HubSpot Community - Email not sent notifications

cristina-psious · ‎Oct 1, 2019

I have noticed that when an email bounces or is Not sent, I am not aware of this because I don't receive any notifications of this.

As we use many workflows in our onboarding and communications with our clients, I can't be checking each indiviual email or contact to see if everything's working as it should be. So it's a big surprise when I happen to chance upon a contact who's not receiving our emails (if they haven't complained about it).

Hubspot helped me set up a workflow to catch emails that bounce, but there is no option to do the same for Not sent.

I propose two options:

- it would be good to have this possibility for Not Sent emails too (to add it in a workflow).

- I highly recommend that we should be able to enable general notifications for this without having to create a workflow (which is a work around at the end of the day).

As we are now using the Service Hub, it seems it should be a no brainer when having constant contact with clients.

Shay · ‎Oct 24, 2019

Hi @cristina-psious, thanks for taking the time to reach out! I can definitely get behind this idea, I think it'd be great to be able to not only get a summary of the performance of the email re: not-sent and bounces but also the general performance (opens, clicks, etc). I'll share this with my team and I'm looking forward to seeing if others on the community have similar feedback too.

Thanks again!

Herschel · ‎Mar 6, 2020

We are also on Service Enterprise and would also very much like to see a default Hubspot notification settings for one-to-one emails that have bounced and/or not been sent due to previous bounces or other issues. Short of checking back after every email sent it is very had to catch if there has been an issue like this.

@cristina-psious I am curious about the workaround that you found for this issue - can you explain how you have this setup and the limitations that prevent this workaround from functioning for Not Sent emails as well?

cristina-psious · ‎Mar 9, 2020

@Herschel In doing a screenshot for you of the workflow we have set up to catch bounced emails, I realised that I wasn't clear in my first post. I'll try to clarify more now.

Hubspot helped us set up this workflow by using the Marketing emails bounced as a trigger. In our case, we have a second trigger to make sure it only works for clients (as I'm in Customer success) and then this creates a ticket for one of our agents to follow up.

The issue then is not about Not sent (my mistake in my previous explanation), it's that you can only choose Marketing emails. This is great for workflows but not great for one2one emails. So in the service department, we never know if an email sent directly to a client has Not sent or bounced. We can only see this in the inbox if we keep the email open.

I asked the person from HubSpot who helped me set up this workflow if it was possible and they suggested writing this post for future improvements.

In my opinion, what needs to change in HubSpot is the idea that the so called "Marketing emails" are just for marketing (leads). The issue is that, for our company at least and I can imagine for others too, the emails are an integral part of Service. Both in the case of workflow and newsletters, and one2one emails.

Hope this helps!

Herschel · ‎Mar 9, 2020

@cristina-psious thank you for the reply, it is helpful to see the Workflow workaround that you are using to address this issue.

In our case it is those one-to-one emails that we are most concerned about, particularly those that Hubspot does not send due to previous contact email send issues, as these can make it seem to a customer that we have neglected to respond to their support inquires when in fact we tried but our email response was stymied for some reason. Our support team generally works from Tickets, which can keep our support reps from seeing the contact email send issue notices that normally appear on contact records if they have bounced, spammed out, etc (and anyway these notices can be easy to miss). To keep up with a high volume of Tickets, our support team will often move onto the next Ricket when they have provided the customer with a solution, assuming that the issue is resolved unless they hear back. Without checking back on every Ticket and/or Contact record, the team can miss the activity feed banner notices when there is a one-to-one email send issue.

I was able to use the Activity trigger criteria related to Email Send Status to setup a what I believe is a fairly effective Workflow workaround to catch one-to-one emails that Hubspot fails to send (if associated with a Ticket):

Failed Email Activity Task Notice Ticket Workflow.JPG

So far this appears to be working to alert our team members directly when Hubspot prevents the sending of one of their one-to-one emails to a customer (and there is a similar email send status you could use for Bounces as well), but there are a couple of potential issues with this workaround:

I do not know the full scope of what a "Failed" email send status may really mean, so I am unsure if this criteria will actually catch all the one-to-one emails that Hubspot stops from going out due to previous email send issues, if it might miss some of these or perhaps pull in other issues as well.
This Workflow can only be triggered once per enrolled object (in this case Tickets, but you could potentially use it for other object types), as a result subsequent email replies that also fail could be missed. Due to this issue I think that this workaround would really only work if you are using Tickets for most of your customer support email interactions.

alexhunter1 · ‎Jul 14, 2020

We have seen several issues where users are hardbounced and we don't find out until they call or chat us that they never received a response - that's not good service. It would be great if we could have an email alert send out anytime we attempt to send an email to a hardbounced email. We are not a marketing team, so we don't use the same workflows that other companies may be using with Service Hub. We often do not have the bandwidth to be checking to make sure each of our closed tickets is hardbounced. Please prioritize this feature.

DannyH · ‎Sep 17, 2020

My problem is more that when we send a 'direct' mail from the contact account that you get no feedback when the mail bounces (or any other error). Only when you revisit that account you'll see the error message.

A simple notification (via mail or in the notification bar) would be a great help. The message could be as short as: There was a problemen sending an email to "contactperson".