How to automate sending emails for each record?

Enzo_Luo · ‎Nov 06, 2022

Hi Community,
I have a table with multiple records.
Each record has the name of a colleague in the first column/field, an email in the second column, a link for that email in the third column, and the weekday in the fourth column.
E.g.,
Record 1: Simon, simon.g@gmail.com, URL 1, Thursday
Record 2: Jack, jack.f@gmail.com, URL 2, Thursday

I need to send the links to the email addresses for each person. Since each link is specifically designed for that colleague, I would have to send individual emails to each colleague.

Is there a way to automate the process? So that by every Friday, Airtable could automatically send URL 1 to Simon and URL 2 to Jack, and so on for every colleagues.

Thanks!

Enzo_Luo · ‎Nov 08, 2022

FWIW, I’ve found a solution to this thanks to an anonymous hero.

If you want the automation to loop through all your records in one table and perform the same action, just do the automation for one record, and it WILL auto-loop all records.

In my case, I’d wanna send emails to each record every Friday. So URL 1 to Simon and URL2 to Jack and so on till all records are covered. An example of the table is below.

Field Name: Name, Email, URL, Weekday
Record 1: Simon, simon.g@gmail.com, URL 1, Thursday
Record 2: Jack, jack.f@gmail.com, URL 2, Thursday
Record 3: …

All I need to do is to make a trigger that reads the “Weekday” column and see if it’s Friday.
Then, make an “action” which is the “Send an Email”. The “To” will be the “Email” field from the “trigger”, a.k.a, your “Condition”.

That’s it! It looks like you’ve set up only one action for one record, while actually Airtable is gonna perform the same action for all your records in the table, hence, looping through all your records!

One easy trick to save your time!

See Solution in Thread

ScottWorld · ‎Nov 06, 2022

Airtable’s automations don’t allow for looping through found records, so you can’t just search for a group of records and then send individual emails to that group.

You would have to come up with a workaround that tricks Airtable into sending emails to just one record at a time.

There are many different ways of doing this. For example, just a few of the popular ways of doing this are:

Writing a custom script to loop through your found records.
In your case, writing a formula field in Airtable that results in the number 1 when the current day is equal to the day that you specified in that field. Then, your automation would trigger when the formula field is equal to 1.
Creating a utility table that links to your current table, along with 2 automations. This is a popular trick that I describe in this BuiltOnAir podcast episode:

Probably the easiest way to do this would be to use an external automation tool like Make, which gives you both (1) 100% accurate scheduling times, and (2) always loops through found records to send individual emails. Your Make scenario would be as simple as these 2 steps:

Enzo_Luo · ‎Nov 08, 2022