Intermittent Email Notification When Forms Are submitted

[AnthonyCollini]

For some reason, I only get notifications for some of the forms submitted. And to make it worse sometimes contacts are never made. 

The only reason I know this is because I use another lead tracking software. If I was relying solely on HubSpot I would have missed a number of valuable leads.

I have all of the notifications setup, as well as the hbs tracking script, so everything should happen automatically.  

Also, I know things are at least partially set up correctly because I do get notifications some of the time, but not always. And, it happens on pages where I have received notifications, and hubspot has auto-created contacts before.

So sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

I contacted support and they couldn't help so they said to post here. ANY ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[Ben_M]

You are going to need to post more details to help us better understand your issue.  What other software are you using for Lead Tracking?  Are you using Hubspot forms, a third party script, or a custom built form processor?  If not using Hubspot native forms, how are you sending the data to Hubspot - repost, ajax, etc.?  Are any errors being seen via your script/repost?  If so, what?

[AnthonyCollini]

I just use Formspree, so it sends me the info when someone submits the form.

I have the hubspot tracking script installed on each page. Like I said, it works, but just not all the time so I'm not really sure where even to start.

The hubspot tracking script has recognized each of the forms at least once before.

I'm not sure how to find errors in via repost/script. Would I just need to use a browser dev tool?

Thanks for your quick response, and for looking into my issue!

[Ben_M]

Ok, so from reading this further, you are using the posting to non-hubspot forms plugin and having it try to read data from this.  First, at this point, I would recommend, if you haven't already, to reach out to Formspree and involve their support as well.  Hubspot doesn't officially support this service which is likely the reason you got pointed here.

In short, the non-hubspot form feature uses javascript and cookies to figure out if a form not hosted by Hubspot was submitted ( link ). The issue with this is that it's not 100% foolproof and depending on the service may not always work or not always work consistently.

To begin - why are you using them as opposed to Hubspot forms?  Seeing as both are paid services, I would be curious if the service could be migrated?  Second, there is an integration with Zapier from that service and Zapier could be used to repost data from Formspree to Hubspot without the need of using the non-hubspot forms integration piece which is not always reliable.  This next option is a bit more technical, but as Formspree supports JSON reposting, you could simply repost the form through Formspree to Hubspot, again without the non-hubspot forms.

As far as the troubleshooting, if you use the inspect feature in a browser like Chrome, you can view the console, however, since it sounds as though you are using the non-hubspot forms feature, I do not believe you would see an error returned in the console to show you why data is not being recieved.

[AnthonyCollini]

So I built my website from scratch using just HTML CSS and a little JS, so I'm not sure if that's considered a third party plugin or not. I'm not using a wordpress type site.

I made my own HTML form and just use the free formspree service because I didn't want to have to worry about security and getting into writing php scripts. Formspree was a quick way to get the submissions sent directly to my email.

Now I am driving traffic to the site via FB ads. In these Ad's I have a form you can fill out directly in the ad. In order to get that information quickly, without having to go into the ad account and downloading a csv, I needed to have it sent to a CRM. I chose Hubspot.

So I already had the forms set up on my site and a system that was working but wasn't a convenient or organized way of doing things. So needing to use something like Hubspot ended up being great so I could keep everything organized and have a better way of tracking submissions. I haven't tried using Hubspots native forms so I'm not sure what that would look like. Would using a Hubspot form fix my problem?

Here is how I have written my form:

<form name="desktopHomeHeroForm" id="desktopHomeHeroForm" action="https://formspree.io/anthony@**********.com" method="POST">
     <div class = "formInputContainer">	
           <div class="form-input">
		<label id="email-label" for="email">*Email:</label>
		<input name="Email" class="input" id="email" placeholder="Enter your Email" type="email" required>
	   </div>
	   <div class="form-input">
		<label id="tel-num-label" for="tel-num">*Number: </label>
		<input class="input" id="tel-num" name="Tel-Num" type="tel" placeholder="Enter your phone number" required minlength="10" maxlength="12">
	   </div>	
           <div class="form-input">
                <label id="address-label" for="address">*Address:</label>
		<input name="address" class="input" id="address" type="address" placeholder="Enter your Home Address" required> <br>
           </div>
           <input name ="desktopHomeHeroForm" id="desktopHomeHeroForm" type="hidden" value = "desktopHomeHeroForm">
      </div>			
      <div class="btnContainer">	
            <button onclick="fbq('track','Lead'); gtag('event', 'submitClick', {'event_label':'hero', 'event_category':'leadSubmit'});" id="desktopHomeHeroForm" type="submit">Get My Fair Cash Offer <<</button>
      </div>
</form>

Is there something wrong with how I've written the form, or with the way I am submitting the form? 

Also, why would sending the information to Formspree effect the script from Hubspot sometimes and not others? 

I'm still fairly new to the whole coding thing (this is my first real project) so I could definitely have made an error. 

Again thank you for your reply. 

[Ben_M · Accepted solution]

So based on your description of just using the free service for Formspree, and the need to integrate forms with social that they are not able to do, I would definitely consider moving your forms to the Hubspot platform for consolidation.

As I said before, Hubspot only has a few "certified" forms that work with their non-hubspot form process and it is possible that something in Formspree's code is preventing the form submission from being recognized on a consistent basis, or it could be Hubspot's code.  The problem is, while it's a "nice" feature to advertise, I'll be the first to admit from other posts I've seen on the forum, and first hand experience, it's definitely not the most reliable feature and does have it's flaws.  There are many reasons why the script may not be consistent and would need to be evaluted on a case by case basis which is why my recommendation would be to build the forms out in Hubspot. 

By switching to the Hubspot forms, you can setup a notification email to be sent to you after every submission and also because the data is being captured by Hubspot, it will also end up in your database immediately upon submission without relying on additional scripts.  It takes out the problem step from your equation which at the moment looks like this:

Visitor Comes to Website Form Page --> Hubspot thinks there is a form so it tries to grab user data as it is entered --> User Submits Form --> Hubspot tries to guess at whether a form submit actually occurred and was successful --> Sometimes Hubspot is right, Sometimes Hubspot is wrong

So basically there is nothing wrong with your code, it's just something between all of these scripts trying to communicate with one another that is not working all the time.