Unlocking Email Campaign ROI: Linking Form Submissions to Specific HubSpot Emails

Hey ESHOPMAN fam! As experts in helping HubSpot users maximize their e-commerce potential, we often dive deep into the HubSpot Community to see what real-world challenges marketers and RevOps pros are facing. Today, we're unpacking a particularly insightful discussion that many of you running online stores or managing complex marketing efforts will find incredibly useful: how to get granular form submission data linked directly back to the specific email campaigns that drove them.

It's a common scenario, right? You've sent out dozens, maybe even hundreds, of email campaigns. You're getting form submissions, which is great, but then comes the million-dollar question: Which emails are truly performing best in terms of driving those valuable conversions?

The Challenge: Connecting Form Submissions to Email Names at Scale

The original poster in the HubSpot Community thread hit this exact wall. They needed to get the total number of form submissions for a set of about 200 email campaigns. While HubSpot shows individual campaign performance, aggregating this data and, crucially, linking it back to the specific name of the email campaign proved tricky. They specifically mentioned not seeing an easy way through APIs, which often points to a need for creative reporting within the platform itself.

Initially, a helpful community member suggested using HubSpot's custom report builder. The advice was to select 'Form submissions' as the data source and then filter by UTM parameters. This makes a lot of sense because HubSpot automatically appends UTMs to links in your marketing emails:

• utm_medium=email
• utm_source=hs_email (for regular, blog, RSS, and feedback survey emails) or hs_automation (for workflow emails)
• utm_c HubSpot ID]
• utm_campaign=[campaign name]

Here's a visual of that initial suggestion:

While filtering by UTMs can show you submissions originating from email campaigns, the original poster quickly realized this didn't directly provide the name of the associated email. They were looking for a way to clearly see the performance in terms of form submissions tied directly to each named email.

The Breakthrough: Joining Data for Granular Insight

This is where the conversation in the community thread took a pivotal turn, revealing a powerful reporting technique within HubSpot. The key insight, provided by a knowledgeable community member, was to leverage the utm_content parameter. As listed above, utm_content stores the internal HubSpot ID of the email. This ID is the golden thread that allows you to connect the dots.

The solution involves using HubSpot's Custom Report Builder to join two distinct data sources:

1. Form Submissions: This data source contains all your form submission records, including the UTM parameters associated with the submission.
2. Marketing Emails: This data source contains all your email campaign details, including the email's internal ID, its name, subject line, send date, and other crucial metadata.

By joining these two data sources on the common field (Form Submissions: UTM Content and Marketing Emails: Email ID), you can effectively pull the specific email name and other relevant email details directly into your form submission report. This transforms raw submission counts into actionable insights, showing you exactly which email campaigns are driving those valuable conversions.

How to Build This Report in HubSpot

While the exact steps might vary slightly with HubSpot updates, the core logic remains:

1. Navigate to Reports > Custom Reports > Create Custom Report.
2. Select 'Form Submissions' as your primary data source.
3. In the 'Configure' tab, click 'Add another data source' and select 'Marketing Emails'.
4. Define the join: HubSpot will prompt you to link common fields. You'll want to link 'Form Submissions: UTM Content' to 'Marketing Emails: Email ID'. This is the critical step!
5. Select your desired fields: From 'Form Submissions', choose 'Total Submissions', 'Submission Date', etc. From 'Marketing Emails', choose 'Email Name', 'Subject Line', 'Send Date', 'Campaign Name', etc.
6. Apply filters as needed: Filter by date range, specific form names, or even specific email campaigns (using 'Marketing Emails: Campaign Name' or 'Marketing Emails: Email Name' if you know them).
7. Visualize your data: Choose a table, bar chart, or other visualization to clearly display your email names alongside their corresponding form submission counts.

Why This Matters for Your E-commerce Strategy

For any business leveraging HubSpot as an ecommerce site builder, this reporting capability is invaluable. Understanding which emails are truly converting allows you to:

• Optimize Product Launches: Pinpoint the most effective email messaging and design for new product announcements.
• Refine Promotional Campaigns: See which discount offers or product bundles in your emails lead to the most inquiries or sales-related form submissions.
• Improve Abandoned Cart Workflows: Analyze the performance of individual emails within your abandoned cart series, ensuring they effectively re-engage potential customers.
• Boost Marketing ROI: Allocate your resources more effectively by investing in the email strategies that consistently drive the highest conversion rates.
• Personalize Customer Journeys: Use insights from top-performing emails to inform future content and segmentation, creating more relevant experiences for your audience.

By connecting form submissions directly to email names, you move beyond vanity metrics and gain a clear picture of your email marketing's impact on your bottom line.

Beyond the Report: Automation and Advanced Analytics

The original poster also expressed a desire to dynamically pull this data rather than downloading reports repeatedly. While the Custom Report Builder provides a robust solution for ad-hoc and scheduled reporting, HubSpot's Data Sets (an Enterprise feature) can take this a step further. Data Sets allow you to create pre-joined, curated data tables that can be reused across multiple reports and dashboards, offering a more dynamic and efficient way to access these complex insights.

For even more advanced scenarios, HubSpot's APIs can be utilized, though as the community discussion highlighted, sometimes the most elegant solution lies within the platform's native reporting capabilities when you know how to combine the right data sources.

Conclusion

Gaining deep insight into your email campaign performance is crucial for driving growth, especially for e-commerce businesses. By mastering the art of joining 'Form Submissions' and 'Marketing Emails' data in HubSpot's Custom Report Builder, you can unlock a new level of understanding about which emails truly resonate and convert. This powerful technique empowers you to make data-driven decisions, refine your marketing strategies, and ultimately, maximize the effectiveness of your HubSpot-powered ecommerce site builder.