If the following situation sounds familiar to you, then this article is for you.
You have a webform that can send you notification emails that contain all of the details of the form, in a format like this:
First name: Fred
Last name: Flinstone
Email: fred@flinstones.com
Phone: 206-555-1212
Company: Rock U
Website: rubble.com
Comments: "Please get back to me as soon as you can, I really want to make some money!!!!"
But what you need is to get each piece of info from that email into its own field in your app of choice (CRM, eCommerce, etc).
Before OpenAI
Prior to this technology, we likely would have recommended one of the following:
- An email parser app (like Email Parser by Zapier, Mailparser, etc)
- A code step to process the data from your email
- Multiple Formatter steps to extract what you need (maybe RegEx?)
None of these options are anywhere as simple as what I’m about to show you. One of our Zapier Experts, Troy Tessalone, alluded to this method in this post, but I’m going to expand upon it a bit.
Using OpenAI to Parse Data
NOTE: You will need a paid OpenAI account in order to use the app in a Zap.
You don’t necessarily need to understand how Zapier’s Named Variables work, but if you’re curious here’s a great article about this lesser-known feature.
Credit also goes to one of my Zapier teammates, Kirk, for this specific inspiration.
The prompt I’ll be using.
Parse the contact details from the text after Content:
Return as formatted text that has the format below, with a field header followed by the field value enclosed in parentheses.
The output should look like this: FieldName(fieldvalue)
Content:
First name: Fred
Last name: Flintstone
Email: fred@flintstones.com
Phone: 206-555-1212
Company: Rock U
Website: rubble.com
Comments: "Please get back to me as soon as you can, I really want to make some money!!!!"
Check Out The Example
In this example, you would replace my typed fields with the email message that your web form sends you.
Here’s what I get in return:
I can then map each of these fields into my next step(s):
What About Using ChatGPT with Zapier?
In my admittedly limited testing, I couldn’t get the ChatGPT integration to provide the first name as a separate field. I’m sure it’s possible with some prompt tweaking, but I decided to use OpenAI for this article.
Beyond Email Parsing
There are other use cases for this type of workflow, like:
- form apps that provide all of the form data in a single field
- apps that have search steps that return data in one field or a format that’s unusable
- parsing Slack messages to pull out separate fields
- etc, etc, etc.
If you come up with something clever, we’d love to hear about it!
