What is an Email Parser and How We Saved 60 Hours Per Month

It’s no secret that business owners receive hundreds of emails per month with the information that they need to extract manually. For example, a marketplace seller can have no possibility to export financial statements or client contact data at once in an Excel file. However, all this information is contained in his new sale notification emails.

It all started in 2016 when we were developing e-commerce extensions and selling them on different marketplaces. Like any other marketplace seller, we were receiving order confirmation and customer details once someone purchased the extension. Some of our extensions used license keys that we needed to 1) generate and 2) send to customers ASAP.

However, those marketplaces had no API so we were bound to keep our eyes peeled for any new email coming into the company’s inbox, in order to manually generate and then send the license. Sounds like a nightmare, doesn’t it?

Solution

That’s where an email parser can step in and help extract and consolidate all the information in real-time.

An email parser is a tool that extracts data automatically from emails and can either put it into Google Sheets or Excel or funnel it directly into another platform, for example, a CRM, email platform, or a database.

In our case, we used an email parser to extract the customer’s email and the purchased extension name. Then, our server was able to automatically generate a license key and send it to the customer.

It helped us to save at least 60 hours of manual work per month!

What else you can do with an E-mail Parser?

Let me show you a few examples to demonstrate the capabilities of automating your email parsing work.

Emails to Google Spreadsheet

Parse the important email details (such as customer name, email, ordered items, order amount, etc) and transfer the data directly to Google Sheet or Excel in an automated way.

Leads to CRM

Using different forms in various places for your business? No worries, you can parse the required data from the emails you’ll receive when a new entry gets registered on any form and add them to your CRM right away in seconds.

Digital Receipts to Account Books

Get your expense details by parsing the PDF from email content and adding them to Zoho books to keep track of the accounts easily.

Google Alerts to Slack

Get the real-time Google alert notification to your Slack channel by parsing the content from your email alerts and sending them to the Slack channel without a wait.

Booking Details to Calendar

If a customer books a room on your stay, then you can parse the relevant data like the date from the confirmation email and add them to Google Calendar automatically.

How Does it Work

In a nutshell, we can distinguish 3 types of email parsers:

1. Custom email parser created to use internally in a company. Most often, it can process only one of a few types of email. They are hard to implement and support.

2. Generic rule-based email parsers. Example: EmailParser. To parse an email, you should create so-called “rules“ to find a piece of data you want to extract.

3. Generic template-based email parsers. Example: Parsio. They are the most advanced, intuitive, and easy to use.

   
   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7XgrAII2e4

Using a template-based parser, you only need to forward your emails to a special email address, pick a sample email and highlight the fields you want to extract. The platform will start automatically extracting the data from all the similar incoming emails.

Conclusion

An email parser tool could be helpful for almost any type of business: real estate agencies, e-commerce owners, marketplace sellers (Etsy, eBay, Amazon), crypto traders, marketing agencies, Airbnb renters, IoT, and smart device owners. Those are very different businesses but the benefits one gets from Parsio are all the same:

• Saving on employee costs (when you have automated email parsing software, you don’t have to hire data entry staff or assign these tasks to other employees).
• Guaranteeing better quality (with an email parser all of your data is 100% accurate whilst even the best manual data entry expert can’t be 100% accurate).
• Managing multiplied workload during holiday seasons (email parsing can help to manage the increased workflow by extracting data from all the incoming emails so that you have nothing to worry about other than making your customers happy).
• Faster processing time (your parsing software will keep running even when you or your employees are unavailable).

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