Welcome new HubSpot contacts with a personalized email from Amazon SES

When a new contact is created in HubSpot, greet them with a warm, personalized welcome email sent through Amazon SES, then log the send back on the HubSpot contact so the sales team can see it went out.

Trigger: HubSpot webhook on the contact.creation event. HubSpot's native Workflows/Automation webhook fires when a new contact is created; the payload contains the contact id. There is exactly one trigger.

Step 1 — fetch context. Use the HubSpot Get Contact operation to pull the full contact record by id. Read the useful properties: first name, last name, email, company, jobtitle, lifecyclestage, lead source, and any recent form submission fields on the record. If the contact has no email, stop the workflow.

Step 2 — suppression check. Before drafting anything, call the Amazon SES Get Suppressed Destination operation for the contact's email address. If the address is on the suppression list, stop the workflow: do not draft, do not send, do not write anything back to HubSpot. Treat this as a normal expected outcome, not an error. If SES returns a not-found response for that email, it is not suppressed and you continue.

Step 3 — draft the email. Write a warm, one-off welcome email tuned to the person's role and company. Lean product-heavy for engineering titles (engineer, developer, architect, CTO); lean ROI-focused and outcome-focused for buyers and executives (director, VP, head of, chief). For operations and support titles, focus on time saved and process improvement. Reference specifics from the record (first name, company, one detail from job title or a recent form answer) so it never reads like a template. Keep it short: two to four short paragraphs plus a friendly signoff from a named sender. No bullet lists, no attachments, no marketing boilerplate.

Step 4 — send via Amazon SES. Use the Amazon SES Send Email operation with Simple content (Subject + plain-text Body, plus an HTML Body if easy). Send from a verified sender identity that I will configure. The subject should be short and human, not marketing-y.

Step 5 — log the send back to HubSpot. After a successful send, use HubSpot Update Contact to set a welcome_sent_at property on the contact (ISO 8601 timestamp of when it was sent). If that property does not exist yet on the account, fall back to HubSpot Create Note associated with the contact, with a short body like: Welcome email sent via Amazon SES on {date} with subject {subject}. Either approach is acceptable; prefer the property update when the property is available so it is queryable.

Error handling. If Amazon SES Send Email fails (rejected recipient, sandbox limit, throttling, or any 4xx/5xx), do not mark the contact as welcomed and skip the follow-up write so the record stays honest. Log the error and stop. If the HubSpot Update Contact call fails because the property is unknown, retry with the Create Note fallback.

Integrations used: HubSpot (webhook trigger, Get Contact, Update Contact, Create Note) and Amazon SES (Get Suppressed Destination, Send Email). Do not use SES contact-list APIs; suppression lookup is enough.