HubSpot Reporting: How to Track Form Submissions Back to Specific Email Campaigns (The Community Solved It!)

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:

Filtering by these parameters would indeed show submissions coming from specific email channels. However, the original poster clarified that this approach still didn't give them the associated email name, which was key for understanding performance.

The Breakthrough: Joining Data Sources with UTM_Content

This is where the real magic happens. The same community member followed up with the critical piece of information: the utm_content parameter. As mentioned above, for HubSpot emails, this parameter stores an internal HubSpot ID. And guess what? This ID is precisely what you need to connect your form submissions back to the specific marketing email record!

The solution involves joining two data sources in the custom report builder:

1. Form Submissions: This gives you all the submission data.
2. Marketing Emails: This provides details about your email campaigns, including their names and, crucially, their internal IDs.

Step-by-Step: Building Your Email Performance Report

Let's break down how you can implement this in your own HubSpot portal:

1. Navigate to Custom Report Builder: In HubSpot, go to Reports > Reports > Create report > Custom Report Builder.
2. Select Your Data Sources:
   • For your primary source, choose 'Form submissions'.
   • Then, add a second data source: 'Marketing emails'.
3. Establish the Join: This is the crucial step. You need to tell HubSpot how these two data sources relate. The connection is made between:
   • utm_content from your 'Form submissions' (which holds the email's internal ID).
   • The Email ID field from your 'Marketing emails' data source.
   Make sure your join is configured correctly to link these two fields.
4. Apply Filters: To ensure you're only looking at email-driven submissions:
   • Add a filter for UTM Medium is equal to email.
   • Add another filter for UTM Source is equal to hs_email (and/or hs_automation if you're tracking workflow emails).
5. Select Your Metrics and Dimensions:
   • For metrics, you'll want something like Count of Form Submissions.
   • For dimensions, pull in fields like Marketing Email Name, Marketing Email Subject Line, and any other email-specific details you need to analyze performance.
6. Build and Visualize: Configure your chart type (e.g., a table, bar chart) to clearly display the number of form submissions per email name.

And there you have it! This method allows you to see exactly which of your 200 (or more!) email campaigns are driving those valuable form submissions, directly linking the submission data to the email's name.

The Wish for Dynamic Data

The original poster's final comment perfectly encapsulated a common sentiment among HubSpot power users: while this solution works, they wished for a way to dynamically pull this data rather than relying on downloading reports every so often. It's a valid point and highlights the ongoing evolution of reporting capabilities within platforms like HubSpot. For now, however, this custom report builder approach is a robust and effective workaround.

ESHOPMAN Team Comment

This discussion highlights a core challenge for any online business: truly understanding your marketing ROI. The community's solution using utm_content as a join key is brilliant and demonstrates the power of HubSpot's custom report builder when you understand the underlying data structure. We strongly agree that robust reporting is non-negotiable for optimizing your e-commerce efforts. Whether you're using a simple ecommerce shop builder or leveraging ESHOPMAN's direct integration with HubSpot, knowing which specific emails drive conversions is vital for refining your strategy and maximizing sales.

For RevOps professionals and marketers running stores, insights like these are gold. They allow you to move beyond vanity metrics and focus on what truly drives engagement and conversions for your products. By implementing this reporting strategy, you can make data-driven decisions to optimize your email campaigns, improve your forms, and ultimately, grow your business.