topic Re: Ability to Send Form Submissions to External Email Address Removed in Blog, Website & Page Publishing

Ability to Send Form Submissions to External Email Address Removed

LCSKMiller — Mon, 23 May 2022 18:43:11 GMT

TLDR: How would you send online form submissions from a landing page you control via email to an external vendor or integration partner? What software do you use?

Background

We have a large and growing integrations program (120+ vendors) for our software where we maintain a tailored HubSpot landing page and lead form for each vendor within our marketing software, the pages are linked on our website, and they are saved under a single HubSpot campaign so we can track our ROI and promotional materials. Then, if a mutual prospect or current customer of ours requests information for a particular vendor, it will automatically email them the lead information (while also allowing us to track how many leads we are sending them). Leads are aware who they are contacting/giving their information to, this is confirmed with the follow up message after they submit the form, and our privacy statement is also attached to every form.

Supposedly in April, HubSpot as removed the option to send form submissions to external email addresses for security reasons. No notice and not in the release notes - just a hard cut off. Our rep is currently researching options, however, it appears this has also spread to any workarounds presented by support and Customer Success.

Original solution two weeks ago from support was a workflow/custom email build for every landing page, however, we have confirmed with Customer Success that this workaround no longer works as of last week: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Lists-Lead-Scoring-Workflows/Send-contact-notification-details-to-external-email/td-p/254209. The secondary option is to add every single one of our vendor lead gen emails as a user to our account, which regardless of permissions set, is not a feasible option as that turns into a security and maintenace nightmare.

Is anyone else in this situation or do something similar with a channel partner/integrations program? Could you describe how you handle lead submissions via email to people outside your company?

Re: Ability to Send Form Submissions to External Email Address Removed

kvlschaefer — Tue, 24 May 2022 18:52:04 GMT

Hi @LCSKMiller,

Thanks for reaching out!

I would like to invite some of our top contributors from our Community to our conversation.

Hi @danmoyle, @Josh, @Ben_M, @johnelmer, @himanshurauthan, @Ian_Matt, @GeorgeBThomas - Do you have any advice for @LCSKMiller?

Thank you!

Best,

Kristen

Re: Ability to Send Form Submissions to External Email Address Removed

Ben_M — Wed, 25 May 2022 00:23:19 GMT

I definitely agree this can be inconvenient and probably done because someone spammed another system by not having a valid email address or one they owned or had opted in. Feels like Hubspot should have left an option in to at least allow validation of addresses without having to create accounts for security reasons as you mention.

Depending on your setup my recommendation would be to use a custom form embed ( https://legacydocs.hubspot.com/docs/methods/forms/forms_overview ) that triggers an email send https://legacydocs.hubspot.com/docs/methods/email/transactional_email/single-send-overview . This does require the transactional email plan addon though as it cannot send marketing emails, only single transactional emails to a single address which may work for your instance.

Re: Ability to Send Form Submissions to External Email Address Removed

LCSKMiller — Wed, 25 May 2022 12:44:09 GMT

Hi Ben! Thanks for the suggestion, however, we do not purchase the transactional email plan. Because of how this situation has evolved, I will not have the purchasing power/approval from our stakeholders to add anything to our HubSpot account for a long while at this point. This was a pretty big selling point for us, to be able to have everything marketing related in one system, and with it gone, we are now considering sending out RFPs to other providers.

Re: Ability to Send Form Submissions to External Email Address Removed

himanshurauthan — Wed, 25 May 2022 17:38:51 GMT

Hello @kvlschaefer, thank you for tagging me in. 🙂

Hello @LCSKMiller,

If custom development is an option, you might look for 'custom workflow action', and using that you can trigger email to any external email.

As this will be part of workflow automation, you can set some custom properties to store this lead has been forwarded and set up reports.

If you need any development help, I can guide you or develop a solution for the same. ✌️

Regards,

Re: Ability to Send Form Submissions to External Email Address Removed

LCSKMiller — Wed, 25 May 2022 17:58:20 GMT

Hi Himanshu, when we were on a call with our Customer Success Representative, that option was also removed as of last week.

Re: Ability to Send Form Submissions to External Email Address Removed

danmoyle — Fri, 27 May 2022 11:10:27 GMT

Hey @LCSKMiller. This is news to me, so thank you for bringing it up. It does sound like a major obstacle for your specific use case, and not something I have a quick solution for.

I do wonder if the scenario you've described is a little like managing partner relationships, where a PRM would be needed. It's a big lift, but it's something we've actually built and offer if you're interested in learning more.

In the meantime, I'll be following along with this unique use case. While I see most all of our clients using form notifications with their internal team, I can see some folks who might want what you're looking for.

Re: Ability to Send Form Submissions to External Email Address Removed

LCSKMiller — Fri, 27 May 2022 13:56:45 GMT

Hi Dan,

Thanks for the offer but it appears at this point, we will be bringing in our internal development teams to determine a new process for these.

Re: Ability to Send Form Submissions to External Email Address Removed

danmoyle — Fri, 27 May 2022 13:59:22 GMT

Sounds good. All the best on the journey!

Re: Ability to Send Form Submissions to External Email Address Removed

TVermeiren — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 09:32:14 GMT

Hi...yes, a shame as this functionality was also embedded in our workflows to alert any of our partners of incoming requests. I guess Hubspot is not taking in consideration their clients after all. No warning, just removed the functionality. Sad - Workero

Re: Ability to Send Form Submissions to External Email Address Removed

Kreskusic — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 00:18:54 GMT

Not how I would operate my business. Our clients would not be so receptive to change without notice, especially when we know people rely on our product to operate their business. This functionalty should be restored for HubSpot clients. It is a key feature in how we operate and service our clients. We will likely resort to looking elsewhere for more user-friendly business applications if this trend of change without notice continues.

Re: Ability to Send Form Submissions to External Email Address Removed

siez — Fri, 17 Jun 2022 12:05:21 GMT

Totally agree that this is a disappointing move by Hubspot. We have 200+ forms on our website. Some for PDF and ebook downloads, some for product demos, trial signups, some are team reachouts, and there are a whole bunch of other type of forms (feedback, Job applications, etc).

Each scenario is concerned with a different team member, or a different internal systems, where we need to send the notification to an external email address.

Hubspot have removed such a crucial feature without any intimation or warning, or without any proper workaround.

Here's what we are currently doing - creating a group email address for concerned teams. Like for PDFs - pdf@company.com (this is an internal email address which forwards all the email to different team members).

Similarly, we created a few more for other teams and added them on Hubspot as team members. This is not a 100% solution as it means we will need to manage email groups separately. But I don't see any other efficient solution to this.

Re: Ability to Send Form Submissions to External Email Address Removed

siez — Fri, 17 Jun 2022 12:14:03 GMT

Exactly. It came out as a very unpleasant surprise when I was typing our usual notification channel email and the field wasn't picking it up.

No pop-up, no header message, no email, or even on their social channels. Literally no notice of any sort. Then I was suggested to use workflows as a workaround, even though they later removed this option from workflows too.

As a solution, we have made a group email that forwards the notifications to all the concerned team members, and later we added this email address as a team member on Hubspot. It seems to be working out for us for now.

But in future if we need to send notification to some new email addresses, it will be a mess to create new groups, or members, and adding them on Hubspot. They have just increased our work and headache.

Re: Ability to Send Form Submissions to External Email Address Removed

bbuxton — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 16:17:03 GMT

Would love this ability!!!

Re: Ability to Send Form Submissions to External Email Address Removed

inahury — Wed, 24 Aug 2022 02:56:38 GMT

I agree. We had this functionality embeded in workflows and forms used on our website. I have taken a look at multiple threads on this topic and sounds like the only solution is to write custom api hooks to send emails. This is not a great solution. We need the ability to send emails externally back.

Re: Ability to Send Form Submissions to External Email Address Removed

acm347 — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 17:26:00 GMT

No clue if you found a solution to this yet but, if you're a GSuite/Workplace user, it may be possible to use the Default Routing email function to automatically redirect the email from one address to another. We use this all the time to provide custom email addresses, but funnel them into a single mailbox in our helpdesk. You can also customize subjects, mail headers, etc. for additional features. Just a thought, but I have not tested it in this exact scenario. Good luck!

Re: Ability to Send Form Submissions to External Email Address Removed

DianaGomez — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 23:18:55 GMT

Hi @acm347 hope you are doing well!

Thanks for sharing 🙂

Best,

Diana

Re: Ability to Send Form Submissions to External Email Address Removed

NHeath1 — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 21:10:17 GMT

There is another way to achieve this, sadly only with Marketing Hub Professional or higher.

You can create a standard contact workflow, with Form Submission in the past 1 day as the Trigger

-> set the action: "Send internal marketing email"

-> then send to any email address you want.

I've tested this with external emails, works!

Re: Ability to Send Form Submissions to External Email Address Removed

LCSKMiller — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 21:23:37 GMT

Hi @NHeath1 ! These are not internal email addresses or users on our account and we are on HubSpot Marketing Enterprise.

Unfortunately, HubSpot's current only solution is to create all of our external integrations, who need to recieve lead/form submission emails, as individual users on our account, which with over 100+ integrations, would be a maintenance and upkeep nightmare, if not a data security one.

Re: Ability to Send Form Submissions to External Email Address Removed

NHeath1 — Wed, 18 Jan 2023 00:02:43 GMT

Hey @LCSKMiller - as mentioned in my thread, this works for External as well. (I'm aware that it is not labelled as such)

So the solution is the following:

Create a marketing email with the body containing personalization tokens that are from your form (ex: hey External contact, new form submission from XYZ at comp.123)
Ad the email as an automated action step "send external marketing e-mail"
Add your External emails (yes. It works with Gmail or other company emails) not users, to the the field I screenshot.
Voilà

I tested this to send to a Google group, Gmail, or other external emails.

Now maybe they will patch it 😅

Cheers