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Syncing do not contact/opt outs between HubSpot and Smartlead

Written by Harris Kenny | January 17, 2024

You can use OutboundSync's new cold email blocklist to block all of your opt outs from HubSpot. This means they never hear from you again AND your reps can stay in HubSpot!

This applies to you if you're running scaled cold outbound campaigns, leveraging Smartlead for sending emails and syncing the activities—contacts, companies, email interactions—back to HubSpot with OutboundSync.

What happens when someone opts out or isn’t interested in your outreach anymore?

In this video and transcript (below), we'll explain how to opt contacts out in HubSpot, create a list of your opt outs, create a blocklist in OutboundSync, and flow those blocked contacts to Smartlead.

 

Transcript

Introduction

[00:00:00] Harris Kenny: Today, I'm going to show you how you can take opt outs or suppression lists from HubSpot and push them to a block list in Smartlead using OutboundSync.

[00:00:10] Harris Kenny: Now, the use case here is you are running scaled cold outbound. You're sending those emails through Smartlead. They're flowing into OutboundSync and then getting integrated or synced to HubSpot.

[00:00:25] Harris Kenny: So you've got the contacts, companies, the emails, replies, potentially, you've got workflows set up to be adding them to lists or building reports or sending notifications, slack, or email notifications to your team.

[00:00:37] Harris Kenny: So you've got this whole setup, but because you're handling your replies inside of HubSpot, some of these replies are not going to be interested in hearing from you anymore maybe they want to be removed from the list or it's just not a fit or whatever.

[00:00:50] Harris Kenny: The question is, how do you take them? Take that opt out that they've indicated to you and then flow that through not only HubSpot But all the way like all the way back to smartlead and I'm going to show you how to do that today using HubSpot, OutboundSync and Smartlead.

[00:01:06] Harris Kenny: Alright, I'm gonna make myself smaller here and then we will jump into it So I've got a sandbox account that I'm showing you right now

How to opt out a contact in HubSpot

[00:01:14] Harris Kenny: Now, in the HubSpot interface, what you can do when you go to a contact record is if you go to actions and you click opt out of email, you're going to get the choice to confirm that you want to opt this contact out of email communication. So we're going to click yes. We're going to opt them out of email.

Create a list of do not contact (DNC)/opt outs in HubSpot

[00:01:32] Harris Kenny: Now what we're going to do is we're going to go over to HubSpot lists. So if you go to contacts, down to lists, create a new list. And now what you can see is that we've created a filter here. Now this filter, this opt out of email, it's a contact level property.

[00:01:48] Harris Kenny: Let's jump over to lists. It looks like processing is complete. Now I just want to note that it can take a little time. Let me explain what we're using here in terms of filters. So this is a contact level property. You go to contacts lists, create a new list and really important here: this is an active list. Very important.

[00:02:10] Harris Kenny: As you add new, do not contact folks unsubscribed from all email folks. You want to update your block list. You want this to be active and updating on a rolling basis.

[00:02:25] Harris Kenny: Go to contact. I'm going to remove this really quick and just show you how to recreate this. Go to contact properties. And if you type in unsub, you can get unsubscribed from all email equal to true, close that out, make sure you can see it here and then hit save. And now you can see that this is the contact that we just added.

Creating a blocklist in OutboundSync

[00:02:45] Harris Kenny: Now let's go over to our app, OutboundSync, which is going to connect HubSpot.

[00:02:49] Harris Kenny: And in this case, we're doing a two way sync from HubSpot back to SmartLead, it's going to flow through Outbound Sync. I've selected our list, our Do Not Contact. I've got our API key to SmartLead already connected. I'm blocking the individual email addresses.

[00:03:04] Harris Kenny: And then I've got the specific client selected because we have an agency set up here. So we've got a bunch of clients and we've got our test account selected.

[00:03:11] Harris Kenny: And then I'm going to hit, start blocking. And the first thing that's going to happen is it's going to go and fetch the list. It's going to do an initial batch of all the current contacts on the list. And then on an ongoing or continuous basis, it's going to look for any new updates to that list.

Pushing contacts to the Smartlead blocklist from HubSpot with OutboundSync

[00:03:25] Harris Kenny: And then in Smartlead, what that's going to mean is that you're going to see the email addresses flow through to Smartlead on a rolling basis from OutboundSync through the API.

[00:03:35] Harris Kenny: Using OutboundSync, you can have your reps handle their replies inside of HubSpot using their sequences, using their templates, using snippets and everything you've already built workflows, properties, automation. They can operate behind that single pane of glass.

[00:03:49] Harris Kenny: And they can respect the communication wishes of your prospects, including opting them out. And that unsubscribed can apply both to HubSpot and to Smartlead. And, uh, that's it. Pretty excited about this, pretty excited about what's possible.

[00:04:03] Harris Kenny: I think it's really important, you know, to reach out to new people and generate new business, but you also really want to respect the folks who you're reaching out to.

[00:04:09] Harris Kenny: And if they're not interested, you know, just leave them alone, focus on somebody else.