Adding the Send transactional email action

Add the action to any HubSpot workflow, choose a template, a recipient, and a sender profile, and send.

Overview

Send transactional email is a custom workflow action. Each time a record reaches it, the action sends one template to one recipient and returns a send status your workflow can branch on.

The action is available in every HubSpot workflow type — contact, company, deal, ticket, and custom object workflows — so you can send a receipt from a deal workflow or a renewal notice from a company workflow.

Before you begin

A sender profile. See Creating a sender profile. In the sandbox you can use the built-in sandbox sender instead.
A HubSpot marketing email to use as the template. See Creating a transactional email template.
Permission to edit workflows in HubSpot.

Steps

Open or create a workflow in Automation → Workflows.
Add an action where the email should go out, and search for Send transactional email. It’s listed under Transactional Email.
Choose the Email template. The dropdown lists the draft marketing emails in your HubSpot account, a page at a time, and you can search it by name. Save your template as a draft; don’t send or schedule it from HubSpot. Published emails aren’t listed. A template already known to be unsendable has — incompatible after its name, with the reasons underneath — pick another or fix it first. A template you’ve never picked is checked when you select it. See Supported email modules.
Set the Recipient email. Choose the property that holds the address — usually the enrolled contact’s Email — or an email output from an earlier action. The address must be a HubSpot contact’s primary email address; additional email addresses on a contact aren’t looked up.
Choose the Sender profile. The default profile is listed first, marked (default); pick the one this email should come from. Until you go live the list also offers Sandbox sender (sandbox only), which needs no setup but stops working once you’re live.
Save the action and turn the workflow on.

The action now sends the template to the recipient each time a record reaches it, and returns a Send status your workflow can branch on. Every send also appears in App Home’s Send log.

What happens next

The content review starts as soon as you choose the template, so it’s usually done before the first send. Sends wait up to 10 minutes for a review in progress. See How the transactional content review works.
Tokens fill in from the recipient’s contact, the one whose email — primary or additional — matches Recipient email, not necessarily the enrolled record. If several contacts share the address, the most recently updated one is used. Company tokens come from that contact’s primary company. See Personalizing emails with tokens.
The action always completes, whether or not the email went out, so the workflow moves on. Branch on Send status to handle failures. See Branching on send results.

What the action returns

Output	What it holds
Send status (`status`)	`sent`, `queued_warmup`, or the reason the email didn’t send.
Message ID (`message_id`)	The ID of the sent email. Empty when nothing was sent yet.
Error code (`error_code`)	The same code as Send status when the email didn’t send; empty for `sent` and `queued_warmup`.

Every value is explained in Send status and error codes.

Tips

One action sends to one address. To email two people, add two actions.
Recipient email takes a property, not a typed address. To email someone other than the enrolled record — a deal’s primary contact, for example — send from a contact-based workflow that enrolls that contact.