Automation doesn't pick up email address from linked table

On the left, don’t choose “Base Structure”. Instead, you want to choose the email address from the trigger step, which is “when a record is created”.

If that still doesn’t work, then your automation is being triggered too quickly after the record is created (i.e. before the email address has a chance to populate in the new record), so you may want to switch your trigger to something else, like you checking a checkbox in that record. And then, make sure that you only check the checkbox after the email address is there.

(You can also try performing a “find records” action to find the brand new record that was just created… and then use the result of that “find records” action to grab the email address.)

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

I assume you have your Client Coaching table linked with the Client Session table. In your Client Session table, add a lookup field for the email.

You want to select the email address from the trigger step, which is "When a record is created."

If you need any help, you can reach out to me.

Taha, Airtable Advisor

I’ve set up a base here for you to check out that should do what you need!

It assumes you have a lookup field in your main table to display their email addresses, like so:

If not, you’d need to add one as a lookup field (https://support.airtable.com/docs/lookup-field-overview), and then you can set up your automation like this:

And that’ll use the email value from the linked ‘People’ record

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As an aside, I’m kind of curious about your automation set up; I’m thinking we could set it up like this instead?

Hey ​@Siobhan B!

Just for further context, when you select “Base Structure” as the description mentions on your own screenshot, it is only returning “table and field IDs”. This means that when you are selecting “Client’s Email Address” you are actually retrieving the field id of field “Client’s Email Address” (fld….).

You can follow Adam’s step by step above go make it work!

If you need further help, please feel free to schedule a call and we can go through it together!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 

Hi Everyone,

Thanks so much for taking the time to respond, I’m really appreciative.

I’ll give these suggestions a go on my Airtable, and see how it goes.

Have a great day!

Kind regards,

Siobhan

Please keep us posted ​@Siobhan B on how that goes!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 

Hi ​Adam (@TheTimeSavingCo),

I don’t currently have a Lookup field. Thanks for sharing the article link.

The tables are linked and the Client Coaching table is the main one. I‘m assuming from the article that the Lookup field is created in the main Client Coaching table.

Do I link the Lookup to the Client field rather than the Client Email Address?

This is how I’m interpreting the Lookup setup:

In regards to my interesting use of the session numbers, thanks for the suggestion to streamline the Conditions section. That makes a lot of sense! It was a newbie error! I have basic database knowledge but am trying to learn a lot as I go. I will try and combine them all into one Condition.

I am so grateful for everyone’s generosity in helping - ​@ScottWorld, ​@TheTimeSavingCo, ​@Mike_AutomaticN and ​@tahajiru 

Thanks,

Siobhan

Hi ​@ScottWorld and ​@tahajiru,

Would this option rely on me having the Client’s email address in the Client Session Log table with the session data, rather than just being in the main table?

Thanks,

Siobhan

If you’re trying to email a customer after they submit a form, then you need to be able to identify the customer from their form submission.

The easiest way of doing this would be to simply ask the customer to provide their email address on the form.

You could also ask them for some other piece of identifying information, such as their customer ID #, which your automation could search for after the form is submitted, which would then figure out which customer to send the email to.

If you don’t want to make them type in their identifying information over and over again, then you’ll need to create a prefilled link for them that automatically fills in some piece of identifying information on the form — such as their customer ID # or their customer email address or their Airtable Record ID.

You can also hide this information on the form so they can’t see it.

This would require you giving each customer their own personalized unique link for each form, which would be very easy to do with formulas and automations. You can read more about prefilled links in Airtable’s support article here.

And, you can take this to the next level by using Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable, which offers hundreds of additional features that Airtable’s forms don’t offer. For example, you could give customers access to updating their own customer record, and they could create additional linked records for themselves (e.g. additional session forms) directly from their customer record.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

re: The tables are linked and the Client Coaching table is the main one. I‘m assuming from the article that the Lookup field is created in the main Client Coaching table.

Do I link the Lookup to the Client field rather than the Client Email Address?

Hm, you’d want to put the lookup field into the table where each record represents a single session and has the session number, and so for me that was Client Session Log:

If that doesn’t help, could you provide some screenshots of your two tables?