If Make can automate part of my dad's business

Questions
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1

:bullseye: What is your goal?

Helping set up a scenario/checking if Make can do what I want; trying to automate part of my dad’s business.

:thinking: What is the problem & what have you tried?

My dad runs a small B2B business, and right now leads come in through IndiaMART (a B2B marketplace) as emails. An employee manually replies to each mail with the same standard text and attachments, and copies the buyer’s name, phone, and email into a spreadsheet by hand. I want to automate that: check for new mails once an hour, log them into an Excel file that’s been maintained over the years automatically, and auto-send the reply email.

What I’ve tried: I did try an Outlook rule a while back to auto-reply to the lead emails directly, but during testing I started getting mails back from IndiaMART saying I was replying to the wrong email address, so that approach doesn’t seem to work, and it’s part of why I’m now looking at other options like Make.

I’m not very technical in this aspect, so before I actually build anything I wanted to check whether this is realistic on Make and it’s free plan, and if it’s not viable on the free plan, which plan (and roughly how many credits) would actually be enough for this?

:clipboard: Error messages or input/output bundles

Attached screenshots of the lead mails recd from Indiamart

:camera_with_flash: Screenshots (scenario flow, module settings, errors)

Screenshot_1.png
Screenshot_1.png1255×1324 215 KB

3

Hey there,

if the email body is standardized, you can use a text parser module to extract the data from it. Then you can use an excel module to log it and a send email module to respond to the correct email.

4

Firstly, thank you for your prompt reply.

and yes, there’s generally 2 types of mails that Indiamart sends, it either has “Enquiry For” or “Buyer Details for” in the email’s subject.

I’d also appreciate any other insights you might have.

6

Hi Somrak, yes this is absolutely doable with make.

The Make Workflow would look something like this:

  1. Outlook: Listen to new emails from indiamart

  2. Extract necessary buyer information (look into Regular Expressions for this)

  3. Outlook send email with attachment

  4. Write Data to Spreadsheet

This would roughly use 4 credits per full execution. So you could process up to 250 emails per month with the free Make plan.

Alternatively you could use an AI module to extract the information from the email, but this would probably be an overkill in this situation and consume much more credits.

I hope this helps :slight_smile:

Best,

Oliver

7

Hello,

Start by checking how your email is encoded in HTML – if there are classes used, parsing becomes much easier and more reliable. LLM models are pretty good with creating REGEX.

Here’s how the flow should look:

  1. Fetch email
  2. Parse data
  3. Send reply
  4. Save into spreadsheet

Good practice: add an error handler that saves failed emails into a spreadsheet, and set up an auto-retry (using a Break module) if the save step itself fails.

Cost-wise:

You can start on the free tier – for this use case, one scenario, and you get 1,000 operations per month at no cost. If you go over that, move to the Core plan, starting at 10,000 operations.

How many operations will it actually use?
It varies:

  • The 1st module always uses 1 operation, even when it fetches 10 new emails at once
  • The 2nd module (Text Parser) uses 1 operation per email
  • The 3rd module (Send Email) uses 1 operation per email
  • The 4rd module uses 1 operation per email

Once you’re more comfortable, you can optimize further – bulk-write rows into Excel using an Array Aggregator combined with a custom API Call, instead of writing one row at a time.

This is a great automation use case – a small amount of setup work saves a lot of manual copy-paste time.

Have a nice day,
Michal