Organizing Customer Emails with Zapier

Automating Missing Customer Emails

Insight from Innovating with AI

Redirecting your emails to Zapier unlocks automation magic. In my previous venture, folks often registered using their personal emails, but made purchases with their work accounts.

My aim? To recognize them as the same person, avoiding redundant or unnecessary messages in any outbound campaigns.

The essential data linking these emails was buried in a single, chaotic email from our platform.

The email's format is a jigsaw puzzle - user images and last names might appear or vanish, and the critical "subscriber_id" in the URL is a shapeshifting element influenced by the user's initial webpage visit.

No API or structured method can rescue this data; it's an email-only treasure.

For the tech-savvy, it's like a digital scavenger hunt: locate the first 'https://,' then a '=,' and an '&,' all while hoping the email and URL format stays constant.

Instead, with ChatGPT, you can use the prompt below, and it will be smart enough to find what you need every time, even if the patterns and structures of the e-mail change:

Prompt: “Below is the content of an e-mail. Provide me with the value of the subscriber_id parameter and the e-mail address you find in this message. Return only the two values, separated by a comma.”

The manual approach takes maybe 30-60 seconds per e-mail, but it gets overwhelming when you multiply that by hundreds of new customers.

And I also can’t always do it immediately – if a user signs up at 12 AM, I won’t have time to map their multiple e-mail addresses before the 9 AM e-mail goes out the next day. 

Here’s the Zapier workflow I used to do it automatically:

1. Gmail: If sender is {your_company} and subject line contains “a customer signed up,” forward to Zapier

2. Zapier: When the email arrives, send the body text to ChatGPT

3. ChatGPT Prompt (Zapier Action): “Below is the content of an e-mail. Provide me with the value of the subscriber_id parameter and the e-mail address that you find in this message. Return only the two values, separated by a comma.”

4. Zapier Formatter: Split the ChatGPT reply on the comma, so we now have two values (the subscriber_id and email address)

5. Google Sheets (Zapier Action): Create a new row in my “User Mapping” spreadsheet with the email address as Column 1 and the subscriber_id as Column 2.

6. ConvertKit (Zapier Action): Get the e-mail address for the subscriber matching the subscriber_id.

7. Google Sheets (Zapier Action): Add the ConvertKit e-mail address from the previous step to Column 3.

8. Zapier Filter: If column 1 and column 3 are different, proceed. If not, stop the workflow here.

9. ConvertKit (Zapier Action): Add the tag “course-owner” to the subscriber with the e-mail address from Column 3.

Thousands of minutes saved – and we never send our customers the wrong message just because they signed up with two different e-mails. 🚀

Once you get handy with funneling your e-mail through Zapier and ChatGPT, you can do pretty much everything – even have ChatGPT respond to e-mails for you! The only limit is your imagination.