Populate Anything’s Automation Alchemy
See how Verifyi9 uses Populate Anything and Google Sheets to automate dozens of emails on a daily basis.
We’ve talked a lot about how useful Populate Anything is for dynamically populating Gravity Forms from any source.
Today, I’d like to focus on Populate Anything’s automation and what it can provide for you. To help us illustrate, we’re tapping in Bob Griggs, Chief Executive Wizard at Verifyi9.com.
The team at Verifyi9 has recently doubled in size. Their volume has quadrupled. When Bob was still managing things on his own, he discovered early on that simple automations allowed him to virtually clone himself and save dozens of hours.
With this simple integration, Populate Anything saves us several hours a day.
Bob Griggs
The following example will show you how you can use Populate Anything, Google Sheets, and Gravity Forms notifications to save time on monotonous, repetitive email outreach while maintaining a personal touch.
“We send dozens of individual but repetitive emails to clients daily. Creating those emails manually was tedious and time-consuming, so we created a Gravity Form with “Chained Selects” and more than two dozen notifications; the email templates. With Populate Anything, we fill in data from a Google Sheet. We just type in the client’s company name, and the form is populated with the client’s contact information, account number, and more.”
Bob can’t share all of his secrets, so we whipped up a quick approximation of his email sending machine.
We created a form based around two dropdowns:
- one Drop Down field to select a client,
- and one Drop Down field to select a template to send.
When you select any client from the first Drop Down field, Populate Anything handles the rest — filling in their details accordingly. Using the second Drop Down field, we can select the email template we’d like to send to a client.
Today, we’re thinking we’ll send a check-in email to Gandalf The Grey to see how the recent website we built for him is doing.
What we’re doing here is configuring Gravity Forms notifications to function as email templates. We can then use a form internally to select a client, the email we’d like to send, and let Populate Anything handle the rest.
For example, we’ll write out our “Check-in Email” as its own template, use merge tags to ensure it’s populated with client information from the form, and set it up to trigger only when “Check-in Email” is selected from the original form Drop Down field.
You can also use merge tags with information collected from your forms directly in your WordPress post content. Learn more about Post Content Merge Tags.
Any time we submit this form with “Check-in Email” selected and a client selected, they get a custom check-in email populated with their information.
“With this simple integration, Populate Anything saves us several hours a day. However, our 4,000+ client list exceeded Populate Anything’s 500-record default limit. [Gravity Wiz] provided a snippet that allowed us to increase the record limit.
We are currently working on the next PA integration, which will populate returning client info in a service request form. The data source for this process will be form entries.”
It’s always nice to see a customer taking advantage of our Pro license with custom snippets. Read our guide to learn more about how Populate Anything works with Google Sheets. And if you want to take this a step further and schedule notifications ahead of time or create recurring emails, we recommend looking into Gravity Forms Notification Scheduler.
