Email is a huge part of
how we conduct business. But a lot of the email that you're
probably sending is that same repetitive stuff that you write out and
draft over and over again, there's a much faster
way of tackling this. If you send email with automation, you can actually build automated processes
that will send your emails out based on certain conditions. And that is exactly
what we're going into in this video. So if that's of interest stick
around and let's get into it, Hey, welcome back to the
channel. If you're new here, my name is Gareth Pronovost. I own a company called GAP Consulting
and we help you to organize and automate your business. So if that's of interest and you want to
learn more about how we do all of that magic, definitely check out the links below
and I would encourage you to sign up for our upcoming live webinar. Once a week, I conduct an automation training webinar, where I show you the fundamental building
blocks of leveraging automation to help you run your business. I personally save up to 20 hours per week
and I help most of my clients get the same results. If that's of interest, if
you'd like to reclaim some of your time, check the link below, you can sign up at Gareth Pronovost
dot com slash webinar dash registration. And Hey, even
if you can't attend live, I will send you a replay of that
training so that you can get all of the information, but without further
ado, let's hop into this video. We are talking about how we can
leverage email in our businesses. Specifically, I'm going to be using
a tool called air table to do this, and I'm going to be going into three
different examples that we see a lot of with our clients. So let's hop on into my screen and
get started with the first one. The first type of email actually comes
in the form of an auto responder. So we can imagine that we have a
form and we're asking a few different questions. One of the questions on that form must
be the email that we're going to be sending the automated email to. In this
case, I have some sample questions here. I'm just asking for name. Of
course, I have that email address. I'm also asking for their level of
education and also their thoughts on world peace. Now, when that information
is accepted or submitted, it's going to be automatically put
into our database in air table. The form and the data structure are both
living in air table in this specific tab or table called form responder. So let's go ahead and open up that form
and actually submit data to this form. Now there's a number of things
you can do with this form. You can embed it on your website,
or you can just share the URL, but I'm going to go ahead
and fill it out for myself. So I'll put my name in here.
I'll put my email in here. I'll go with my highest level of
education and my thoughts on world peace. And we're going to go ahead
and submit that information, going back into air table. Now we're going to find
that that information was
just received inside of our database. So in order to
leverage an autoresponder email, what we can do is actually build this
automation directly inside of the tool. So I'm going to go up in
the upper right-hand corner
of the screen and click on my automations panel here. And I'm going
to create a custom automation. Now, first I have to establish what
the trigger is. And in this case, we want to trigger this automation
as soon as any form is received. So I can say, look, when a new
form is submitted in this table, and then of course I have to tell it
what table that is. And in our case, we have a few different
tables we're playing with, but this particular example comes
from that form responder table. So when we get a form specifically
the auto responder form, once we receive a form
there in that table, we are going to send an automated email. We then run a test and it will find
the most recently submitted form, which is the form we just
submitted a moment ago. Now we can go into building the action
and the action here is going to be to send the email. In my case,
I use Gmail. If in your case, you use outlook, you can scroll down
and send an email through outlook, or you can just send email
directly through air table, whichever of these three
choices, best suits you, but I'll go ahead and set this
up from my Gmail. So I'll say, send an email from my Gmail and we have
to first determine who we're sending it to. And this is why we must have require
that email address when they submit the form. So again, we're
going to come in here, access the email address that the person
gave us when they submitted the form, plop that in, right, the subject, something like this is an auto response, and then we can write out
the message. Hi. And again, we can access any information that they
gave us in the forum. So for example, their name we can bring in here. And if we want to include any attachments,
we can bring them in here. Now, the last piece we need to do of course
is make sure we're connected to our Gmail account. And so in my case, I've
already built that connection, but if you haven't, you'll need
to connect your account here. And then I will just link up with my
account there and we can run a test or preview of the email. And so if
we look at the preview email, we see that this is going to the email
address that they submitted in the form. We are addressing it to them because
we got their name in the form. And then we have our message in
the body and also the subject here. So that's great. Once we
have this to our liking, we need to make sure to turn it on. So go ahead and flip on that particular
automation and we are good to go. You probably also want
to name your automation, not doing so is going to get you in
trouble, stay organized. So let's name it. Auto responder email.
All right, good to go. And now anytime someone
submits a new form to us, they are going to automatically receive
that email. Now let's hop into example. Number two, an example, number two, I'm going to assume that we have a
specific status within our project that reaches a certain level and we want to
send out an automated email based on that condition. So here we have contacts living
in one, and here I have a first name, last name and an email. This is
different from our form responder table, totally different table that can
hold, just contact information. Now in our other table here on projects, we have these projects where we assign a
name to the project and the project has a status and it connects to a client. Now, since we know the email
address of every client, we're able to look up that email address
using a lookup field in air table that looks at the client that we've connected
to and brings in the email address. So from here, what we can do is set up a rule that says
when the status of a project reaches a specific outcome, then we want to send an automated email
that outlines next steps and what the client can expect. So let's go
ahead and set this email up again. We're going to open up
our automations panel. We're going to add a new
automation. And in this case, we're going to build a
different type of trigger. We're going to say that the record
matches specific conditions. In this case, we're looking at a record
in our projects tables. So we have to link to that and we
need to set up those conditions. And at a minimum, we need to say that email must not
be empty because if email is empty, how in the world are we going
to send an email address? But also in our particular case, we want to make sure that the status is
completed in this example. So for us, we're imagining that when we
mark that project as complete, then this email goes out. So if
we try to run a test right now, of course we're going to fail. We
haven't completed any projects. So let's go back to our projects and
make sure that we mark one as complete. We can drop back into our automation, go back into our trigger and
test this again. And sure enough, we're going to get the green
check box that says, yes, I do find a record that matches the
conditions that you set up here. And now just as we did before we
can write the email. So again, we can bring in the send email here. We can include the email address
from step one, in this case, it's in this lookup field. And we can bring in that value right
here and write up whatever subject and whatever message we want. For example,
we might write a message that says, hi, Gareth, your project has just been
marked complete within our system. We're going to move you into the
support phase for the next 30 days. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out or
something along those lines, whatever the case is for this
particular type of email automation, we're looking, of course, at an example, that sends out an email based on certain
conditions within your operations. So really cool way to make sure that when
certain milestones are hit within your operations, that's when those
emails are getting sent out. Now let's hop into example three, we're going to back up yet again
and look at a proposal email here. So let's imagine that you send out
proposals or you have some other time-sensitive things that you
put out and engage with leads or clients or customers somehow in your
business. In this example, again, we're connecting to that contact table. So this is linking back again to the
contacts table. And just as we did before, we need to know what the
email is of that client. And so we're going to
use a lookup field again, to connect to the contact and look up
the email that lives at the contact level in our database this way. Again, we can send an email directly from
our proposals table without having to write a new email
address in here. Again, since it's already assigned to
the contact. All right, now we, in our example here, we're going to
imagine some sort of time to trigger. So for example, we might send out a proposal on a certain
day and that every proposal might have an expiration. Well, perhaps we want to send out an
email reminder a few days before the proposal expires. Of course we can calculate when the
proposal expires just by writing a formula that says, take the date that
the proposal was created, add to it the expiration days in days. And then from there calculate when this
proposal will expire. So in this case, a proposal that started or was
created on September 6th and it has an expiration of 30 days, of course will
expire on October 6th. Easy enough. Let's say now that we
want to send out, uh, an email three days before the expiration,
let's build a new formula for that. So we'll create a field called email
send date, and this will be a formula. And again, we're going to look
at that proposal expiration, but we're going to subtract
three days from it. So we're looking again at a
date ad formula using proposal expiration, then negative
three, and then here is days. So what this is doing is subtracting
three days from our proposal expiration. I'm not super concerned about the time, so I'll go ahead and remove the
time field and save this up. Now, what we can do is build an automation
that is sent whenever the email send day is equal to today. So that
when it is October 3rd, it will actually send the email. Let's
actually bring a new version in here. I will bring in a new proposal.
Now, as of today's recording, it is September 18th. So I'm going to pick a date and an
expiration that makes it so the email send days actually the same day that
I'm testing out this automation. So let's imagine that my data
proposal was actually 8 21. And then I had a 31 day of
expiration on that proposal. Now, once air tables had a chance to think
it's calculating and saying, well, the proposal will expire
on the 21st of September. And then the email will be
sent on the 18th of September, which is exactly what I want because
today is the 18th of September. So now I can go ahead and pop
into my automations and again, create a custom automation. In this case, I'm saying that my record
matches certain conditions again, but the conditions are different because
they're based on the formula that we just built that is time
and date sensitive. So I'm going to select a
table again, in this case, I'm looking at my proposals table and
my condition here is going to be number one. Again, the email must
exist. If the email is empty, then I can't send an email. So I don't want the automation to ever
trigger in that condition simultaneously. I want to make sure that the
email send date is today. And in order to get there, I can
just drill in here and just say, the email send date is today, let's run a test and see if air table
is actually able to find a record. And of course it is because we went
through and made sure that we had one that matched those conditions. So if we pop
this open, we can see, sure enough, the email sends date for this particular
one is the date of proposal of 8 21 that we just created
expiration of 31 days. That email will be sent out
on the 18th of September. So now just as we did before, we can move past our trigger
and go into sending an email, we can bring in the email address
again, that we received in the trigger, which is right here, go ahead and
continue here and bring in that value. And we can write up whatever subject
we want and include the message in this particular example, the
message is time-sensitive. So our message would likely say, Hey, your proposal is about
to expire in a few days. Just wanted to remind you that the
window is closing hope to be able to earn your business or something along
those lines, whatever that is. So there you have it three really
cool ways that you can leverage email automation so that you can stop
sending the same email time after time and just let a computer do
it for you in the background. As you go about your work, I hope
you got a ton of value out of this. If you have any questions, please
be sure to post them below. And I will see you in
the next video as always. I hope you found that to be
extremely helpful if you did. And you'd like to learn more swing by
our website and see how we can help. We offer a free air table crash course
that will help you level up in air table quickly. And we also
have some paid services, including hourly consultations
with our experts. We have some online courses
and a group coaching program, and for advanced needs, we can build a
bespoke solution for you from scratch. So swing on by, and I look forward
to connecting with you soon.
