Question

How to change email draft content based on data in Zapier?

  • 23 August 2023
  • 5 replies
  • 77 views

I’m very new to Zapier. No coding experience (but I can figure it out if it’s relatively straightforward)

 

I’m making a zap where:

  1. Trigger: event start in Google Calendar
  2. ***I draft the client a reminder email w/ the date, address, etc. the day before the event.
  3. Update some stuff in Copper CRM
  4. Delay until the event is over
  5. Draft an email thanking them & asking for a review
  6. Update more stuff in the CRM

 

*** But in step 2, depending on what time the calendar event starts, I want the email to be slightly different. (i.e. if it’s before 9:30 AM [AKA it’s the first job of the day], we say we’ll text them when we’re on the way. If it’s later than 9:30AM, we say we’ll update them on ETA via text day-of while at the previous jobs.)

 

What’s the best way to do this? I tried paths, but that has to be the last step & you can’t merge them back together as far as I see, so I’m duplicating & managing all these steps just to change a couple sentences in the email.

I tried doing a sub zap for everything after the email, but those steps require pulling info from before the email (the parent zap) & I didn’t see a way to get the sub zap to pull info from the parent zap.


This post has been closed for comments. Please create a new post if you need help or have a question about this topic.

5 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +14

Hi @fgdsgsasdfafds 

Good question.

Some options to try...

 

You could split the Zap into multiple Zaps.

Instead of the “Delay until the event is over” use this Zap trigger: GCal - Event Ended

 

Or you could possibly use a lookup table to make the logic dynamic:

 

Or you could use a Code step to dynamically determine which verbiage to use.

Thank you. I used the lookup table & did this for now. Not ideal since if we put a job on the calendar at 6:13AM or whatever, it won’t work right. But I got it done quick & it’s fine for now until I have the time to look into it all.

 

Userlevel 7
Badge +11

Thanks for following up here @fgdsgsasdfafds to share how you solved this!

I know you’ve got a solution in place for now but wondered if it might be worth looking at using Paths for this? With Paths you can create a rule to check whether a Date/Time is before or after a certain value.

For example:
647bbdbf79a5c45d617a3b4b326cc117.png
That way you can set up different paths to carry out different actions (like sending a differently worded message) based on the time. I should note that Paths is only available on Professional or higher plans, but thought it worth mentioning in case it helps! 🙂

@SamB I did try path which does technically function for ,my purpose, but I have many steps that come after that step & am continuously tweaking the Zap to edit, add, remove steps. So, unless there’s something I’m missing, it requires having to manage two separate paths with a bunch of steps that are all identical except for that one thing.

Userlevel 7
Badge +11

Thanks for getting back to me @fgdsgsasdfafds! 🙂

It’s possible to duplicate existing action steps and paths - see: Reorder or duplicate action steps and paths.

So rather than having to recreate the changes across multiple paths it may be better to create copies of the added/updated action step and then move it into the other paths. Or if there’s several actions that have been updated/added/removed, you might be better off copying the existing path and and then editing the path rules.

Not a perfect solution I know but would hopefully help to reduce the time spent recreating these edits across each path. Hope that helps!