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Hi

My website collects contact info and sends them to me via gmail

the Contact Details are in the body of the gmail

I want to save the Contact Details to a google sheet

Sounds easy but I'm having problems


Hi @JerryCharlton! I'm sorry to hear that you're having some trouble with your Zaps. Could I check that this post is in the right category? Are you looking for some help from the community on how you might do this, or are you looking to pay an Expert to set it up for you?

The 'Work Offered' category is for folks who would like to hire a Zapier Expert to help them with their Zaps. If you'd like to ask a question to the community as a whole, to get some tips on how you can do this yourself, then 'Ask the Community' is the best category.

Thanks!



What type of form are you using?

It may have a direct webhook tie in, but if not, does it come through in the same format every time:

Q1: answer 1....

Q2: answer 2....

etc... ?

or is it more of a comma separated list?



Hi @JerryCharlton — If you're not sure how to answer @Robert_Segelquist's questions above regarding the type of form and webhook, perhaps you could post a link to the form on your website? That might provide enough information to get started answering the question for you.

Thanks!



Hey @JerryCharlton, I'm assuming whatever form is collecting entries for your website is sending them to your Gmail account with the same "From" address (or other identifying feature) and layout in the body every time, like

From: form-submission@squarespace.com

________

Body:

Name: example name

Email: example email

Subject: Love your site!

Message: Just wanted to tell you how much your site means to me.

_________

Otherwise it wouldn't be a very good contact form by my standards!

So basically, to achieve your goal you need two things:

  1. Something that you can teach to "read", or parse, those fields in the email body and their answers as individual items; and
  2. A way to pass those parsed bits to your spreadsheet so they're matched to columns of your choosing.

Fortunately, Zapier has an awesome tool for just such a Step 1, called Email Parser

Parse Emails by Zapier And Step 2 is handled quite seamlessly with "Create Spreadsheet Row" for Google Sheets as an Action Step.

Following the awesome tutorial pasted below, your flow will be as follows:

  • A Gmail filter will recognize an incoming email as being from your contact form service
  • Gmail will forward that email to your Zapier parsing robot, which you've taught to read the different parts of the email body as field-value pairs
  • Your zap will paste the values for each submission into a new Google Sheets row according to which field you want in which column (presumably in the same order as fields appear in your form - in my example, Column A is Name, Column B is Email, etc.) - check out screen shots below from the demo I set up to see exactly what Parser calls each field you taught it, and how those map to your sheet.

The Email Parser Guide: How to Automatically Copy Data From Your Emails

Just keep in mind this tutorial sets up the parsing robot first, then gets into Gmail. And of course, your last part, the action step, will be different:

Google Sheets "Create New Spreadsheet Row" step...

Screen Shot 2020-01-09 at 1.14.10 AM.png

...with how those fields and values then show up in my sheet

Screen Shot 2020-01-09 at 12.42.56 AM.png

Hope that makes sense and helps, good luck!