible workarounds exist. Any pointers to any of these?

[mikepollard-sbr]

I was able to do a workaround, as long as the user has not unsubscribed from all subscriptions, in a two step process

• First call using the legacy API (https://legacydocs.hubspot.com/docs/methods/email/update_status), make sure to set the subscription as unspecified by setting optState to "NOT_OPTED"
• Then submit a second call to subscribe the user

[ki392]

this is really important for nonprofits! we often see donors resubscribe on a donation form, but if they've previously unsubscribed from all emails it's only possible to MANUALLY resubscribe them. that is totally unscalable, and we need a different solution!!

[KatyaManges]

Desperately need this for our nonprofit clients who are taking donations (and collecting resubscriptions) via third party donation platforms!

[IFly0]

I have a mobile application with Notifications and need to have the user be able to toggle their own settings from within our app.  This is a common situation, in many web & mobile applications.  

I have tried the following using your API

if (typeof req.body.hs_email_optout === 'boolean') {
        const statuses =
          await hubspotClient.communicationPreferences.statusApi.getEmailStatus(
            user.email
          );

        const { id } =
          statuses.subscriptionStatuses.find(
            status => status.name === 'Marketing Information'
          ) || {};

        if (req.body.hs_email_optout && id) {
          await hubspotClient.communicationPreferences.statusApi.subscribe({
            subscriptionId: id,
            emailAddress: user.email,
            legalBasis: 'CONSENT_WITH_NOTICE',
            legalBasisExplanation: 'manual resubscribe through application',
          });
        } else if (!req.body.hs_email_optout && id) {
          await hubspotClient.communicationPreferences.statusApi.unsubscribe({
            subscriptionId: id,
            emailAddress: user.email,
          });
        }