Ability to Send Form Submissions to External Email Address Removed

[LCSKMiller]

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-e.... 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?

[NHeath1]

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! 

[LCSKMiller]

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.

[NHeath1]

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

[LCSKMiller]

Unless they rolled this update back, workflows are also not allowing us to send to external emails. We can only send to users on our account. 

[siez]

Haha thanks @NHeath1!

I found this too recently, that internal marketing email in workflows can be sent to any address. I am also scared of them patching it. 

The solution I adopted is - created internal email groups of different teams and tools. Later, I added those email groups on Hubspot as a team member. We had a dozens of external email accounts that needed to recieve notifications, now we only have 2-3 grouped by their team, function, etc.

Like - development@mycompany.com sends email to our development team. 

[LCSKMiller]

Unfortunately, internal email groups are also not an option as these are email address outside of our company. We explictly state on these 100+ forms that the viewer is filling out a form and submitting information to both companies to be contacted. 

[siez]

I do not know the whole scenario on your end but I think any email address will work here. 

The internal email group that we use is just a forwarding address we created internally. Like the example I gave above - development@mycompany.com 

It forwards to development team, but we have other groups as well which forwards emails to dozens of email addresses. These groups includes all kinds of emails like- CS@mycompany.com,  this group forwards email to following address (all handled by our internal email server).

• mike@mycompany.com
• datacapture@xyz.com
• randomtool@gmail.com
• john@mycompany.com
• operationsteam@mycompany.com (another group)

So what we have done is. We categorized different channels we want the email notifications to go to. Different teams, tools, databases, etc. And then created internal email forwards. 

Now, if a customer support form needs to send email to entire customer support team along with tools to capture those requests, we use CS@mycompany.com as a notification recipient. 

I understand that things might be more complex at your end and it might not work there. Grouping helps as it removes the issue of adding 100s of email addresses on Hubspot as team member, we just added a couple of them. 

[LCSKMiller]

Hi Siez, this was for our integrations program, with has over 100, nearing 150, separate contact groups that would only include 1 or 2 email addresses each. While this would work for some, we prefer to natively select who the information needs to be sent to as any work arounds would require double the work and maintenance. 

[siez]

Oh, in that case, totally understand how my proposed solution might not work. 

If you don't mind sharing, what is the current solution that is working out for you? I remember some of our old forms are still sending emails to external addresses because we never changed or updating them, even after Hubspot's update. So the addresses are still there. 

Again, not sure if this will work for you. But maybe you can setup email filter rules in that internal inbox, which matches subject lines, email body text, and forwards it to different addresses? This will entail some extra manual work but I guess if nothing else is working out, this could be your temporary solution?

[LCSKMiller]

We have actually rebuilt every page and form within our website (we don't use HubSpot as our website provider, only marketing landing pages). It now operates similar to what HubSpot used to do.

[NHeath1]

That make a lot of sense and probably safer! Love it 

[siez]

Yes it is. Also, we can manage who is a part of those groups internally. So it saves us from adding and removing team members on Hubspot. 

[acm347]

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!

[LCSKMiller]

We are not a GSuite/Workplace user 😕

[DianaGomez]

Hi @acm347 hope you are doing well!

Thanks for sharing 🙂

Best,

Diana

[inahury]

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.

[bbuxton]

Would love this ability!!! 

[siez]

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. 

[Kreskusic]

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. 

[siez]

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.