Automated Confirmation Emails to Non-marketing Contacts

[RYLeigh]

We've created an automated email that sends when customers submit a form that lets them know we've received their inquiry and gives an estimate of when they can expect to hear from our team.

However, we discovered automated emails can only be sent to marketing contacts. This is unfortunate because this isn't a marketing email, just a general FYI of next steps. We give customers the opportunity to sign up for our mailing list or not, but choosing to not opt-in to promotions shouldn't mean they have to worry that their form went into the void, ya know?

Are there any workarounds to make these confirmation emails possible? We don't want to set up the forms so that all submitters are marked as marketing contacts because that just means we'd have to do some weird workflow business to then mark all the folks that didn't opt-in as non-marketing contacts right after the email is sent...which is an unnecessary hassle. 

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @RYLeigh,

"Marketing contacts" is a misleading name for this set of features in HubSpot, it's better to think of it as "Billable contact, required for automated emails". It does not have to do anything with consent or opt-ins. It's a way for HubSpot to charge you based on the contacts you want to communicate with using automated emails, regardless of whether these require opt-in or not: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/contacts/marketing-contacts

The type of email you're referring to is a transactional email. HubSpot has an add-on for transactional emails that actually don't require contacts to be marketing contacts: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/email/how-to-use-transactional-email-in-hubspot

This is a paid add-on. Once purchased, you can send transactional emails to non-marketing contacts. Without this add-on, it's not possible and there aren't any workarounds either.

Hope this helps!

[RYLeigh]

Oooh, I wasn't familiar with this add-on. Very helpful. Thanks for putting it on my radar!