How to Automate Data Ingestion from Email Attachments

It seems like everyday we see more and more professional communication tools with promises to help streamline communication. But no matter what we do, we cannot seem to outrun email. Since everyone uses email, it’s the top method for getting in contact with people outside of your company as well. 

Although questions over security are often raised in regards to sending and receiving external emails, email isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it’s estimated that in 2022 over 333 billion emails will be sent daily. That’s almost 14 billion more emails sent per day than in 2021. And with an average email size of 75 KB, that’s nearly 25 trillion terabytes of data sent everyday over email.

While email is not the safest way to send sensitive information, it's an easy medium for sharing data, both within and outside your organization. If your inbox is filled with customer and partner data then it likely requires a lot of manual processes to clean up and ingest.

With Osmos, you can automate this entire process. You can have the data received via email and clean and uploaded to your target systems right when it hits your inbox–without having to manually clean any spreadsheets.

Automate CSV ingestion from Emails

Below are the top three ways to use an Osmos Email Connector.

1. Customer Data Onboarding

Every business wants to provide the best possible customer data onboarding experience. That means making things quick and easy to keep them satisfied. Sometimes sending data via email is the easiest way for customers to share information–especially nontechnical customers. 

Osmos Pipelines offer you the control of receiving customer data via email to be cleaned and ingested how you want it–all automated and error-free. You and your customers are using email to send data already. It’s time to make it work for you, on your terms–and take control of your data ingestion.

2. Partner Data Onboarding

For better or worse, your partners are probably already sending you data via email. Whether your partners are sharing the latest inventory levels, weekly sales data, or updated pricing information, that data is probably coming in via email attachments. From there it needs to be downloaded, mapped, cleaned, and validated then uploaded into your target system.

The partner data onboarding process is often long and tedious–requiring a lot of cross-functional teams working together to import their data. Thankfully, it’s now one that can be automated when you set up an Email Connector with Osmos Pipelines. Save time and energy to focus on building better partner relations rather than manual data wrangling.

3. Internal Data Imports

For those on the go-to-market side, it’s a tale as old as time when it comes to lead information. Your marketing team decides to co-host an event with another company. The other company is going to set up the landing page and handle registration. After the event, a list of registrants are downloaded into a spreadsheet and sent to you via email attachment. After some back and forth, you have to manually clean up the spreadsheet and upload it into your marketing automation tool or CRM.

With Osmos Pipelines, you can empower your marketing teams to forward lead lists to an email inbox that automatically cleans and uploads it directly to your CRM system via an Email Connector. Now you can spend less time cleaning data and more time reaching out to leads.

How to Build an Osmos Email Connector

By reducing the manual work required for wrangling CSVs, your teams can focus on keeping customers happy and building core products. This leads to a faster time to value for customers, because teams spend less time cleaning data and more time on revenue-generating work. Here's how to design a process that reduces friction, data errors, and internal resources.

1. Start by building an Osmos Pipeline

Osmos Pipelines are automated data pipelines that ingest external data, so you can get the data you need when and how you need it.

2. Set up an Email Source Connector

Osmos can set up an email inbox to receive this data via email attachment. This is the data source.

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3. Choose where the data goes

Ingest clean data directly into your app, database, or SaaS application with our prebuilt connectors and API endpoints. Where is the email attachment going to end up? Set up a Destination Connector to send email attachments directly into your target system.

You can connect to various systems using Osmos, such as Amazon S3, BigQuery, Google Drive and more. Once you create a Destination Connector, you can connect it to your email connector.

4. Clean up and restructure emailed CSVs to match your system's schema

You can clean up and restructure CSVs to match your destination's schema using column mapping, QuickFixes, AutoClean, formulas, and single-cell edits. From here, you can ensure all emailed CSVs are correctly formatted, mapped, and ready to use every time with custom validation functions.

5. Schedule the Pipeline

After completing the transformation step, you will be taken to the Pipeline Rules page where you name your Pipeline and set the rules. Currently, we only support one business rule, which allows you to set a schedule for your Pipeline.

Step 1: Provide a Pipeline Name.

Step 2: Provide a Description (optional) for this Pipeline.

Step 3: Select one of the two options for the Pipeline Schedule:

- Select No scheduled runs if want to manually trigger each Pipeline run.

- Select Custom schedule if you want the Pipeline to run automatically at a specific frequency.

Automate CSV ingestion from email attachments with Osmos

Make your customer onboarding experience as smooth as possible. With Osmos, you can automate your entire external data ingestion process. Don't fret when your customers send data via email attachments, our Email Connector automates the ingestion of data from those attachments. You can take the data you receive and upload it to your target systems right when it hits your inbox–without having to manually clean any data.