Summerley Recruitment is a busy recruitment agency which spends the winter months signing up students to work at major events and festivals throughout the summer season. They get leads from university job fairs and digital marketing and then nurture candidates through the onboarding process, which includes getting two references.
Requirements for a series of email chases
Each candidate is required to provide two referees, giving the Summerley team their name and email address so that the administrators can request the information needed.
Sam’s requirements were to send referees a chaser every five days to follow up with them and stop chasing when the information was received. There would be three chasers in total, after which the administrator needed to follow up with a phone call to try and get the reference.
Automating email chasers isn’t as easy as you’d think!
Although sending emails is a relatively simple automation requirement, sending them over a prescribed time period and stopping when certain criteria are met doesn’t seem to be as simple as you’d think.
The Summerley team used Google at first, to try and find examples of automations to do email chasing, and as they use Microsoft Office they initially tried MS Power Automate. They found some sample code on a website which seemed to do the trick but when the first chaser triggered it sent multiple emails to each recipient, some receiving more than ten asking for the same information! There was obviously a bug in the logic they’d configured but it wasn’t easy to track down. The problem with Power Automate is that it’s more suited to people with a technical background – it’s not a no-code solution and is in fact more like a ‘low-code’ platform. This is fine for developers to use, but Sam didn’t have the budget to hire one. He wanted ideally to devise a solution which his team could easily maintain.
Sam then got in touch with Solvaa to see if they could help out. Kelly was delighted to lend a hand so suggested a few ways they could satisfy their requirements using Zapier.
How to automate email chasers using Zapier
Kelly recommended using a combination of Google Sheets and Google Calendar to trigger the emails. Sam had found that using MS Excel to trigger them was a bit hit and miss but had used Google Sheets previously – and successfully – in other Zaps so was happy to use it again for this use case.
Email chasing : trigger step
The trigger for the chasing cycle was adding a new row to a Google Sheet. The data required was simple – just a unique ID for each row (assigned manually), the candidate’s name and the referee’s email address.
The process would be that the administrator would add a row to the spreadsheet for each reference required, then when it was received back, they would delete the row.
Email chasing : action steps
A series of Zaps were configured for the action steps, one for each chase. The triggers for each one are the start of the Google Calendar event.
For Chaser 1, when the Google event starts, it first checks that the row still exists in the spreadsheet. If it doesn’t then no chase is required so the Zap can finish. If the row does exist then an email is sent via MS Outlook and the next Google Calendar event is scheduled, in 5 days’ time.
A final Zap is configured to send the administrator an email after a final 5-day period, prompting them to call the referee and ask for the reference by phone.
Testing the Zap to create email chasers
Unlike the MS Power Automate automation, configuring the process in separate Zaps made it much easier to test each chaser in isolation. The team could adjust the 5 days between chasers to just a few minutes, to check that the logic was correct. Once they were happy they could set it to the proper time period. This reduced the risk of issues arising in a long and complex workflow which can be difficult to debug.
Using Delay After Queue to prevent bottlenecks
Kelly advised Sam’s team that if they added a lot of rows to the Google Sheet at once it might cause a bottleneck, and Zapier might stop processing them. To avoid this happening Kelly suggested using a Delay After Queue step, to create an enforced gap between each one. As it turned out, Sam’s admin team wouldn’t be adding dozens of rows at a time so the delay step wasn’t necessary, but this was good to have up their sleeve if numbers increase in the future.
A successful partnership
Sam was delighted with the outcome and really appreciated Solvaa’s help with automating email chasers. He said “Working with Kelly gave us the confidence we needed to automate our process using Zapier. It was so helpful having her to guide us, and our admin team are delighted that they don’t have to send these emails manually! We can’t wait to automate more of our processes using Zapier, to save even more time in our day.”
Solvaa: Strategy, Solutions, Support, Education
UK-based Solvaa® is a systems, process and automation consultancy specialising in improving business workflows. Solvaa® works with SMEs worldwide to implement digital tools, better processes, use business process automation and generative AI to boost productivity, enhance lead management, and remove unnecessary time, costs and hassles from stretched business owners’ days.
We help you simplify and streamline existing processes, integrate your business tools to make data transfer more efficient, and automate manual tasks. Our business process automation specialists have extensive experience using multiple cloud-based business tools, including Zapier, Pipedrive CRM, SmartSuite, Xero, Google Suite, ClickUp, Asana, Airtable, Hubspot, Active Campaign, Salesforce, Mailchimp, Quickbooks and many more. We are Zapier Certified Experts, SmartSuite Certified Partners, Pipedrive Certified Partners and Xero Certified Advisors. We also educate teams about using AI in their daily roles, mindset, governance and strategy in our Solvaa AI Academy.
Solvaa® was founded in 2016 by Kelly Goss, a no-code solutions architect, business process automation specialist and author of Automate It with Zapier (first edition) and Automate It with Zapier and Generative AI (second edition).
A thought leader on business process automation and digital adoption, Kelly attended an invite-only Roundtable on Artificial Intelligence (AI) with the UK government at No.10 Downing Street, providing insights and recommendations on how SMEs can benefit from productivity gains by using digital technologies, automation and AI. She has also been invited to speak at the House of Lords and at many other events.
Contact us today to find out how Solvaa can help your business make big savings on operational costs and time, and significantly increase productivity.
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