topic Re: Form submissions to external partners in Tips, Tricks & Best Practices

Form submissions to external partners

SBell49 — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 03:14:23 GMT

Kia ora all,

We use HS forms to send referrals to external partners by entering their email into where the form submissions are sent, however, due to recent HS changes this is no longer allowed, as they do not have a HS account and we do not want to give them access to ours, understandably.

Is there a way around this or has HS essentially removed this feature as we can only send form submissions internally now?

Thanks,

Sam

Re: Form submissions to external partners

jolle — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 03:54:38 GMT

Hey @SBell49, thanks for reaching out! This is a great question.

It's definitely tricky with the new update since form submission notifications, internal email notifications, and dashboard emails all require that the recipient is a user within the HubSpot account (and they need to accept their invite as well).

I'm not 100% sure if this will work, but it looks like the Internal marketing email workflow action still allows you to enter any email address you want:

You would need to potentially create a custom email for every unique form depending on your needs, but this could potentially solve your problem (at least temporarily).

Otherwise, your only other options that I know of are to:

Invite those users to your HubSpot account with the lowest access levels possible (you can pretty heavily limit the tools and records that they have access to)
Swap the forms on your website to non-HubSpot forms that will enable you to send notifications to any email addresses you want. You can then enable non-HubSpot forms to still pull in submissions (this workaround is kind of counterintuitive, but I wanted to pitch it as an option just in case)

I know this isn't perfect, but hopefully it's enough to get you started!!

Re: Form submissions to external partners

karstenkoehler — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 06:02:37 GMT

Hi @SBell49 and @jolle,

I can confirm that internal marketing emails in workflows are currently the fastest and easiest way to set up notifications to external parties. (I've set this up a few times recently and it works without issues.)

There are a few things I'd like to add:

Other than the native form submission notification, @SBell49, you would work with personalization tokens to build your own notification. You can fully design the automated email to your design requirements and would then include the form input in the email body by spelling it out like this:

Name: [personalization token for first name] [personalization token for last name]
Email: [personalization token for email]
Company name: [personalization token for company name]
etc.
If you're using transactional emails as a subscription type, I've found this to work best with the least amount of troubleshooting. If you've enabled the GDPR features including the 'legal basis required' option, I've had issues in the past where contacts where excluded from the internal marketing email send due to a lack of opt-in into the subscription type used for the email. In that case, make sure your notification recipients have the opt-in for the subscription type.
To send the notification in BCC to an internal email address, for recordkeeping, for example, you would simply repeat the automated email send action in your workflow twice. I'm often being asked for a copied or bcc email address but it's not possible. You simply have to repeat the action.
Make sure to test everything with internal addresses before you unleash it onto your partners. Also, when enabling the workflow, you'll likely only enroll contacts who meet the trigger criteria from that point on. A few wrong clicks and you could be sending hundreds or thousands of notifications at once.

Let me know if you hav any follow-up questions!

Re: Form submissions to external partners

MHarvey643 — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 17:23:12 GMT

Hi there, question on this -- I'd like to use personalization tokens to notify a specific external contact when we get a submission on a specific form.

If we use personalization tokens for the internal marketing email notification, woudn't the the personalization tokens pull from the contact the email is going to, and not the contact who submitted the form? Not sure how that would work.

Thanks

Re: Form submissions to external partners

CDean — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 17:42:16 GMT

It looks like this was silently patched out as an option. There appears to be no way to email to anyone outside of the User list. The minimum permissions are not secure enough to grant to people you would not want in your account.

This is a much bigger security risk than simply allowing us to email as we need.

-1

Re: Form submissions to external partners

NataliaBA — Mon, 27 May 2024 08:00:19 GMT

Thanks for digging a bit deeper into the solution. I still don't see though, how are we supposed to pull the contact information from the submission form into this email notification? Wouldn't the personalisation trigger the recipient's contact information?

Re: Form submissions to external partners

CTreinen — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 14:44:01 GMT

I wanted to highlight the unanswered questions below.

Is there any way to code/set the personalization tokens so they pull the information from the form submission that triggers the workflow? After testing, all I can come up with is sending the external party their information.

Re: Form submissions to external partners

MarcLat — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 19:35:51 GMT

I can't believe this is an acceptable solution to this issue. So instead of just added in a CC or BCC recipient to the form I have to now become marketing emails professional and figure out how to create workflows in there. I just need an external email address to get the exact same form submission email i get internally when a form is submitted. This should not be rocket science.

Re: Form submissions to external partners

MaicaI — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 09:10:18 GMT

Is sending the form submission to yourself then setting up forwarding rules inside your own email client not feasible? They wouldn't be able to click the links since they don't have access to your HubSpot, but they should still at least see the content of the email if that's all they need.

Re: Form submissions to external partners

CDean — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 16:11:31 GMT

The main problem is that the emails all include opt-out links. If you forward these to 100 people, 1 person decides they do not want the email and they click unsubscribe, then no one gets the email anymore.

Re: Form submissions to external partners

SamTassey — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 21:15:25 GMT

Hello @CDean!

Thanks for posting in the Community!

I understand that it can be challenging to find alternatives to forwarding each email. However, I came across a post that might be helpful. One of our Top Contributors, @karstenkoehler, shared a few valuable tips hat you may find useful in this similar Community post here: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Email-Deliverability/Unsubscribing-from-a-forwarded-email/m-p/371492/thread-id/840#M842

Please don't hesitate to share any additional questions or insights in the related thread above! Our Community is always here to help!

Sam, Community Manager

Re: Form submissions to external partners

andreasintrow — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 16:01:54 GMT

Hi @SBell49, @CDean, @MaicaI, @MarcLat,

Makes a lot of sense! Introw is a HubSpot app allowing you to easily share HubSpot data/contacts with partners.

Select what object you want to share (in the video contact)
Select with which partner you want to share this
The partner will receive a branded e-mail with all the required context to start working on this
You can now collaborate with the partner on this contact without giving the partner HubSpot access.

If you want to go next level, you can even allow the partner to make changes to the contact in the partner portal. 2-way synced with HubSpot.

Here's a quick video showing you around:

Andreas Geamanu

CEO @ Introw | #1 Partner Portal on top of HubSpot

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