Create an Email Contacts Table in Airtable

If you are using Airtable to manage your business, you most likely already have your customer details, product information and marketing campaigns all in your Airtable base. If you are an advanced Airtable power user, you may even be triggering automated emails from your contact list in Airtable. Have you ever wondered if it is possible to receive emails in Airtable or somehow save your business emails with customers to you Airtable base?

While Airtable cannot receive emails with it’s original product, you can make use of extensions such as TaskRobin to link your email inbox to your Airtable. TaskRobin will automatically create a table with fields to store your email information such as sender, timestamp, CC, content, attachments and more! Then, you just need to forward, BCC or set up auto forwarding to your dedicated TaskRobin robot inbox for emails that you want to save, and they will be saved to your Airtable.

Get TaskRobin from Airtable Marketplace

So now we have our emails saved to Airtable via TaskRobin, but how can we gain more insights regarding our interactions and communications? For example, if your business requires regular high touch point with your customers, then it would be wonderful to have a system to track when was the last time you have communicated with a particular customer. And even better if you have a comprehensive list of all your email customer contacts from all customers.

TaskRobin has introduced its latest feature for Airtable - an automatically updated Contacts table. All you need to do is to click a button on TaskRobin’s official Airtable extension to create a Contacts table in your base and TaskRobin will take care of the rest.

Once you have that setup, whenver you save a new email to Airtable, TaskRobin will check the sender and the recipients of your saved emails and add all new contacts to your Airtable Contacts table. The fields “Name”, “Email”, “Website Domain”, “First Contact” and “Last Contact” will be updated automatically by TaskRobin. If there the contacts are not new and are already logged in the Contacts table, TaskRobin will update the last contacted date automatically.

All these are done without you lifting a finger!

Then, we can organise our email contacts by their company, which is usually indicated by their email domain. To do this, let’s first create a new Airtable View for this customer organisation. In our example, let’s create a View for a ficticious customer with ‘comapny.com’ as their website.

We are going to name this View “Customer: company.com” for easy navigation on Airtable’s left Views panel later.

Now, you will realise that all your contacts from Contacts table will appear here. But since we only want to view contacts from company.com in this few, we will add a filter to the view. Click on the downward arrow in the field “Website Domain” and select “Filter by this view” option as shown below.

Then, we can add conditions to filter our contacts in the table. Add a condition as shown below to only show rows where “Website Domain” column contains our customer’s domain, “company.com”.

There you go! Our customer view now only contains contacts from “company.com”. To take it one step further, you can also sort the contacts in this view by last contacted date to find out who was the most or least recently contacted customer staff. We will add a simple sort to this view:

Sort by “Last Contact” - “1-9” means that all rows in this view will be sorted according to their respective values in the “Last Contact” field, in ascending order with oldest date first. If you would like to organise the contacts in the reverse order, or descending order with olest date last, you just need to change the sort from “1-9” to “9-1”.

That’s it! It’s really simple isn’t it? Now, you have an organisational view of your customer, the people from that organisation that you have engaged in an email conversation with. And you can add your custom fields to this table and view to record more information about your interactions such as next step, pending items, who is assigned to this customer etc.

If you want to explore creating your very own CRM system with Airtable and TaskRobin, with components that we covered in this article such as Views, Filter and Sort, check out our Airtable CRM Guide!