Despite all expectations, email remains a prevalent means of communication today, especially with the advent of digital marketing. Most small business owners end up spending countless hours sorting through their inboxes, looking for specific emails to extract crucial customer data. After searching for the right emails, they must manually enter that data into spreadsheets or CRM programs. However, the correct email parsing tool can save you vast amounts of time and human resources. Email Parsing is an automated process that sifts through your incoming emails to extract the specific data you need to improve your workflow and business operations.
In this article, we will explain everything you need to know about email parsing and its applications.
What is an Email Parser?
Simply put, an email parser is a software program or service that extracts text or specific data from incoming emails. During the extraction process, it condenses the collected information into a structured data format. Subsequently, the extracted data can then be exported into your favorite spreadsheet (Google Sheet, Excel Sheet, CSV file, etc.) or CRM program. Most business-related emails follow a particular outline, such as invoices, orders, and inquiries. An email parsing tool identifies the important data fields such as customer names and contacts, order numbers, type of inquiries, and other free form data, then combines this into actionable information.
Why You Need an Email Parsing Tool
Automatically extract critical data from your emails
The main advantage of parsing software is the amount of time and money you can potentially save in your daily operations. For example, a recruiter that receives applications daily can use a resume parser automatically sort through the candidate’s work experience, background, skills, contact information and education. With this information, the recruiting company can send timely, customized email replies to their applicants faster than ever.
An intelligent email parsing tool can also extract relevant data from your incoming emails, such as purchase orders and invoices. This data contributes significantly to automated order fulfillment, monitoring online transaction data on platforms like PayPal and Stripe, and targets repeat customers with discounts and offers to boost email marketing campaigns.
Top 3 Benefits Of Using Email Parsing Software
You can configure email parsing tools in numerous different ways to suit a wide range of uses and contexts. However, the following are the main advantages of using a parsing API.
- Quick Email Filtering – You can easily search for specific keywords, phrases, email addresses, phone numbers, and links from the parsed data instead of reading through the entire email contents to find the particular item you need. An email parser can also filter out spam emails automatically using more robust filters than your email provider.
- Extract Attachments – Email parsing can identify and extract important data from your email attachments if you work primarily with PDF documents, spreadsheets, and images. A good parsing tool can remove specific contents from the email attachments without you having to open each one separately.
- Integrate with Sales and CRM Applications – Since your sales and customer relationship applications already record client interactions, you can route incoming emails through a parsing API to feed directly into your existing applications. This process complements your CRM system and gives you precise, usable data in one package.
Can You Use Email Parsing In Your Projects?
Email Parsing Use Cases
To get a clear idea of how email parsing software programs work, here are some simple use cases across various industries:
- Automated Recurring Invoices & Receipts – Subscription-based businesses have customers that renew their services usually every month. Think of cell phone bills, gym memberships, magazine subscriptions, or ride-sharing instances. An email parsing API can process these recurring invoices and generate a CSV file to import into your accounting system. You can also link the parser into your accounting system for automatic updating.
- Website Performance Monitoring – Web hosting platforms automatically generate reports about server instances, user sign-ups, database backups, and much more. Instead of going through each of these automated reports, you can redirect these emailed reports into a parsing API to extract the important data you need. This feature is handy for individuals who either have little or no background in data science or are time-strapped and need web performance data at a glance.
- Analyze Industry Alerts – Many businesses use Google Alerts, or similar applications, to track industry trends or search instances related to their products and services. The amount of data generated by these email alerts can be overwhelming and tedious to analyze. An email parser can quickly convert this data into a spreadsheet to reveal notable trends.
- Online Form Processing – Most business websites have a customer request form delivered to the company email address. An email parser can extract the data from these online forms into a Google Sheet, Excel Sheet, or a CRM program instead of manually entering the contents of each request into a tracking tool. This process works for other web forms such as appointment requests, online surveys, support tickets, grant applications, and more.
- Real Estate Inquiries Management – If you operate in the real estate industry, you know the importance of cross-posting property ads on many online listing platforms. Each time a user replies to any of these ads, you receive incoming emails containing the person’s contact information. Multiply this by the number of property ad platforms, and you have a large number of emails coming into your business. With an email parser, you can extract essential contact information to plan your follow-up emails and phone calls – which can help you schedule viewing dates and recommend similar properties.
- Lead Generation – Every digital marketing campaign uses and generates tons of data. An email parser sifts through the information you receive from newsletter subscriptions, landing pages, social messaging platforms, and online ad campaigns. You can use a parsing system to automatically subscribe every new lead you receive to your email campaign, or you can integrate with lead generation APIs to boost your marketing efforts.
Automate Your Workflow with a Quality Email Parsing Tool
Growing businesses can make great use of email parsing to automate a significant part of their email analytics process. Once you easily understand your incoming email data, you can dedicate more time and resources to other business aspects. Email parsing also eliminates the chances of human error because you no longer require manual data entry into spreadsheets or analytics software programs. No matter the size or type of your business, you can start improving your workflow by taking the next step and trying a free trial with Parserr today!
