How to Send Recurring Emails in Outlook with Power Automate

don't waste your time sending the same email over and over again if there's a reminder or a message you need to send out repeatedly you can easily automate it in a few simple steps today I'm going to show you how to set up automated recurring emails in Outlook or Gmail with power automate or zapier hi I'm Tom from X-ray tech the workflow company at x-ray we automate everything from quick email messages to complex inventory management systems to help our members create more time for Meaningful work to learn more about x-ray just go to our website x-ray . Tech if you'd like to see more automation tips and tutorials every week like this video And subscribe to our Channel and be sure to turn on those notifications too in this video I'm going to show you how to set up recurring emails in Outlook step by step using Microsoft power automate then I'll show you how to build a similar workflow using zapier and Gmail instead if you've never used power automate or zapier before don't worry this workflow is very simple and a great one to get started with let's jump into it for our example today I'll create a reminder email about our team's standup meetings on Monday I'll schedule it to go out at 8:45 a.m. but you could customize your automation or flow as power automate would call it to send out an email at any time and frequency you'd like weekly daily hourly whatever you want to get started sign in to Outlook in your browser click on this square of dots in the top left to access more apps from there click on all apps then scroll down to power automate you should see it right before PowerPoint I guess Microsoft has a thing for power couples if this is your first time using power automate on this account you'll have to pick your region and then click get started on this screen you'll see lots of options for learning more about power automate however the flow we're about to build is very simple so we can just Dive Right In click on create in the middle of the screen to create a new automation from scratch you'll see a few options here since we want our automation to run at a designated time we'll pick schedule Cloud flow give your flow a name I'll call mine send standup reminder email brief descriptive names like this are important when you start building a lot of automated workflows and need to keep track of them all under run this flow you can choose when your automation will start running by default it will start running immediately but if you'd like you can delay it until later then set how often the automation or flow will run it will default to running every 1 minute but you can customize this to whatever you'd like since I want to send out a reminder every Monday I'll change it to once a week if you're not sure you can always just pick something for now and then change it later once you're all set click on create to make a new flow with these basic settings with the flow created you'll need to provide a little more detail about how often the automation will run in this recurrence step it will already be set to whatever interval you specified when you created the flow but you can change it here if you'd like or further customize the schedule under Advanced options for inance inst you can specify the time zone the days the automation will run and the specific time the flow should run I'll pick my time zone eastern US and since I want the flow to run every Monday at 8:45 a.m. I'll choose Monday as the day and I'll pick 8 for hours and 45 for minutes note that this is a 24-hour clock once your recurrence schedule is set up click on new step and add an automated action this is where we'll configure the email that gets sent out you'll be prompted to choose an operation in this window search for the name of the app you want to automate with in this case I'll search for Outlook since I want to send an email with Outlook but if you'd like you could use another email app like Gmail here but I'll stick with Outlook and pick outlook.com as the app next you need to choose a specific action to perform with this app I'll go with send an email V2 I'm not really sure why it's labeled V2 but that seems like the only send email option so hopefully it's the most up-to-date version once you've chosen your action you'll be prompted to sign in to your Outlook account to authorize it here in power automate sign in then click on accept to allow power automate to view and automate your Outlook data now you just have to compose that email that you want to send out fill out the two field the subject and the body with whatever you'd like to begin you should make sure to send it to an email address that you have access to for easy testing you can always change it to your actual desired recipient or recipients later on in the body you can write and style the text just like you would in the normal Outlook email client in this brief message about the weekly standup meeting I'll just add some bold text for the start time 9:00 a.m. if you'd like to access other options such as adding a BCC uploading attachments or setting a different from name you can find those and more under the show Advanced options once your email is all set be sure to remember to click on save to finalize your setting settings when you save your configured action you'll see a green notification Banner at the top of the flow editor encouraging you to test your automation click on test in the top right to run a manual test this will run your configured action and will actually send an email so make sure it's set to send to an appropriate address that you have access to check manually and click on test then click run flow to run the test for real power automate says it was successful so I'll click done to dismiss the message but I'll check my inbox to make sure that everything worked correctly and there's a message formatted exactly as I configured it in power automate looks like we're all set just as a heads up any flow with fully configured saved steps like this one will be automatically turned on that means that it will run as scheduled every week until I update it or turn it off if you'd like to manage your Flows at any time just click on my flows in this left-hand menu from there you'll see a full list of your flows you can hover over any of them to see several options for instance you can click on this pencil icon to edit the [Music] flow you can also click on the three dots here to view more options like run history and turn off if you're building a test automation just to figure out how power automate works you'll probably want to turn it off so you don't send and receive a bunch of junk messages that's all you have to do to set up recurring emails with power automate just create a new flow set your schedule under recurrence configure an automated step with a customized email and save your work then you'll have a recurring message going out as scheduled until you edit or turn off the flow simple automations like this can be built in virtually any automation provider and can use nearly any email service power automate is a great choice if you've already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem and if you want to build relatively simple automations its free plan is all you need but if you're already automating your work with another automation provider like zapier you could easily create an identical workflow there too and you could swap out outlook for Gmail let me quickly show you how that works I'll create a new zap and for the trigger I'll pick schedule then I'll choose every week as the event next I'll need to pick the day of the week and the time for the automation to run now I'll run a test to retrieve a sample date that zapier can work with with the trigger all set I can add a Gmail action to send the email I'll pick send email as the event and sign in to Gmail here zapier throws a lot more options at you than power automate does however most of these are optional the only strictly required fields are the two field the subject field and the body field I'll quickly fill those out with the same info I used in power automate unfortunately you don't have any way to easily stop style Body text in zapier your only choices are plain text or to use HTML and style everything directly using HTML tags I'll just stick with the plain text now I'll test the step zapier says the test was successful and it shows us data returned from the email it sent but just like with power automate I want to check my inbox to be totally sure and there's the email sent by zapier great now I'll go back to zapier unlike your power automate flows your zaps won't turn on by themselves you'll need to click on publish then your zap will be set to on be sure to leave a note for your future self in the version description you can turn this automation off or on just by clicking this toggle as you can see the exact menu options may be different but the same basic concepts apply to both zapier and power automate you could also build a similar Automation in make formerly known as integromat but connecting your email accounts will be a little more complicated we we've made a video explaining the process for connecting your personal Gmail account to make which is really a lot more complicated than it should be let us know in the comments down below if you want to see a similar tutorial for connecting Outlook to make and no matter what workflow you want to automate your first stop should always be x-ray. tool so you can see which automation providers support the apps involved with most popular apps you'll often see that you have several choices just use whichever automation provider you're most comfortable with or whichever one fits your budget best automating simple workflows like this can add up to something that's more than the sum of its parts with just a few minutes in power automate or zap year you can start each week with one task already checked off your to-do list so check it out today and start sending out recurring emails from Outlook or Gmail and explore the thousands of other actions that you can automate with zapier and power automate and let us know in the comments down below if you want to see more tutorials about power automate specifically on this channel if you've enjoyed this video prove you're human like And subscribe subscribe for more automation tips every single week if you'd like to learn more about low code Automation and workflow design follow us on LinkedIn Twitter or Facebook and you can find all of our content on our website at x-ray. Tech you can check all those links in the resources board down below and as always find your focus and stay in flow trying to futureproof yourself start designing the way your team works with no code tools Automation and AI in X-Ray's workflow designer course we'll show you how to break down every part of a process to find the best opportunities for Automation and how to integrate those automations into your team's daily work you'll learn how to create time for your entire team get more reliable results and give everyone a newfound Clarity and confidence in their work just go to this URL to learn more the entire package includes over 2 hours of Premium video content challenging example projects and tons of helpful resources the course costs just $250 and gives you lifetime access to a slack community of workflow designers Building Systems in dozens of different Industries space is limited so join the free waiting list today to get notified as soon as the course is live later this year thanks for watching and we hope to see you soon in our workflow designer course

Channel: XRay Automation

Views: 3,833

Keywords: no code, low code, Zapier, integromat, xray.tech, xray, automation, mindfulness at work, mindful work, airtable, slack, workflow, power automate, microsoft, outlook, automate outlook, email, recurring email, gmail, automate gmail

Id: Lv4do4-WqV8

Length: 11min 16sec (676 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 05 2024