Different subscription types can be created in HubSpot and are available with the following plans:
- Marketing Hub Starter, Professional, Enterprise
- CMS Hub Professional, Enterprise
- Legacy Marketing Hub Basic
With OutboundSync, you can use subscription types in HubSpot to indicate contacts that will not receive further cold outreach from your team—and update them in your sales engagement platform.
Creating Email Subscriptions in HubSpot
To create and manage an email subscription type, follow these steps:
- Go to your HubSpot account and click on the settings icon in the main navigation bar.
- In the left sidebar menu, select Marketing > Email.
- Click on the Subscription Types tab.
- Click on Create subscription type.
- Provide a name and a brief description of how you intend to use this subscription type.
You want to select descriptive name that you are also comfortable with your prospects seeing when they go to update their own subscription preferences when hearing from your company.
Examples of potential names you could use are Prospect Information or One-to-One - Outbound Emails.
- If you have enabled data privacy settings, you can configure the subscription type to explain to subscribers how and why you will be contacting them.
- Choose a purpose for the subscription type from the Purpose of Subscription dropdown menu. This purpose should align with the nature of the emails you plan to send to subscribers. For more information on common subscription types, visit the HubSpot marketing blog.
- Select a method of communication from the Method of communication dropdown menu for how you will contact subscribers.
- When a contact reviews your subscription type, they will see the purpose and method of communication first, followed by its name and description. You can preview how your subscription type will appear.
- Click Save.
- Use the different subscription types in your email communication.
Adding contacts with a specific Subscription type to a HubSpot list and syncing to the OutboundSync block list
- In your HubSpot account, navigate to Contacts > Lists.
- In the upper right, click Create List.
- In the left panel, select the Contact-based list
- In the right panel, enter the list's details:
- List name: the internal name of the list (required).
- Description: a description of what the list contains.
- What kind of list are you creating: select whether you want an Active list or a Static list. You can also view the number of lists you've used on this page.
- In the upper right, click Next.
- In the left panel, set the criteria for the contacts with that specific subscription type
- Select Add filter.
- Scroll or type to search, then select Email Subscriptions
- You are then presented with three options to filter the list on
- You can choose to include:
- Contacts that have opted into all of your email subscriptions or specific ones.
- Contacts who have opted out of all your email subscriptions or specific ones.
- Contacts who have never opted into any or specific email subscriptions.
- Once you have made your decision, you have the option to choose either all of your subscription types or select specific ones.
- To illustrate, let's say we want to include in our list all contacts who have specifically subscribed to our customer service communications. We can then utilize this list of contacts (who are most likely customers) as a block list on OutboundSync. This means that we do not want to send any emails to the contacts/customers on that list.
Creating a workflow to sync OutboundSync Unsubscribe webhook events to your new subscription type
To tie it all together, if you want to take every unsubscribe event webhook from OutboundSync and use that to update your blocklist, you can do it with HubSpot workflows.
The workflow below has a trigger event of When filter criteria is met. It's looking specifically for when an unsubscribe timeline event event is received from Smartlead via OutboundSync.
When this event occurs, the contact will be enrolled in this workflow.
HubSpot will then add them to this new subscription type. So any unsubscribes will be added here. And on a rolling basis, they will be added to your Smartlead blocklist.
The beauty of this approach is that it ensures that both Smartlead and HubSpot are in sync. So if you are doing prospecting from either platform, they're on the same page.