Convert inbound emails into actionable leads using AI

Most companies use a website email form to receive business inquiries. The inquiry form provides a great way to collect, store and quickly access insightful data.

However, many customers opt for an email address instead of completing an online form. This becomes an additional task, and a resource must read the email, extract the information and organize a follow-up, which can be a real hassle.

This additional task can be automated thanks to AI automation tools like Zapier and Airtable. You can build an automated process without using coding skills to extract the required data from the email and create a summary before sending it to the concerned department for follow-up.

This tutorial will show you how to automate the inbound emails into actionable leads using Zapier and Airtable.

To help you follow this tutorial, we will use a scenario where you’re running an online gift shop. You receive a query to prepare a gift basket for a birthday party. The party will start at 1800 hours tomorrow. You want AI to extract all the relevant information from the email and put it in an Airtable to send the details to a Google Sheets assigned to an order fulfillment team. Note that this last part will really depend on your workflow and you could totally send the leads to Slack or in an email.

Key Objectives

• Create a New Zap for the incoming email
• Construct an air table to store the data from the email
• Use OpenAI’s API to extract the data from the inquiry email
• Add the data to the Airtable