The Catalyst Stack - Sept 6, 2025

INTRO
Welcome to This Week’s The Catalyst Stack

If you have been using HubSpot Sales Hub for some time, turning on Marketing Hub might seem like a logical next step. You already have a contact database, and campaigns are ready to go. However, before sending anything, it is important to pause and ask a critical question: have your contacts actually provided permission to receive marketing emails?

This edition of the Catalyst Stack explores a common point of confusion. HubSpot’s “marketing contact” setting is primarily used to manage billing. It does not verify that a contact has opted in. The responsibility for managing consent still rests with your team.

We will walk through how to define subscription types, how to re-permission contacts who entered through sales workflows, and how to treat consent as a living system that evolves over time rather than a static checkbox.

Marketing Activation & Campaigns
Marketing Contacts vs Consent in HubSpot: What You Need to Know

When you activate Marketing Hub in HubSpot, it’s easy to assume that marking a contact as “marketing” gives you license to start sending campaigns. But this checkbox is mostly a billing construct. It doesn’t validate whether that person gave you permission to receive marketing emails. And if you’ve been using Sales Hub for a while, there’s a good chance that much of your existing database has never explicitly opted in.

This mismatch between how your CRM is configured and the actual consent status of your contacts can create real friction. It affects not just your audience, but also the internal teams relying on clean, compliant data.

Marketing Contact ≠ Consent

HubSpot’s “marketing contact” setting is designed to manage billing tiers. For example, Sales and Marketing Hub Pro customers are allowed 2,000 marketing contacts before additional costs kick in. But designating someone as a marketing contact doesn’t automatically mean you have their opt-in consent to receive newsletters or promotional emails. You are still responsible for ensuring that permission has been granted.

If you’re importing records from another system, uploading lists from spreadsheets, or relying on contacts created via one-to-one sales outreach, you may find yourself with hundreds or thousands of contacts who have never actually given you permission to receive marketing messages. And unless you’ve been capturing email subscription preferences from the start, your CRM may give you very little indication of who opted in and who didn’t.

Build Your Subscription Types and Capture Real Preferences

One of the most powerful but underused features in HubSpot is the ability to define and manage subscription types. Subscription types in HubSpot provide a structured framework for organizing consent across distinct categories of messaging. You can define and manage preferences for newsletters, product updates, event invitations, and customer onboarding journeys, each with its own opt-in logic and purpose.

Rather than sending every message to your entire list, you can allow contacts to opt in to the categories that matter to them. When you publish a form, you can associate it with one or more subscription types and clearly communicate what the person is agreeing to receive. This approach builds trust, improves email deliverability, and provides a stronger legal basis for marketing communication.

Once someone opts in to a subscription type, they become eligible to be marked as a marketing contact. That step should only occur after the appropriate consent has been captured.

What to Do with Legacy Sales Contacts

If you have been using Sales Hub before activating Marketing Hub, your contact database may include a wide range of leads who were never asked about their marketing preferences. These could be people who filled out a general contact form, booked a meeting, or replied to a cold outreach, but never subscribed to a newsletter or opted into event communications.

Instead of assuming these contacts are ready for your next marketing campaign, take a step back and reassess. A re-permissioning effort can help confirm who still wants to hear from you and in what context. This does not need to be overly complex. A single email introducing your newsletter or highlighting upcoming content, paired with a clear opt-in mechanism, can help clean up your list and re-establish consent.

This approach not only protects your email deliverability but also ensures you are not wasting your marketing contact allocation on people who are unlikely to engage. It creates a cleaner foundation for future outreach and improves trust with your audience.

Track Consent as an Ongoing Process

It is important to think of marketing consent not as a single checkbox, but as a complete system. Preferences change over time. A person might unsubscribe from one category of messages but remain subscribed to others. They may give consent on a form today and revoke it later through an unsubscribe link. Your systems need to be flexible enough to keep up with this behavior.

HubSpot provides several properties that help monitor consent status. These include Subscription Status, Legal Basis for Processing, and Unsubscribed from All Email, along with the overall marketing contact designation. These fields should inform how you approach segmentation, targeting, and automation. Instead of building workflows around marketing status alone, you should be aligning them with actual subscription types and individual preferences.

Over time, you can also create dashboards to monitor consent trends. You might track whether users are opting in at form fill, whether unsubscribes are increasing, or whether your current nurture campaigns match the subscription types that have been defined. Asking these kinds of questions regularly helps keep your strategy aligned with user expectations and regulatory best practices.

Final Thoughts

HubSpot gives you flexible tools to manage email marketing, but it also assumes you know how to use them responsibly. Marking a contact as “marketing” is not the same as obtaining their permission to receive promotional emails. If you are expanding your marketing efforts, especially after using only Sales Hub for a while, it is worth stepping back to confirm that consent is being captured, tracked, and maintained properly.

Building a structured opt-in system takes some effort upfront, but it leads to a more engaged list, fewer compliance risks, and a more sustainable foundation for future campaigns. A little extra diligence now can save you from major headaches later.