Reskin shipping emails from multiple 3rd Party Logistics

Running a business has many moving parts. The more you can automate, the more it frees you up to address higher level and strategic problems of your business. This is a newsletter about automating aspects of your business.

Problem

You may find that your business needs to cobble together a patchwork of 3PLs (3rd Party Logistics) companies to ship your product all over the world. However, they all have slightly different shipping confirmation and tracking emails. This hodge-podge of email formats and styles creates an inconsistent experience for your customers.

A consistent messaging and buying experience from your business engenders trust and confidence in your customers' purchase. And that includes the often overlooked shipping confirmation emails.

Automation

You can use MailParser to parse the shipping confirmation emails from your 3PLs. Then we can use Zapier to funnel the results to Mailgun for a consistently designed email.

After you log into your MailParser account, create a new Inbox to parse incoming shipping emails.

First, send sample emails to mailparser.io

Next, set up parsing rules after sending some sample emails

While you can try using their automatic parsing rules, I found them to be generally unhelpful. Luckily, setting up the parsing rules is relatively easy. You can think of it as a series of filters to be applied to the email. You can iteratively whittle down the email with filters until you get the data you want.

Here, we'll extract all the line items in an email. The example is with a wholesale order of fish, but you can easily adapt it to shipping confirmation emails.

First, select the body and whether the email is HTML or plain text.

Then select Set Start & End Position -> Find Start Position

We can use Text match: after to match some text that indicates the start of the line items, and keep everything after the match.

Next, we can remove all the empty lines in between the line items.

Lastly, we'll bookend the text we're looking for with Set Start & End Position -> Define End Position

You can try your filters with multiple emails by trying it out with other samples you sent to Mailparser.

After that, you can use Zapier to route the parsed email data to an email service like Mailgun.

From here, you should be able to access the parsed data from Mailparser in your customized email. You know your customers best, so it's up to you to write the shipping confirmation email.

Take care to reassure your customers that you have their order on their way, and soon, they'll enjoy the fruits of your business!

As always, you can use alternative services to achieve the same thing outlined above. Check out:

• Zapier alternatives
• Mailparser alternatives
• Mailchimp alternatives

Photo by Burst at Pexel