How to Send Automated Emails Using Workflows in HubSpot

Workflows in HubSpot are your engine for automating tasks at scale, and sending email is one of their most powerful uses. These workflows run based on criteria you define, such as a contact’s form submission, a lifecycle stage change, or a deal update, and automatically push out relevant emails without manual effort.

You’ll find this tool under Automation > Workflows in your HubSpot portal. You can choose from templates or build a workflow entirely from scratch.

Automated email triggers are most useful for handling repetitive, time-sensitive tasks. 

Think: onboarding instructions when a deal closes, educational content after a whitepaper download, or renewal reminders when a contract is about to expire. The key is HubSpot’s ability to link CRM data, like contacts, tickets, companies, and deals, to your workflows, ensuring the right message reaches the right person at the right moment.

Also worth noting: HubSpot includes a generative AI tool that can assist with writing workflow descriptions or drafting email messages. These tools can help speed up your build process, but you should treat them as assistants, not decision-makers.

How It Works Under the Hood

To get emails firing with precision, you need to understand the core pieces that power your workflow. Every automated email workflow in HubSpot runs on three fundamentals: what triggers it, what you want it to do, and how enrollments are managed.

Key elements to configure:

• Enrollment triggers: Define what qualifies a contact to enter the workflow. You can use form submissions, property changes, list memberships, or deal stages.
• Associated records: HubSpot identifies relationships between objects, such as contacts and deals, so you can trigger emails based on activities related to a contact, even if those activities occur on a deal or ticket.
• Email assets: These are created in advance under Marketing > Email. Only published marketing emails can be used inside workflows.

Here’s what happens behind the scenes when your workflow runs:

1. A contact meets the enrollment criteria.
2. HubSpot confirms the contact can be enrolled (e.g., based on re-enrollment and suppression rules).
3. The workflow sends the designated email.
4. If additional steps exist, delays, conditionals, branches, they’re triggered in sequence.

A few features that fine-tune how your workflow behaves:

• Re-enrollment: If you expect contacts to trigger a workflow more than once, for example, every year on their renewal date, don’t forget to enable this.
• Goal criteria: Define a condition (like “became a customer”) that automatically removes a contact from a workflow so they don’t receive irrelevant follow-ups.
• Suppression lists: Use these to exclude contacts from automation logic, such as existing clients who shouldn’t receive new prospect offers.

HubSpot delivers workflow emails through its marketing email infrastructure, allowing you to track open, click, bounce, and unsubscribe rates in both the email and the workflow’s performance dashboard.

Main Uses Inside HubSpot

Sending Welcome Emails After Form Submissions

When someone fills out a website form, they expect acknowledgment, and quickly. Automating a welcome email ensures that every contact receives a courteous, timely response, no matter when they submit.

For example: You set an enrollment trigger for “Contact submitted Contact Us form.” The first action? “Send email,” using a branded welcome message that confirms receipt and outlines what happens next.

This keeps your communication clean and your leads warm, without requiring manual follow-up.

Nurturing Leads with Drip Sequences

Lead nurturing works best when it’s spaced out, relevant, and designed to build trust over time, something workflows do exceptionally well.

Say a lead downloads a whitepaper. That event triggers a workflow to send a thank-you message, wait 3 days, check whether the contact has moved to an MQL stage, and then send a more in-depth educational email. Each element exists within your workflow, using delays and if/then branches to ensure timely relevance.

This sequence gives your contact breathing room between messages, all while nudging them forward.

Automating Onboarding or Customer Education

Sales just marked a deal as Closed Won. What now?

A well-timed onboarding workflow takes over from here. As soon as the deal stage updates, you can trigger a “Welcome to Your Onboarding” email, followed by training details or key setup instructions. These touchpoints eliminate guesswork and reduce customer support back-and-forth.

One trigger, and your customers feel taken care of right away.

Renewal and Re-engagement Notifications

If you’re managing subscription-based services, you know how important renewal reminders are. With workflows, you can build logic tied to a date property, like “Renewal Date”, and ensure a reminder email lands 30 days before expiration.

You can also revive disengaged contacts. For instance, identify anyone who hasn’t opened an email in 120 days, then send a friendly re-engagement campaign.

Both workflows help you keep contacts from dropping off silently.

Common Setup Errors and Wrong Assumptions

To keep your automations running cleanly, watch out for these missteps. They’re easy to overlook but can cause confusing results if left unchecked.

Using test contacts that stay enrolled
Set up test contacts during build-out, but forget to remove them after testing? That distorts reporting. After your workflow checks out, clear any leftover test data.

Skipping the re-enrollment setting
Some workflows need to run multiple times for the same contact, say, annually or by form resubmission. If re-enrollment is off, nothing happens on the second go. Review this carefully based on your trigger logic.

Forgetting to publish emails
Only published emails are eligible in workflows. Drafts can’t be sent, no matter how perfect they are. Make sure marketing emails used in automations are marked as “Published for automation” before finalizing.

Assuming delay settings use calendar days
HubSpot lets you choose between calendar days and business days for delays. Choose based on your audience: for B2B, business days often make more sense to avoid weekend sends.

Step-by-Step Setup or Use Guide

Before you dive in, confirm you have access to Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise. These tiers are required for workflow-based email automation. Also, make sure your marketing email is created and published before adding it to the workflow.

Here’s how to build and launch an email automation workflow in HubSpot:

1. Navigate to Automation > Workflows.
2. Click “Create workflow” and choose a type (e.g., Contact-based).
3. Set your enrollment trigger, for example, “Contact submitted Lead Magnet Form.”
4. Click the plus icon (+) to add your first action. Choose “Send email.”
5. Select a published marketing email from your list. Confirm and preview.
6. Add additional actions if needed, delays, internal notifications, or branching logic like “If contact clicked the previous email.”
7. Configure re-enrollment permissions and suppression lists.
8. Review the full workflow, then toggle it to “On.” HubSpot will enroll contacts based on your trigger criteria going forward.

Test your workflow by enrolling a sample contact using the “Test” button in the upper right of the workflow builder. This prevents surprises after launch.

Measuring Results in HubSpot

Once your automation is live, your focus should shift to performance. HubSpot offers built-in reporting options that help you link your automated emails to engagement and conversion data.

Here’s where to look and what to track:

• Workflow performance tab: See how many contacts enrolled, completed steps, or met a defined goal.
• Marketing Email dashboard: Get open, click-through, bounce, and unsubscribe metrics specific to each email in your workflow.
• Custom reports: Build views that correlate workflow performance with lifecycle stages or revenue metrics, such as Deal Amount or Lead Status, for a more complete ROI picture.

Checklist of metrics to evaluate:

• How many contacts enroll each week/month
• Email deliverability health (esp. bounce rate)
• Conversion on workflow goal (e.g., booked a meeting)
• Ratio of re-enrolled vs. net-new contacts

To keep things actionable, build dashboard tiles combining workflow and email data. This allows quick access to insights you can actually use to improve content or timing.

Short Example That Ties It Together

Let’s say your marketing team wants to follow up automatically when someone requests a demo.

Here’s how it plays out in HubSpot:

1. A contact fills out the “Request Demo” form.
2. In Workflows, your team sets the enrollment trigger as “Form submission: Request Demo.”
3. Action 1 sends a “Demo Request Received” confirmation email.
4. Two days later, Action 2 sends a “Meet Your Account Manager” email with a Calendly link to schedule a call.

The outcome? Every interested lead gets a timely, personalized sequence without any manual work. You can monitor engagement, who opened, clicked, or booked, right in HubSpot, and hand warm leads directly to your sales team.

If your workflow report shows 100 enrolled contacts, 90 emails delivered, and 60 clicked through, that’s a 60% click-to-schedule rate. Stats like these let you optimize timing and messaging as you scale.

How INSIDEA Helps

HubSpot offers a robust foundation for automating emails, but sustaining performance goes far beyond setup. You need consistent data hygiene, updated logic, and workflows that stay aligned as your business evolves. That’s where INSIDEA comes in.

We help you build workflows that reflect your real processes, from lead capture to customer engagement, and set up automation that scales. Our role is to minimize friction, eliminate redundancy, and surface meaningful performance insights.

What we bring to your HubSpot implementation:

• Onboarding: We configure your portal and essential workflows so you start with a clean slate.
• Ongoing management: We maintain integrity across data, assets, and automations to prevent breakdowns.
• Workflow optimization: We audit and optimize existing workflows to better align with your lifecycle stages and business goals.
• Reporting setup: We align campaign metrics with CRM insights to keep marketing, sales, and customer service on the same page.

Visit INSIDEA to schedule a call or explore our HubSpot Consulting services.