About Automation
Elevate your inbox with email automation
Email is a crucial communication tool in business. It facilitates quick and efficient correspondence, document sharing, and collaboration among colleagues and clients. However, keeping up with your inbox can also prove to be quite time-consuming. You have to read and respond to emails every day, and oftentimes, important information can go overlooked. If your daily routine is often filled with time-consuming email tasks, you may be looking for a way to help lighten the load. If so, email automation is likely the tool you’re looking for.
What is email automation?
Email automation is the use of software robots and technology to automate common tasks in an email application, like Outlook or Gmail. With email automation, you can automatically perform simple email functions such as replying to, forwarding, and deleting emails.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg of what’s achievable with email automation. It can also be used to schedule calendar events, build to-do lists, and organize your inbox, freeing you up to focus on higher-value business contributions.
How does email automation work?
Email automation uses software robots powered by robotic process automation (RPA) to perform your desired functions within the email environment. You can train the software robots to respond to certain events, such as an incoming email. Then, depending on your needs, the software robot can perform any number of tasks.
For example, if the incoming email contains an attachment that needs to be downloaded and shared with a wider team, the bots can do that. Or, you can train software robots to read through your daily emails and compile the pertinent information into a single, digestible document. It all comes down to what email processes you need to be automated.
Can anyone use email automation?
Yes, email automation can benefit nearly any employee that uses email in their daily workflows. And with the right automation platform, even users with limited to no coding knowledge can harness the power of email automation.
Many platforms offer prebuilt templates to perform common email functions. If you need more customized automations, someone with a technical background can create them. And with the ability to share automations, entire teams and organizations can implement them into their workflows with relative ease. It all comes down to what you wish to accomplish.
Benefits of email automation
Email automation offers a range of benefits, both to the users who employ it and their wider organizations. Some of the most common benefits of email automation include:
Get more done in less time
Email automation empowers you to automate repetitive and time-consuming email-based tasks, enabling you to focus your attention on more strategic and value-added activities.
Achieve greater accuracy
Software robots can perform the same tasks as humans, and typically with greater accuracy. Therefore, they can complete your email tasks faster and with fewer errors.
Empower your wider team
With automation platforms that allow for sharing automations among users, scalability becomes easy. When you create an email automation that saves you time, you can share it with your coworkers to enhance team-wide efficiency.
Save on costs
Greater efficiency and fewer mistakes across a business lead to money saved for your organization. As such, the wider you deploy automation solutions, the greater the ROI.
What can you automate with email automation?
There’s no shortage of possibilities when it comes to automating tasks within your email app. Common email automations include:
Archiving emails
Deleting emails
Forwarding emails
Marking emails as read/unread
Moving/sorting emails
Replying to emails
Saving email attachments
Sending calendar invites
Sending composed emails
Email automation use cases
While automating routine email functions can help save you time, it represents a fraction of what’s possible with email automation. Here are three business use cases for email automation that can help you harness the full power of the technology.
- Summarize email information
- Convert emails into tasks
- Respond to customer feedback
Summarize email information
For people who receive hundreds of emails every day, simply reading through each email for importance requires a lot of dedicated time. With email automation, you can train a software robot (powered by AI) to read through all of your incoming emails. Then, it can consolidate and summarize just the important information and send it to you in a single email, saving you both time and energy.
Convert emails into tasks
Oftentimes, emails contain information that requires an action, such as sending an invoice to a customer. However, using your email as a task manager isn’t ideal, as certain items might slip through the cracks. Additionally, manually creating tasks based on incoming emails is time-consuming and not the most effective way to fill out your to-do list. With email automation, robots can process the content of emails and create to-do's in the task management app of your choice.
Respond to customer feedback
The process of manually reading, sorting, and replying to customer feedback can be time-consuming and difficult for customer service representatives. Yet, it’s incredibly important to respond promptly to maintain customer relations. With email automation and document understanding, customer service reps can develop automations that read incoming emails and analyze them for sentiment. Using this analysis, software robots can draft response emails, which the customer service rep can review before sending them on to the customer.
Harness the power of email automation with UiPath Studio
If you’re interested in exploring email automation for you or your organization, UiPath Studio is the perfect place to start. UiPath Studio offers automation capabilities for users of all skill levels. Therefore, whether you’re an experienced developer or a new business user, you can begin to automate email functions with relative ease.
UiPath Studio integrates with multiple operating systems and email applications. Whether you use Windows or Mac, Outlook or Gmail, UiPath Studio has what you need to get started.
