With so many emails coming in, it’s really hard to keep track of the important information within emails. Often, that information is in email attachments, as well as in the body of the emails. Business owners who have multiple employees need something that’s does this for them, at scale.
What is an email parser?
An email parser is an automated way to extract the information in emails. Often, the data is quantitative, and therefore extracting it within a spreadsheet is a smart idea so that you can get the bigger picture, but still drill down to whatever is needed. Best use cases are for events, order numbers, subtotals, customer service responses, email contact information, and basically anything that repetitively shows up in your emails.
Theoretically, you could use an email parser on your entire inbox, but that’s usually only advised if you have a dedicated email address that you want to parse, like service@yourcompany.com. If you want to parse your own inbox or your company’s employees’ inboxes for something specific, it’s best to parse a Gmail label. It’s an easier way to ensure that your email parsing is specific to what you need. For example, let’s say that you’re building an email list, but you use your email for so much more than just with your customers. Siphoning off your emails with your customers into a Gmail label means that when you parse the data in that label only, you’ll get your customer list in a spreadsheet which can then be used for email marketing and whatnot.
We’ve created Export Emails to Google Sheets, which gives you a lot of room to decide how you want to export your email data. You can export your data by person, date, or even if you just highlight what information you want parsed, that will generate a rule for all the rest of your emails. So if you’re looking for a subtotal and you highlight it, all emails with subtotals in that same format will get exported into a Google Sheet for you. You can set that up on an ongoing basis so that as more emails come in, it populates your Google Sheet, too. Here’s a step by step instructional video on how to do that.
Email parsing is inevitable as your inbox grows, or your company grows and you need to hire more employees. If you feel like you’re drowning in email data, and you use Gmail, cloudHQ might be a great option for you.