Notify your team from an automation
Use the Notify someone step to email your own people when a contact reaches a point in the flow, choose the recipients three ways, and know the limits.
Every other step in an automation acts on the contact. Notify someone acts on you. It sends an internal email to the people on your side of the account, saying which contact just reached this point and what put them there, so somebody can pick up the phone while the interest is still warm.
This guide covers where the step lives, the three ways to choose who gets the alert, what the email contains, and the two limits worth knowing before a busy flow surprises your inbox.
Add the step
Open the automation in the builder and put the step where the news happens: straight after the form-triggered start, inside the branch that only high-value contacts take, or after a Wait until that resolves when somebody finally engages.
- Drag Notify someone out of the Steps rail’s Messaging group and drop it exactly where you want it, or press Add step and pick it from the grid.
- It sits in Messaging next to Send Email and Create email draft, because it sends an email. It is the only one of the three that does not email the contact.
- A branch can hold it too, which is usually where it belongs: alert the team on the YES side, stay quiet on the NO side.
This step never emails the contact and never appears to them. If you want the contact to hear something, that is a Send Email step.
Open your automations in Mailsoftly
Choose who gets the alert
The settings open on one panel with three recipient controls. They add up rather than replace each other, so a single step can reach a shared inbox, two named people and whoever owns that particular contact.
- Who on your team should get this email? picks from the active users on your account. Add as many as you need; deactivated teammates are dropped when the step runs.
- Anyone else? Type their email addresses takes free text. Separate several with commas. Anything that is not a valid address is quietly ignored rather than failing the step.
- Also send it to the person responsible for this contact points the step at a contact field. Pick the field that holds each contact’s account manager or sales rep, and the email goes to whatever address is saved there for that contact. Leave it on No, skip this when nobody owns contacts individually.
One step emails at most ten people. Everything above is combined, lowercased and deduplicated first, so the same person listed twice still gets one email.
The contact-field option lists only text fields, because only a text field can hold an address. Contacts with nothing saved in that field are simply not emailed, and their flow carries on exactly as before. That is the case worth testing before you rely on it.
Write the subject and the message
Both fields are optional. Leave them blank and Mailsoftly writes them for you, which is the right answer for most alerts.
- The default subject reads New activity from the contact’s first and last name, and the default message says they just went through this step and invites you to open the contact.
- Fill either one in and you can use the same merge tags the rest of the product uses, so a subject like Warm lead ready: first name, last name reads properly in the inbox.
- Whatever you write, Mailsoftly adds the rest for free.
The alert your team receives carries the contact’s name, email, phone, company, tags and lists, a "what happened" line naming the event that started their run and its target, an Open contact button, and a footer naming the automation that sent it. Nobody has to guess which flow fired.
The step will not let the automation go live until at least one recipient is set. A step with no teammate, no typed address and no contact field wears the amber Missing fields badge and blocks activation, which is deliberate: an alert nobody receives is worse than no alert.
Know the delivery rules before you rely on it
This is not marketing mail, and it does not behave like it. That is what makes it safe to drop anywhere in a flow.
- It goes out through Mailsoftly’s own transactional mail rather than your sending identity, so it does not need a verified sender.
- It ignores unsubscribes and suppression. Your own colleague unsubscribing from your newsletter does not stop them being alerted.
- It does not count against your sending limit.
- It never blocks the contact. If the alert cannot go out for any reason, the contact’s flow continues to the next step.
Two guards keep a busy flow from flooding a team, and they are the reason an alert you expected sometimes does not arrive.
- The same contact and the same step will not alert twice within ten minutes.
- One automation sends at most 200 alerts an hour across all its steps. Anything over that is skipped for the hour, and the contact moves on.
Rehearse it, then two patterns worth copying
Run the flow through the simulator before you activate. The simulator reports the step as your team being notified about the sample contact, and no email leaves the account, so you can confirm the step sits in the right branch without pinging anybody.
Two shapes cover most of what people actually build.
- Tell the owner about a high-intent form. Trigger on the form response, add a Condition on the answer that separates a real enquiry from a newsletter signup, and on YES put a Notify someone pointed at the contact field that holds the account manager. The person who owns that relationship hears about it, and nobody else does.
- Tell the whole team when a lapsed contact comes back. In a win-back flow, put a Wait until on "Contact matches a condition" so the flow pauses until they pick up the tag your team adds to anyone who replies, then a Notify someone addressed to your shared inbox. The alert only fires for the people who actually re-engaged.
The step’s own skips, a blank contact field or a rate limit, do not surface as a readable reason on the Contacts tab. If an alert is missing, check the recipients first and the ten minute window second, rather than looking for an error message.
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