Cold Email System in Zapier
Send a 4-email sequence using Zapier Tables, Zaps, and Gmail.
I’m embarking on a challenge in 2025 to sell.
How can I package up things I build in Zapier, reach the people who would benefit from them, and close the deal?
That’s what I aim to discover.
Will you join me?
I’m working on a Chatbots outbound campaign where I:
- find Zapier users who don’t have a chatbot on their website,
- build them a custom chatbot, and
- Send them a sales email sequence.
It’s a high-touch campaign because I’m literally building chatbots for people. But there’s one area where robots can help me: the email system.
Today, I’ll show you how to build a cold email system in Zapier to reach out to prospects with a customized email and follow-up automatically if they haven’t responded.
This took me ~5 hours to build.
1…2…3… let’s sell (this is supposed to be my cheesy sales transition).
A note to convince you to love selling
I love building, but I hate selling.
Or so I thought.
Let me give you the quick and dirty on why you should love marketing and sales.
First, go do yourself a favor and read This is Marketing by Seth Godin. It’s short and at the end you’ll be convinced that marketing is a generous act and we are all in the business of making change happen for a specific group of people for the better.
The next logical step is sales.
You do sales to help people make the right decisions for them. You’re helping someone actually get what they need even if they didn’t know they needed it.
You need strong positioning so that if someone isn’t a great fit you tell them to go use a competitor, instead.
I have on many occasions told someone to keep using Airtable or Google Sheets instead of Zapier Tables.
But I digress.
The point is that I used to hate selling because I was convinced that it was trying to give people something they didn’t need.
But that’s simply not the case and it’s real freedom to know it’s not.
Now, the real point of this paragraph is the next sentence:
You’ll be delighted to know there is actually a lot of building involved when you’re trying to sell (it’s why RevOps exists as an entire business function).
So let’s build. And sell.
My cold email system at a glance
With my Chatbots outreach campaign, my goal is to get a response.
I don’t want clicks or opens. I want that response.
I’m sending four emails to get a response with a 2-3 day delay between each send.
Here’s the Canvas of the entire system.
Here’s what I’m doing to get everything prepared for sending:
- Identify Zapier users who haven’t used Chatbots
- Enrich all of the users using Clearbit
- Narrow down to small businesses (ideally 20-50 employees)
- Narrow down to professional services business (to start with)
- Check each website, filter out those who already have a competitor chatbot
- Build a custom chatbot for each, adding their website pages as knowledge sources, editing colors, capturing leads
- Take a screenshot of the chatbot overlaid on top of their website for visual effect
- Capture chatbot URL and ID
We’ll get into more of the details in a second, but I’m basically showing them the chatbot I’ve built and then asking them if they are interested in receiving a quick guide on how to set up the custom chatbot themselves.
If they respond, I’ll send the guide “right over!”
The email system: Tables
You’ll need two Tables.
The first table has the list of prospects and all the information you might need for them including email, name, company, website, Chatbot URL, screenshot, status, and 37 other fields.
It’s mega. Add in as much detail as you want.
Then use filters and views to only see what you want to see.
The prospects table has two buttons. One for triggering the “Create Emails” Zap and another for triggering the Zaps to start sending emails.
The second table is for the sales emails themselves which have placeholders that update to customize each email.
The placeholders I’m using are little pills surrounded by double curly braces.
These special little things are pulled from the Zaps that send the emails which automatically convert into first names, company names, or any other field from the prospects table I want.
Just go into a Zap, map the field you want into any action step and then highlight and copy the mapped pill that appears. Paste it into text and you’ve got the placeholder!
Now let’s look at the brains behind the system.
The email system: Zaps
Once you have the list of users and the email templates, you need to create the custom emails for each prospect.
By the way, if you’re interested in list building which I don’t cover here, check out my post about rebuilding Clay in Zapier.
Create Emails
You’ll click a button in the table to trigger this Zap. The Zap will go to the emails table, grab email 1, and then update the prospect record with the created email subject and body. Remember, because we used pills from this Zap to actually build the email template, the custom variables like name and chatbot URL are automatically inputted.
One of the emails in my system actually uses a custom response from the chatbot I’ve built for the prospect. Show don’t tell, right?
So in my Zap it goes and generates a chatbot response based on the question “what services do you offer” and then pastes the response in the email.
Once all the emails are saved in the prospect’s table, you’re ready to start sending.
Send Email 1
Click a button in the table to begin the sending sequence.
The first email will go out and then the Zap delays for three days before sending a POST request to a webhook that triggers the second email to go out.
These “send email” Zaps are straightforward. They grab the email from the table then send them.
The trick is to monitor for responses so that you don’t keep sending once you receive a response! So, have each Zap check to ensure the status of the prospect isn’t “Customer Responded.”
To update the status when a customer does in fact respond, you’ll need another Zap.
Monitor Responses
Check every new email that comes into your inbox then go see if it came from one of your prospects. If it did, then mark the prospect record as “Customer responded” so that the sending sequence will stop.
By the way, most of this system doesn’t actually cost tasks. That’s because almost all by Zapier apps don’t charge tasks. Hooray!
You can monitor millions of incoming emails for free.
While I’m sending in Gmail and limiting it to 25 emails a day, if you want a larger cold email system you’d want to plug in another app for the actual sending of the emails. There’s a whole thing about deliverability and stuff I haven’t dove into enough to make sure emails don’t land in spam.
Wrapping it up
It’s nice to have complete control over a cold email system and house almost all of it within Zapier.
For every prospect, this entire system uses a maximum of 8 tasks to run all four emails. There are ways to eliminate the webhook steps at the end of each send email Zap, too, that would reduce it down 5 total tasks per prospect. I won’t get into the details today.
You don’t need a paid Tables plan, either.
Send a cold email sequence becomes scalable all within Zapier. It’s amazing what you can build.
To recap:
- Be generous, do the hard work of marketing and selling
- Build out a table for prospects and a table for emails
- Create (nearly) free Zaps to send each email and monitor responses
… and go sell!
That’s all for this week!
Happy Selling,
Bryce
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