Automate email digests with 3 new features 🚀

[Jason]

Hey community!

Today we are officially launching several brand new automation features to help you build more robust workflows.

• Automation trigger: at a scheduled time
• Automation action: find records
• Rendering records as a list

One of the best applications for these new features is making an email digest, where you can schedule a time to send a list of records that match the conditions you set. To see how all of these features come together to build an email digest, see this support article.

Below you’ll find a shorter summary of each new feature.

At a scheduled time trigger

The “At a scheduled time” trigger allows you to trigger (or run) an automation at a pre-designated date and time. You can choose to run at regular intervals (in hours or minutes) or at set time on specific days of the week.

Find records action

This action will look for records matching conditions that you can specify within the action settings. If a record that matches the conditions is found, you can add a following action that uses the record data to perform some other action.

Render records as a list

This new feature lets you use the records found in the “find records” trigger and render them as a list within an email. You can select which fields to include, and render them as a list of records in the email.

Share your feedback

Our developers would love to hear your feedback around this feature, so feel free to comment in this topic with any questions or ideas on how we can improve.

[Shrey_Banga]

Ah I see, thanks for the details. The reason you can’t insert “JOBS” into the filter for the second Find Records is that it’s coming from the output of the previous Find Records action, which outputs a list of records. So if the Find Records action outputs 3 records, you will end up with a list of the JOBS cell value taken from each record and combined into a list, e.g. ['job1', 'job2', 'job3']. The filter in the second Find Records expects a single string, so it’s not allowing you to insert the list. We have plans to make it easier to convert from a list to a string, but in this case I’m not sure that will help either. It sounds like what you actually want is to find all records where SUBMITTED is OWNER ADDRESS CORRECTION and then loop over each record, then for each record find records in another table and take an action on those. This is not currently supported in automations because automations don’t support loops, but you can do it with a scripting action.

[Heracles]

That’s a great step in the proper direction, as previous methods of creating digests with Zapier were hacky and unreliable.

Is sorting in the roadmap? The current order appears to be record creation which really makes no sense for task-keeping use cases.

A nice feature would be to inherit filters & sorting from specified views.

[SergioCodes]

Shrey_Banga:

The filter in the second Find Records expects a single string, so it’s not allowing you to insert the list.

Hey @Shrey_Banga

But the filter from Find Records doesn´t work also with a “single string” I tried using a formula and a rollup (with concatenate); those fields aren´t a list (array), but it doesn´t give me the option to include them as a filter.

(https://cdn.zappy.app/2f03bf1ceb0dd1886d657079eb18f580.gif)

[2f03bf1ceb0dd1886d657079eb18f580.gif (782×516) (zappy.app)]

[Alyssa_Buchthal]

This is amazing! Will there be different time intervals coming available soon? (Namely being able to send something once or twice a month rather than on a weekly basis).

Also, have you considered adding the option to send all records in a view rather than needing to use the find records function to send a list of records? Having that available as an action would let me transfer my current digest system over from Zapier, which would be awesome.

[Harold]

Also would be great if we could use bullets to sum up the records in the digest, with sub bullets for their details.

[Jason]

Hey @Alyssa_Buchthal! I can’t speak to new time intervals coming soon, but we’ll definitely update the community if we do release them in the future.

As for a way to send records in a view, are you more interested in sending records that are more formatted like the grid view? That’s something we’re actively looking into so I wanted to see if that would fit what you had in mind.

[Alyssa_Buchthal]

Yeah! Currently I have an email digest that I’m using Zapier to send. There’s a list of people it might be sent to and with Zapier I filter by each person so their relevant records are in one single view, and then send a digest of that view on a set time basis. I could also use the people’s names as a field and then use logic paths to direct records to one digest or another based off of that field as a filter. It would be great if, rather than setting up 3 automations in AT, I could use logic paths within a single automation, or use a time trigger to send a digest of each view on a set basis.

[Jason]

Ah that makes sense @Alyssa_Buchthal. What we’re working towads wouldn’t exactly fit the need you described, but would allow you to create a digest with more of a grid view (as opposed to the current vertical “list” view).

[Jason]

Hi everyone,

We just released an update to the “send record” functionality - you can now send records as an HTML grid in addition to the previous “list” format.

Here’s an example of what that could look like within an email:

This new addition has just started rolling out across all of our customers, so it should be available to you soon. You may need to refresh your webpage to see it.

You can learn more about the new functionality in this support article.

[Mariusz_S]

This is BIG! Thank you!

Edit:
Just tested this new functionality and my formula fields (formatted as number) come in without decimal values?