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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
