Is there a way to trigger one node upon another node being started in the process model view?

Hi all,

We've got a requirement to trigger a custom email to be sent with a link to a task upon task assignment. Our current solution is, when we split the path to asynchronously start the Send Email process, we have a timer on the send email path to wait a small amount of time to give the process time to reach the User Input Task. This can cause problems if the user quickly moves the task on before the email has sent and updates the data in our database that the email is populated with before it's sent. 

I was looking at Send Message Event and Receive Message Event, in case there was some way to trigger a send message on our user input task which would then be received by our send email sub process node to start that and send the email. I don't know if that would've worked, but it doesn't look like Send and Receive Message events are available to cloud users (which we are).

Is there any alternatives I could try out? 

Thanks for any help.