Pro Tip: Add email addresses to your Contacts just to keep an eye on how they receive emails
I want to share something that happened to me yesterday in case it can help someone else. I know some HubSpot users have to be careful about how many contacts they have in their portals. To follow this process you may need to give up a seat for a time, but you can remove the email address later.
The situation:
Several forms on our websites are for Support people and teams. They are the ones who need to know when the form is submitted and what the data is. However, I do not want to maintain those teams and people as users in my HubSpot portal so I can't add them to the Form notification setting.
So instead I build Workflows that watch for the form to be submitted and send an automated email via and Internal Marketing notification to the various teams and people who need to know about form submissions. Here's an example of a Form Submission trigger that sends notifications via email to other email accounts.
The Problem:
Yesterday, one of these WorkFlows was failing to send the email to 1 of the listed addresses. The other email address was working fine. Other similar flows with multiple email addresses were working fine. There was an issue with 1 address and the error message in the Workflow was not clear at all as to WHY the email address was failing.
Great that there's a failure logged, but no WHY. So, I contacted Support and let them look into it.
While they were looking for a reason I started looking at all these "internal" recipients and their Contact record in our portal. Thanks to the Contact Activity Feed I was able to verify that they were all receivng emails from the Workflows. But when I looked for the offending email address, they were not found in Contacts at all. Oh!
The Solution:
I added the offending email address as a new Contact and tested the Form and Workflow again. This time when the email failed to send I was able to see WHY from the Contact Activity Feed.
My fellow coworker had opt'd out of ALL emails we were sending out of HubSpot.
Support did not have this insight based on the errors being seen in the Workflow, and I couldn't see the cause either until I added the address as a new Contact.
Take Away:
Use the Contact Activity Feed to monitor your internal employees, too (if you can give up the space). Occassionally, enough of our employees move our own marketing emails to junk folders and it trips our email servers into blocklisting our own domain. (Why? I don't know.) I've had to work with IT to undo it several times.
Not everyone is your audiece, including your own people who have good and bad days. So be prepared by using all the HubSpot tools at your disposal.
