Automate Customer Emails with Mailparser 

How to Automate Customer Emails with Mailparser

Step 1: Create a Mailparser account

First, sign up for a Mailparser account. You can go for the Free Plan which lets you parse up to 30 emails per month, or choose a free trial of one of the paid plans so you can parse large numbers of emails.

After creating your account, we suggest you provide a few details about your business, like your industry and how many emails you want to parse, so that Mailparser can help you create the most optimized email parser.

Step 2: Create an inbox

Next, you want to create an inbox where you will receive customer emails. Note that you can create several inboxes for different types of emails. For now, just click on the button ‘Create Your First Inbox’.

Type a name for your inbox, confirm, and Mailparser will generate a unique email address for that inbox.

Step 3: Send a customer email to your Mailparser inbox

To build your email parser, you need at least one sample email to use as a base for creating Parsing Rules (more on that in a bit). Choose a customer email from your inbox and forward it to your Mailparser inbox. If you can forward a few emails of the same nature, that’s even better.

Now, in the left-hand side panel, click on ‘Emails’ and you’ll see your sample email there.

Step 4: Create Parsing Rules

Parsing Rules are the instructions you give to Mailparser so that it knows where to search for each data field and how it should be formatted during the parsing process. So Rules are at the core of automating data entry. Thankfully, they are quite simple to create as we’re about to see.

Use the Automatic Setup

To create your first Parsing Rules, go to the ‘Rules’ section and select ‘Try Automatic Setup’. Mailparser will try to automatically create Parsing Rules based on the data within your sample email(s).

In this example, the sample email is a new customer order for an online store that sells workout clothes. Let’s say you want to extract the information related to that customer so you can add it later to your customer database. Mailparser will try to create Parsing Rules based on the data within the sample email. Let’s take a look at the result:

Since the sample email is straightforward in its presentation and text, it was easy for Mailparser to recognize each data field and isolate it from the others. This automated process took only a moment and we don’t even need to add anything to the Rules. That’s convenient!

Scroll down and click on ‘Start with this Template’. Mailparser will exit the Rule editor and take you back to the Emails section where the sample will be re-parsed according to the Parsing Rules we set. You can check the parsing results by clicking on the email.

Note that you can always go back to your Parsing Rules in the Rules section to rearrange their order as well as edit, duplicate, or delete any of them. You can also add as many new Rules as you want.

To illustrate, let’s re-create the Item Rule manually.

Add a Parsing Rule Manually

In the Rules section, click on ‘+ Add Parsing Rule’ under the last Rule.

Next, you need to select the data source within the email. In this case, it’s simply the email’s body. So select ‘Body’ followed by ‘Plain Text’. The editor will then isolate all the plain text data from the email.

Now, scroll down a little bit and click on the button ‘Add Text Filter’. Move your cursor to ‘Set Start & End Position’ and select ‘Find Start Position’.

The first option to find the start position is ‘Text match: after’. In the text field right next to it, type ‘Item: ’. Make sure to add the blank space that comes before the item description.

You can see the result of applying the filter: all the data that comes before the item description has been removed. Now we just need to remove the data that comes afterward.

To do this, add a new text filter, but this time, select ‘Define End Position’ instead of ‘Find Start Position’. The first option for this filter is ‘End of line’, and it’s set by default, so you don’t need to do anything here—the filter is applied automatically.

Scroll down and click on ‘OK, Looks Good!’. After that, type a name for your Rule, like ‘Item Description’ then click on ‘Validate & Save’. You’re Done!

So as you can see, creating Parsing Rules is very simple. The Automatic Setup can create Parsing Rules for you, and from there you can create additional Rules by isolating each specific data field with filters.

Step 5: Choose where you want your data to go

Option a: download a file of your parsed data

If you want to download your parsed data, go to ‘Downloads’ and click on ‘Create First Download Link’.

Select the format you want: XLS, CSV, JSON, or XML. Type a name for your file then scroll down to click on ‘Save’. Mailparser will generate the download link in the blink of an eye. That’s it!

Option b: send your parsed data to a cloud app

Alternatively, and perhaps more interestingly, you can send your data to a cloud app, either directly (e.g. Google Sheets, Zoho CRM) or via a third-party integration platform like Zapier. This way, any time your Mailparser inbox receives new customer emails, they get parsed and the data automatically goes to a specified location on your cloud app, thus streamlining most of if not your entire data entry workflow.

To create an integration, go to ‘Integrations’ and click on ‘Add New Integration’.

Let’s say you want to use Zapier to create ActiveCampaign contacts from parsed emails. To do this, choose Zapier from the integration options and select the ‘ActiveCampaign + Mailparser’ Zap.

Log in to your Zapier account and create a Zap where the Trigger is any newly parsed email and the Action is creating a contact with data fields taken from parsed emails.

So that’s all you need to do to automat customer emails with Mailparser. The whole process of creating your own customer email parser is straightforward, requires no technical knowledge, and can take as little as 10-15 minutes to complete.