Individual communication subscriptions as contact properties

I picked this one, and it turned out to be the subtle one. If you read the panel and thought, wait, didn't we already have this, you're in good company, because all three of us went around on it on air. What it says: Email subscription types: subscribed and Email subscription types: unsubscribed are now native contact properties, so you can find, filter, segment, report on and automate with subscription status using the CRM tools you already use. It's in private beta, all hubs and tiers.

My read going through it was that this is about subscription types, so you can see who is subscribed or unsubscribed to specific channels, not only the contact property that told you someone had unsubscribed from all. Where I landed is that it isn't new data, it's easier to find. The old way had dates, it wasn't clear cut, and sometimes you had to know the exact subscription name to track one down. This looks like a checkbox. Hold that loosely, because the panel never says it that plainly.

Zach wasn't sold, and that's fair. He walked through what HubSpot already had: opted out of email marketing information, opted out of email, the properties by subscription, and unsubscribed from all email, all of them properties on a contact record. His line was “I don't see how this is so much different still.” So I pulled up the list builder, where you can already filter on email subscriptions, has opted out of or into, but it has to be all of the ones you pick, so “this or that” gets clunky. The thing I kept coming back to: “there wasn't an opted in.” All the focus was on the exception, who opted out. Once we talked it through, we converted Zach. Chris then went after the panel's own wording, which says subscription status data has long been available in HubSpot. “Available?” I asked. “Not to the usual user,” he said, and then, “Isn't HubSpot the CRM? What do you mean now a part of the CRM?” His best guess at what that means is properties on objects, with visibility the real change.

Chris had the best explanation for why this has always been awkward: “In this case, I think there's a lot of friction on purpose.” His reasoning is that it's tied to subscription types and the rules for email, so you don't get in the way of your own email deliverability or HubSpot's deliverability as a platform, and there's a lot of risk HubSpot has to manage. In his words, “I am taking responsibility for the way that we are setting up our email subscriptions and HubSpot is not liable for the way that I'm doing [it].”

What to do: it's a private beta, so the call this week is small. If you build lists, workflows or reports around who opted out of what, check whether your portal is in and compare it to how you do it today. If the list builder already does the job for you, nothing breaks and you can skip it. The show didn't open the properties in a portal, so where they show up and what the beta names them is still open.