Form submissions to external partners

[SBell49]

Kia ora all,

We use HS forms to send referrals to external partners by entering their email into where the form submissions are sent, however, due to recent HS changes this is no longer allowed, as they do not have a HS account and we do not want to give them access to ours, understandably.

Is there a way around this or has HS essentially removed this feature as we can only send form submissions internally now?

Thanks,

Sam

[jolle · Accepted solution]

Hey @SBell49, thanks for reaching out! This is a great question.

It's definitely tricky with the new update since form submission notifications, internal email notifications, and dashboard emails all require that the recipient is a user within the HubSpot account (and they need to accept their invite as well).

I'm not 100% sure if this will work, but it looks like the Internal marketing email workflow action still allows you to enter any email address you want:

You would need to potentially create a custom email for every unique form depending on your needs, but this could potentially solve your problem (at least temporarily).

Otherwise, your only other options that I know of are to:

1. Invite those users to your HubSpot account with the lowest access levels possible (you can pretty heavily limit the tools and records that they have access to)
2. Swap the forms on your website to non-HubSpot forms that will enable you to send notifications to any email addresses you want. You can then enable non-HubSpot forms to still pull in submissions (this workaround is kind of counterintuitive, but I wanted to pitch it as an option just in case)

I know this isn't perfect, but hopefully it's enough to get you started!!

[CTreinen]

I wanted to highlight the unanswered questions below.

Is there any way to code/set the personalization tokens so they pull the information from the form submission that triggers the workflow? After testing, all I can come up with is sending the external party their information.

[jolle · Accepted solution]

Hey @SBell49, thanks for reaching out! This is a great question.

It's definitely tricky with the new update since form submission notifications, internal email notifications, and dashboard emails all require that the recipient is a user within the HubSpot account (and they need to accept their invite as well).

I'm not 100% sure if this will work, but it looks like the Internal marketing email workflow action still allows you to enter any email address you want:

You would need to potentially create a custom email for every unique form depending on your needs, but this could potentially solve your problem (at least temporarily).

Otherwise, your only other options that I know of are to:

1. Invite those users to your HubSpot account with the lowest access levels possible (you can pretty heavily limit the tools and records that they have access to)
2. Swap the forms on your website to non-HubSpot forms that will enable you to send notifications to any email addresses you want. You can then enable non-HubSpot forms to still pull in submissions (this workaround is kind of counterintuitive, but I wanted to pitch it as an option just in case)

I know this isn't perfect, but hopefully it's enough to get you started!!

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @SBell49 and @jolle,

I can confirm that internal marketing emails in workflows are currently the fastest and easiest way to set up notifications to external parties. (I've set this up a few times recently and it works without issues.)

There are a few things I'd like to add:

• Other than the native form submission notification, @SBell49, you would work with personalization tokens to build your own notification. You can fully design the automated email to your design requirements and would then include the form input in the email body by spelling it out like this:
  
  Name: [personalization token for first name] [personalization token for last name]
  Email: [personalization token for email]
  Company name: [personalization token for company name]
  etc.
• If you're using transactional emails as a subscription type, I've found this to work best with the least amount of troubleshooting. If you've enabled the GDPR features including the 'legal basis required' option, I've had issues in the past where contacts where excluded from the internal marketing email send due to a lack of opt-in into the subscription type used for the email. In that case, make sure your notification recipients have the opt-in for the subscription type.
  
  
• To send the notification in BCC to an internal email address, for recordkeeping, for example, you would simply repeat the automated email send action in your workflow twice. I'm often being asked for a copied or bcc email address but it's not possible. You simply have to repeat the action.
• Make sure to test everything with internal addresses before you unleash it onto your partners. Also, when enabling the workflow, you'll likely only enroll contacts who meet the trigger criteria from that point on. A few wrong clicks and you could be sending hundreds or thousands of notifications at once.

Let me know if you hav any follow-up questions!

[NataliaBA]

Thanks for digging a bit deeper into the solution. I still don't see though, how are we supposed to pull the contact information from the submission form into this email notification? Wouldn't the personalisation trigger the recipient's contact information?

[CDean]

It looks like this was silently patched out as an option.  There appears to be no way to email to anyone outside of the User list.  The minimum permissions are not secure enough to grant to people you would not want in your account.

This is a much bigger security risk than simply allowing us to email as we need.

-1

[MHarvey643]

Hi there, question on this -- I'd like to use personalization tokens to notify a specific external contact when we get a submission on a specific form. 

If we use personalization tokens for the internal marketing email notification, woudn't the the personalization tokens pull from the contact the email is going to, and not the contact who submitted the form?  Not sure how that would work.

Thanks