How many repetitive emails do you send every week?
Quotes, appointment confirmations, replies to the same questions, follow-ups to customers who don't respond. If you think about it, a good chunk of your time goes into messages that all look alike.
What can actually be automated
Not everything. The email to the important client weighing up a 50,000-euro contract, you write that one yourself.
What gets automated are the high-volume, low-variation messages. Receipt confirmations, replies to FAQs, appointment reminders, document requests, status notifications. Messages that follow a clear pattern and change only in the specific details of the recipient.
A small service company I worked with was sending an average of 15 to 20 manual emails a day of this kind. We're talking about 45 to 60 minutes of daily work, just for messages that always followed the same template.
How it works in practice
The basic flow is: a trigger starts the automation, the AI reads the available data, produces a personalized text, the message gets sent.
The trigger can be almost anything: a filled-in form, a row added to a Google Sheet, an event in the CRM, a date in the calendar, a message received on WhatsApp Business.
The AI reads the context: who this person is, what they requested, which stage of the process they've reached. Then it produces a text that looks like you wrote it, not a bot. You give it a tone, examples of emails you like, instructions on what to include.
The result isn't a generic email with the name swapped in. It's a text that takes the specific context into account.
The tools I use
To orchestrate the flows I use n8n. It handles the triggers, connects the apps, passes the data to the AI and sends the final email.
For generating the text I use GPT-4o or Claude depending on the case. The practical difference for this kind of application is minimal: both produce good texts if you give them the right context.
For sending emails I often use Brevo, which has low costs and good deliverability. If the client already uses Gmail or Outlook, it integrates directly.
The monthly cost for a small business is typically between 20 and 60 euros, between API costs and licenses.
A real example
A mechanic's workshop I worked with manually sent a message to every customer when the car was ready for pickup. Between checking the status of the work, finding the number and writing the message, it was 3 to 4 minutes per customer. With 8 to 10 cars a day, that was 30 to 40 minutes wasted every day.
I connected their management software to n8n. When a job is marked as completed, an SMS and an email with the pickup details go out automatically. The mechanic doesn't touch anything.
The setup took an afternoon. Now it runs on its own.
If you have a type of email you send often that always follows the same template, it can probably be automated. Head to the automations page or write to me to talk about it.