Often, between the fine print of GDPR and the vague reassurance of “We’ve always done it this way,” email consent gets flattened into a checkbox. But real consent isn’t as simple as finding a loophole that lets you send your marketing emails to the folks you really want to talk to. And if you’re using HubSpot or any system that touches email marketing, assuming someone said yes once upon a time isn’t enough. Especially if that “yes” came from a webinar two years ago or a badge scan at a conference that has long been forgotten about.
The reality? Email consent isn’t as simple as an act of legal hygiene. Consent is what keeps your marketing from eroding your credibility behind the scenes.
And there's a lot that marketers miss when they treat consent as a checkbox instead of a genuine agreement.
If you’ve ever watched your open rates dip after updating your recipients list and thought, “Maybe it’s just a deliverability issue,” there’s a good chance the problem isn’t technical at all. It’s structural. And it probably started the moment someone imported a list of “warm contacts” who weren’t expecting to hear from you and assumed that would go smoothly.
What counts (and what definitely doesn’t)
Start here: consent must be verifiable, stored, and valid. That means a contact needs to have clearly said “yes,” and you need to be able to prove it. Not assumed from a business card, not copied from a sales rep’s spreadsheet, and not implied because they follow your LinkedIn page. HubSpot requires verifiable consent for marketing emails. And so should your team.
Form fills are best because they generate clean data, a timestamp, and a trail. A contact who signs up through a form where you state what they’re opting into is gold. Bonus points if you give them options. Fewer points if they were added by hand without context.
Purchases can also qualify, but only if the contact’s consent remains current. HubSpot specifies that the opt-in expires if the purchase was over 2 years ago, or if the contact has unsubscribed from email communication. After that, they’re no longer eligible for marketing emails.
Tradeshow attendee lists, personal contacts, publicly available addresses, contacts from social media, and those sourced from the Sales team don’t meet HubSpot’s consent requirements. Verbal consent alone doesn’t qualify either unless you can prove it through another approved form of written documentation.
Expired isn’t cold. Expired is off-limits.
If your newsletter has been paused or your strategy shifted away from consistent outreach, you might have more ineligible contacts than you realize. And if you’re importing old lists, those people aren’t just cold. They’re off-limits.
We're not talking about unsubscribes here. This applies to anyone whose consent has expired. If a contact hasn’t heard from you in 12 months, you should strongly consider marking their opt-in as no longer valid. Sending them marketing emails anyway risks breaking HubSpot’s requirements for email use, and depending on your region, possibly your compliance obligations.
When teams skip processes for tracking consent status, contact lists grow faster than they can be verified. What looks like a list of thousands often contains only a fraction who are actually eligible to receive marketing emails. That gap between perceived audience and usable audience quietly undermines performance and drives confusion about why campaigns “aren’t working.”
You can’t bulk-email people to ask if you can email them
This part trips up even experienced teams. You can’t send a bulk marketing email to ask if someone wants to receive marketing emails. If they haven’t already opted in, that first email already violates the rule. The most compliant way is to ask individually, via a personal email, message, or even a link in your signature.
If you want to confirm that existing subscribers still wish to receive communication, you can use a permission pass email. But that only applies to contacts who already have verifiable consent. It’s a way to check ongoing interest, not to obtain new consent.
Treat these consent moments as campaigns of their own. They deserve clear writing, good design, and visibility across every touchpoint, from gated content to onboarding and sales follow-up. If it’s hard for someone to opt in, you’ll lose them. Not because they don’t care, but because your process didn’t make space for their “yes.”
Email consent is an agreement, not a formality
There’s a reason this keeps happening. Too often, consent is treated like an afterthought on a form. But consent is part of your infrastructure. If your systems don’t record when and how a contact opted in, who owns that record, and when it expires, then you don’t have a consent process. You have a guessing game.
Maintaining accurate consent data protects your credibility and ensures that your marketing efforts reach people who actually want to hear from you. When you build consent tracking into your operational workflows and make verification part of your team’s daily rhythm, your marketing becomes cleaner, safer, and more effective.
Don’t waste your emails on people who didn’t ask for them
The most successful marketing teams treat consent like a living system, with memory, expiration, and boundaries. These teams are the ones that build campaigns that actually work. Why? Because they’re not wasting time on disengaged lists, angry unsubscribes, or deliverability black holes. Instead, they’re spending time on people who actually want to hear from them. And those people convert better, stay with you longer, and recommend you more often.
Every marketing strategy in the world talks about alignment. But if your campaigns are built on contacts who didn’t ask to be contacted, then alignment was never on the table. Consent is what gives marketing its superpower of reaching the right people with the right message at the right time without damaging your reputation in the process.
The fix is simple. The discipline is hard.
What’s the fix? Create rules for who goes into your system. Create workflows for sunsetting consent. Train your sales team on where the line is. Build opt-in flows that are human, helpful, and direct. If you’re serious about a quality sales pipeline, you have to be just as serious about quality consent. The concepts are easy to grasp. The hard part is prioritizing them and keeping those standards alive in your daily work.
So no, consent isn’t a checkbox. It’s the foundation of your marketing. And the more seriously you take it, the more seriously your audience will take what you send them.
