Hello!
So… I recommend that you tweak your base structure a little bit.
Let’s start here:
You have a multiple select field with options for each contact.
Each contact has relevant information that you need to use in a Send Email automation.
It would be much easier and much more efficient to create a new table for each of your contacts.
There are a few advantages of doing this.
- By creating a new record for each contact, you can hold a ton of data about only that contact. This means you can store email addresses, phone numbers, contact notes, etc.
- You can use your automation to find the relevant information you want about that contact and leave the rest out.
Here’s How To Do It
So, let’s say for example you have a table where you have a list of your projects.
In this example, I have fields for contacts/stakeholders, project notes, goal date, and project statuses.
In the next table, Contacts, I have records for each of my individual contacts.
Now, there are a couple of ways you could solve the email automation problem, so here’s one of the methods.
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Create a lookup field to grab the emails from the Contacts table. These will come in with comma separators. (This will come in handy later).
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Now you’ll need something to set off a trigger for your automation. I’m not sure what your method is, but I’m going to create a quick n’ dirty checkbox field in my example called Mid-Point Email Sent.
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Create your automation - For this example, I’ll create one using a condition as a trigger. I’ll use the condition of
when {checkbox} = true.
I’ll go ahead and skip the unconditional actions since I don’t have a use for them.
For the first conditional action, I’ll declare that the Contacts linked field must have at least one linked record in order for it to run. This way there will always be an email in the lookup to send the email to.
There is a world where this fails though. This method requires that you must have an email value for every contact in the Contacts table. If you have a single contact linked and the email field is blank, then the email will fire off into the lonely void of nothingness. And since the automation did a successful run, it won’t alert you to the fact that it functionally failed.
Here’s the setup for the conditional.
Now, for the email itself. Fill everything out as you'd like. For the recipients of the email, all you need to do is insert the value of the email lookup field. Since the values are automatically comma-separated, you satisfy the requirements for sending the email to multiple email addresses (if applicable).
So… yeah, that’s it.
(lemme know if it doesn’t make sense, if you have any additional questions, or if I’m just plain out wrong lol)
