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Automate Your Inbox: How to Manage Email Newsletters with Automation
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Most likely, you are subscribed to at least a few newsletters. Every big creator on the internet has an email list (or should have) and uses it to the full advantage.
There are 2 main problems with email newsletters from a consumer perspective:
Some people use paid software for managing their mail or hire people to do it for them.
But what about using automation to do it for you faster and cheaper than other options?
Sounds like a good deal to me.
To start, we need to have a well-defined problem and the result we expect.
We want to find a solution for managing our newsletter subscriptions inside our Gmail account. We need to sort and find newsletters or hide them if needed quickly.
There is one tool made exactly for our problem — a label.
We can add labels to our newsletters. With them, we can easily identify which emails are newsletters, we can sort them by label, or create filters based on a label.
For this solution, we will use automation software Make.com
This product makes automation projects easy peasy. This will only take us 3-steps. To make this more interesting, I will show you how to keep track of your newsletters with google sheets:
1. Make a schedule.
Our first Make bubble is a trigger. This is where we are waiting for something to happen. When certain action appears, our automation starts running.
In this case, we are creating a schedule for this automation to run.
Running our automation when we receive every single email is redundant.
Let’s make it run once an hour.
2. Check for a specific word.
Email newsletters can be written in a million different ways and about a billion different topics.
But there is one word that appears in every single email — Unsubscribe.
I think it’s actually illegal to not have an unsubscribe option in your emails from the newsletter.
We can use it to our advantage.
When our automation detects a new email, it checks what’s inside it.
With a smart content detection system, we can see if an email has a word unsubscribe or not.
Here we are checking two options. One is for basic text content and another for HTML content.
Newsletter software products use different approaches to handling unsubscribing, so we need to check on both cases.
3. Add a label to an email.
We can create labels in our Gmail account.
Before working on this step, we need to create a new label on Gmail.
After we have it, Make.com can find it easily and it to a new email.
And we do exactly that.
Now we can filter our newsletters, see the, and delete them quickly if needed.
Success!
But what if we want to do more with our newsletters?
4. Integrate Google Sheets
If we want to gather some sort of data about our newsletter subscriptions, we can do it with Google Sheets.
Integration between Gmail and Sheets using Make.com is seamless.
We add a new module and select our sheet. Here we choose options for the sheet.
5. Add data to the sheet
When a newsletter label is added, that email data is sent to the sheet.
Here we want to track the time when we received an email and email information, and keep count of how many newsletters we received from this sender.
When automation reaches this stage, it branches into two paths:
If it’s a new sender, we create a new row.
From the previous module, we have the email sender's name, email address, and message link. Also, we add a date and format it.
If this sender is already in a sheet, we update the row:
We automatically find this row based on the sender's email, increase the email count, change the time of the last mail, and add a link to that email.
We can see our athat email.
We can see our automation in action:
Automation is set! Now we can leave it, it will run on its own. After some time, we will be able to find our newsletters more easily. Also as we have been collecting data about the sender, we can draw some insights from it, imagination is the limit!
Some steps can feel intimidating and confusing, so it’s always recommended to work with an automation agency if you want to save time and increase efficiency.