Handling email subscription settings in HubSpot can get a bit confusing because the system's email settings don't always match with your actual mailing list subscriptions (see, even differentiating why it's confusing is confusing). Stick with me here why I break down the default subscriptions, how to manage mailing lists, and give you a few options to make your email marketing processes a bit easier.
When you first set up your HubSpot Marketing or CMS Hub, you'll have a section in your Settings under Marketing > Email > Subscription Types.
These defaults (sales, service, marketing, one-to-one) are buckets for the kinds of emails you may be sending from your HubSpot portal.
Are one-to-many, which are going to be sent from your Email marketing tools. These could be Regular marketing emails or Automated marketing emails. Almost all of the emails that you queue up with your email marketing tool and use a list to send to will be considered Marketing Emails for your Subscription Type.
Note: In order for your contacts to receive your marketing emails they must be set as Marketing Contacts.
Are emails that are sent out as part of the Service Hub such NPS surveys. They're not necessarily marketing emails and aren't one-to-many but they are automated and can be opted out of.
Generally used for sales, these one-to-one emails can be opted out of. This subscription type is also used for Sales Sequences.
The question usually arises when you want to add additional lists and remove the default ones. Alternatively, it may come up if you have multiple mailing lists that all fall under "Marketing Email Subscriptions" and don't want/need to get explicit permission for each list and you don't want to show default subscriptions like "One-to-One" or "Service Emails" alongside your marketing mailing lists.
If you're running into this situation, you may want to consider managing your email list subscriptions via contact properties and using a Multiple Checkboxes property so contacts can have multiple sections and join multiple lists.
You can use this property in forms so you can easily manage your subscriptions to allow people to sign up for the mailing list for just one list, or for many.
Using the property allows you to show all the options, or just some of the options. In this example, we could remove some of the cities and show just one on the form. We could also make this a pre-selected hidden field if we wanted to add to a certain list and not show all the values. This would be handy if someone was on a Calgary-specific page and we wanted to keep our form very simple. We could change the form to "Sign up for Calgary Updates" and only ask for the name and email.
Using the property makes it very easy to create your mailing lists. Just create an active list that adds in anyone who has that property value.
Your default Manage Subscriptions link is not going to support this new form automatically. What we recommend instead is to create your own landing page to manage your Subscription Preferences. On this page you can put in the content that you need to inform your visitors about your different mailing lists, so they can chose the right ones for them.
When you create your form you have the option to 'pre-populate contact fields with known values'. We recommend turning this ON if you're going to use this for your subscription management, so your visitors know exactly which lists they're already on and can update them easily.