Emailing People Because of a Page They Viewed, Without Breaking the Spam Act

The mechanic here still works: a page view puts a contact on a list, the list triggers a relevant email. What the original version never asked is whether you're allowed to send it.

A workflow built off page views only fires for contacts who already exist in your HubSpot database, so this isn't about acquiring new people, it's about sending the existing ones something relevant to what they've actually looked at, instead of the same email to everyone. Before any of the steps below, it's worth knowing where the line sits under Australian law, because a page view on its own is not consent to email someone.

What the Spam Act Actually Requires

Under the Spam Act 2003, a commercial electronic message needs consent, either express, the person knows and accepts they'll receive marketing, or inferred, where they knowingly and directly gave you their address and it's reasonable to believe they'd expect marketing because of an existing, provable relationship directly related to it. Viewing a page is neither. It's behaviour, not consent, and the burden of proving consent sits with the sender, not the recipient.

In practice that means the workflow below is safe to run against people who are already your contacts under an existing relationship, an existing customer, someone who signed up for your list, someone mid-way through a sale, and considerably riskier against a cold contact who happened to click through from an ad and view one page. The trigger doesn't create the consent. The relationship does.

Every message sent this way still needs an unsubscribe option that doesn't require a login, an account or extra personal information, and it still needs to correctly identify the business sending it. None of that changes because the email was triggered by a workflow instead of typed by hand.

Storing which pages a named contact viewed is also collecting personal information under the Australian Privacy Principles, specifically APP 3, collection of solicited personal information, and APP 5, notification of that collection. If your privacy policy doesn't already say you track on-site behaviour and use it to personalise email, that's worth fixing before you build the workflow, not after.

Building the Interest-Based Workflow

This workflow rewards existing contacts with personalised content based on what they're actually interested in, rather than what you think they might want. It's built on real behaviour, not a guess.

Set it up:

1. Go to Settings > Properties > Contact Properties.
2. Create a new drop-down property called "Topic of Interest". Add values relevant to your business, for example Inbound Marketing, Sales, Website Creation.
3. Create a list: Contacts > List > Create List > Static List > Save.
4. Build a workflow: Workflows > Create Workflow > From scratch > Contact based.
5. Set the trigger to when a specific page has been viewed.
6. Add a step to set property value > Topic of Interest > the relevant drop-down option.
7. Add a step to add to static list > the list you created in step 3.
8. Add relevant pages to the enrollment trigger as you publish them.

The property value will change as someone's interests do. The static list captures that history as it happens, so you can use personalisation tokens and smart rules to make the emails feel relevant to what this particular contact has actually looked at, because the contact is already in your database and you already have consent to be emailing them.

Up-Selling and Cross-Selling

For up-selling and cross-selling, page view tracking is useful for spotting existing customers who are focused on a specific product or category. This is the clearest case for inferred consent: there's already a direct commercial relationship, and the message is directly related to it.

Here's how to do it:

1. Create a static list called "Engaged Customers".
2. Make a new workflow: Workflows > Create Workflow > From scratch > Contact based.
3. Set the trigger to when a specific page has been viewed and the contact is a current customer.
4. Create a task and send an internal notification to the contact owner to follow up on that interest.
5. Add them to the "Engaged Customers" list for the sales or account team to work.
6. Add a delay of at least 31 days.
7. Add a step to remove the contact from the list once that window has passed.

You can enable notifications to alert an owner when their contact visits the website, but the workflow is what actually creates a task and connects marketing and sales activity to it. This still only works for existing contacts. For a different angle on the same idea, personalising off purchase history instead of page views is worth reading too, and if the goal is alerting a rep in real time rather than emailing later, alerting a rep the moment someone hits a high intent page covers that version of the same trigger.

Checking It's Actually Working

Checking which of your lists actually drive workflows tells you whether the static lists you built are doing anything, rather than sitting unused and getting forgotten.

Wrapping Up

Turning page views into targeted email works, and it works without putting your unsubscribe rate or your Spam Act compliance at risk, as long as the trigger is built on an existing relationship and not just a click. Get the consent question right first, then set up the workflow.

Want us to build this properly, including how we build the revenue system underneath this? Get in touch.