Emails are an integral part of all businesses today, with over 80% of small and medium-sized companies using email for customer acquisition and retention. All incoming emails contain essential information that can help grow a business.
Keeping this data in your email inbox is never ideal: think of the hours spent sorting through incoming emails on top of all other business functions. Learn how email parsing software app can save time and resources by automatically parsing data from all incoming messages arriving in your email inbox through this guide.
What Is an Email Parser?
An email parser is a type of software application used for data extraction from incoming emails. Email parsers extracts text data from the email header and body. It can also parse data directly from email file attachments like PDF documents, CSV files, and MS Office files.
The parsed email data then feeds into workflow automation applications like Salesforce to avoid manual data entry. Email parsing is an easy way to automate your business processes, and it integrates seamlessly into numerous CRM applications and other tools. It helps save countless hours that would have been wasted with manual data entry.
How Do Email Parsing Tools Work?
An email parsing software is programmed to extract data by searching specific terms and keywords in every email at its core. Additionally, it enables you to integrate email data with internal tools or local files. After the initial setup of creating your parsing rules, the parsing tool will then capture and extract text information automatically from each incoming email.
Instead of manually searching your Gmail inbox, or any other email mailbox, for keywords, names or document titles, the email parser extracted data is collected and delivered in a usable plain text format. Email parsers can even go through all of your recent emails and compile a list of contact details that can be submitted to your CRM.
Why is Email Parsing Software Important?
For businesses that receive a large number of emails daily, email parsing software can be a massive relief in terms of time and resource management. With email parser, staff members no longer need to manually extract data.
With email parsing software, you can rest easy knowing that the API is doing a great job of automatically collecting these pieces of data for you, meaning no more manual data entry.
Is Email Parsing Like Web Scraping?
Email parsing and web scraping share some similarities. For example, both types of software use machine learning to process data. They can extract text information such as names, titles, contact information, and any other data types that you choose.
The key difference between email parsing and web scraping is where the API gets the data from. An email parser specifically extracts text data from emails, while a web scraper extracts text data from websites. In the same way an email parser can read your incoming emails for specific information, a web scraper does the same for web HTML pages. Differentiating email parsers and web scrapers can be sometimes be confusing if you don’t know their functions.
Benefits of Email Parsing
Your business will realize the several benefits from using email parser, regardless of its size.
Workflow Automation
Any software that automates business processes is invaluable to a company. Email parser automatically gathers all the data from all incoming emails, even from multiple email addresses, and feeds them into your CRM. Simply choose the required field of data you want to extract, and leave the email parser to do the rest.
Cut Back Costs
A dedicated data entry employee is slow, expensive, and error-prone compared to an automated data extraction API tool. If employees take on tedious email data entry tasks, their other work assignments may suffer greatly, but not when you have email parser.
When you have automated email parsing software, you don’t have to hire data entry staff who work for countless hours.
Faster Process Times
Email parsing is a fully automated process, so your parsing software will continue running even if you or your employees are unavailable. With email parser, you will have fewer email backlogs to deal with, and the extracted data will automatically link to your CRM.
Better Quality Assurance
When you use an email parser to automate data extraction, all your data is 100% accurate as it flows from your incoming emails into your CRM or other business applications. For example, if you process hundreds of orders from different platforms every day, such as a restaurant listed on multiple food apps, the amount of customer data can be overwhelming.
Not even the best manual data entry expert can be 100% accurate, and a mistake, in this case, can wreak havoc on your ordering and delivery systems. With email parser, data like customer contacts, items ordered, and delivery locations can become available directly to the delivery team.
Better Workload Management During Peak Seasons
Many companies are constantly overwhelmed during holidays and often have to work for countless hours to fulfil customer requests.
Email parser can help to manage the increased workflow by extracting data from all incoming emails and contact details email signatures, so you and your team can focus on keeping your customers happy. You can meet deadlines, allocate resources and balance your workflow with the same great team you work with during off-peak times.
Automate your Business with Email Parser
Let’s look at how you can use the data from your email parsing application.
- Lead Generation & Lead Management
Every business relies on leads to get its sales going. A considerable percentage of marketing efforts go into lead generation, and this is where email parsing truly shines. Parsed data goes straight into Salesforce or any other sales and marketing CRM to capture and store customer information straight from incoming emails.
Whether you’re looking for real estate leads, insurance leads, or even new patients for your practice, lead generation is much easier with email parser.
- E-commerce Automation
Every purchase on an e-commerce platform generates an email signatures containing customer contacts, invoices, and product details. To automate this critical business process, link your email parser API to your e-commerce site.
This way, the parser will be recording invoice data in real-time, then the e-commerce API uses that data for order fulfillment, shipment, and follow-ups for all your customers. You can also generate an automated PDF report every week or every month to track your progress.
- Appointment Scheduling
The beauty of structured data, which you typically find in order forms and Excel spreadsheets, is that it’s super easy for automation.
Suppose you use appointment scheduling software for your business, such as booking dental appointments, event tickets, and so on. In that case, you receive essential client information through emails every day.
Link the parsed email data into your appointment scheduling software to easily automate your workflow and organize your calendar.
- Message Scheduling for Engagement
An email parser can do more than extract information from your incoming emails. You can also use it to send data by scheduling automated email responses, one-way text messages, or prerecorded voice messages for your mailing list.
- A/B Testing
For email marketing campaigns, in particular, email parsing can be a great way to conduct split or A/B testing with your recipients. Use regular expressions to filter through your email list for specific customer profiles based on their location, gender, purchase history, or any other relevant traits for your marketing campaign.
Use this parsed email data to automate targeted emails and gather feedback, which helps you tweak your marketing emails for better results.
How to Use Parserr to Parse Emails
Having learnt the benefits and examples of email extraction through parsing software let’s look at how to parse data using Parserr. Keep in mind that you don’t need to be a programming expert to configure this email parser.
Step 1: Configure a Parserr email address
The first step is to register a Parserr email address where you can receive all the specific data. Subsequently, incoming emails from your Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, or other email clients will forward to your Parserr email, where you will receive the extracted data.
Step 2: Set up your email parsing rules
From the Parserr setup wizard, you can either create a custom parsing rule or select a parsing template for a faster setup. You can choose a variety of components such as the email subject header, sender and recipient names and email addresses, body text, internal tools, local files and, even file attachments.
Step 3: Run a test email
After you have specified the necessary rules, you need to send a sample email to your inbox to verify if you have set up your Parserr rules correctly. Basic emails will do as long as they look like the types of messages you receive, such as subscription alerts, invoices, appointments, etc. You can even forward an existing email from a customer to test your Parserr extraction rules.
Once the test email goes out, your Parserr email will contain the extracted data in a usable format. Save this data as a Google sheet or Excel file and confirm whether the important information you need is captured.
Step 4: Set up the key search terms
You will want to pull up specific data from your parsed emails, such as a keyword in a message body, a header, or an object like an email file attachment. The best way is to use a regular expression to find the specific terms you need from the data.
You might need some basic knowledge in Python or Javascript to create more specific search patterns, but a simple “find and replace” is sufficient in most cases.
Step 5: Export the parsed data
Easily export the extracted data to CSV, Excel, or JSON format files, which you can then import directly into your CRM software or other business applications. Integrate Parserr with Zapier, Google Sheets, Microsoft Flow, Sharepoint, Salesforce, Hubspot, and endless other on-premise and cloud-based automation systems. Use the extracted data as you please for lead generation and other campaigns.
How Much Does Email Parsing Cost?
Email parsing is available at a range of price points depending on the number of emails you receive in your business. If you receive an average of 15 emails every month, the Parserr free package is the best to get started. Other packages include $49.99 for 450 emails, $99.99 for 2,500 emails, and $149.99 for 5,000 emails per month.
All of the pricing plans at Parserr offer unlimited parsing rules and integrations with Google Sheets, Zapier, Sharepoint, and Power Automate. Using it to pass data will save you a great deal.
Wrapping Up
Despite the market’s abundance of email parsers, a company’s decision will depend on its unique requirements. If you’re ready to boost the efficiency of your business, manage your time and resources, and save on costs, Parserr is the way to go.
Whether you’re a startup adjusting to high demand from your customers or an established venture looking to scale up, you can explore the benefits of email parser. The most effective email parsers are straightforward and intuitive to just about anyone. Register your free Parserr account today and get started with email parsing.
