How to select parts of an email and turn them into variables?

Question

Good day friends!

Bill from Australia here. Just getting started with a small business of mine that I’ve always wanted to do. But I’ve come across an email automation problem that I can’t answer for the life of me. I’ll try to explain it with a brief example.

Imagine you receive the following email:

“A client, Arcadia Gallagher, would like to schedule an appointment at 12:30 PM on May 3rd, 2017. Please contact Arcadia Gallagher at [email protected] to accept or reject this request at your earliest convenience.”

Do any of you know of an email automation solution that allows me to select parts of the email like— “Arcadia Gallagher”, “12:30 PM”, and “May 3rd, 2017”—and turn them into variables? Then, assuming that the email structure above never changes, is it possible to take those variables, plug them into an email response template, and automatically send it to the email address contained in the email above as soon as I receive it?

Thanks in advance ladies and gentlemen!

Kind regards,

Bill Ion.

Answer 1

Bill, obviously this was months ago, and I hope that you found a solution already, but should you still be looking for a method - the best way would be to use an auto-reply add-on. Presuming that you are receiving this through a web form (i.e. a "contact me" on your website), depending on how your site is built, you could auto-reply within the contact form plugin, which can use its own internal variables to formulate the reply email.

Wordpress has Contact Form 7 Pro, which would have most of what you're looking for. If your site is built on other platforms, I'm sure you can find a comparative solution.