Workflow for Filtering Genuine Email Responses

I love having AI review specific types of emails I get to see if they're worth my time. Today I helped my friend Alec Cheung - a fellow marketer in the CMO Coffee Talk community I'm a member of - set up one of these AI automations and it turned out awesome, so I wanted to tell you about it (with his permission of course). Here's the backstory: Going through website form submissions was eating up too much marketing team time. The submissions (which have a place for open-ended inputs that make them hard to screen via traditional methods) flow through Pardot and trigger emails that required human review to figure out if they were genuine leads or just spam. Tons turn out to be junk, creating unnecessary work for Alec's team. Others are genuine leads (or actual paying clients) that a human definitely needs to follow up with. Alec posted in our CMO Coffee Talk AI channel a few weeks ago asking for ideas on how to improve their process with AI. This is a super simple automation, so I offered to help if he'd let me share what we did. He was in! Our fix was AI-powered automation using Zapier. Here's the flow: 1️⃣. A visitor submits a form on Alec's company's website. 2️⃣. Pardot sends an email with the form contents to a designated address. 3️⃣. Zapier kicks off the automation. 4️⃣. GPT-4o reads, analyzes, and categorizes the submission. 5️⃣. Based on the categorization, the automation filters the next steps. 6️⃣. If a human needs to attend to the email, it emails them (along with the appropriate categorization, directly in the flag email's subject line). If it does not require a human, then nobody is notified about the form submission. The result is a far more streamlined workflow that will save a lot of monotonous manual effort. And it's CHEAP. It looks like this automation will cost Alec around $0.10-$0.20 per day in AI usage to run - yes, cents, not dollars. It's an incredibly affordable solution for such a big time (and headache)-saver. Alec was new to using Zapier for this kind of task, so we had 2 calls. First, we planned the planned process, and I gave him some homework, and then today we finished everything. (And he gave me the okay to share with you!) While the setup is pretty straightforward, it does require a base knowledge of Zapier, and how to write solid AI prompts (this isn't something for AI newbies to take on alone). For those in CMO Coffee Talk, I'll go much deeper into this automation during our 2/19 mid-week Zoom "What Every CMO Needs to Know About How AI is Evolving in 2025: Automated Workflows, Agents, and Reasoning Models." Also - if you're a marketer and want to explore AI automations, I do get into that in my Foundations of Generative AI for B2B Marketing course (🔗 in bio). --- UPDATE: A recording of the webinar for CMOs I mentioned above is now available! More details at: https://lnkd.in/gxe9EQ69

We send tens of thousands of cold emails a day across multiple sequencers — and consequently, that means we get thousands of replies weekly. So how do we keep it from turning into chaos? 💡 We don’t rely on sequencer inboxes or Slack. We built a system around Missive to route, sort, and automate replies — making it dead simple for our clients’ sales teams to take over. Here’s why that matters: 📥 All replies in one place – Instantly.ai → personal emails – EmailBison → work emails ... SO all replies need to be consolidated somewhere - Missive is our choice for this right now ⚙ Webhook-based workflows, triggered by Missive and pushed to n8n/Clay – Categorize replies (interested, out of office, etc) – Enrich contact data (phone #, LinkedIn) Missive keeps things focused — and looks/feels like a real inbox, which makes handoff easier for sales teams. 🎯 We see Missive as the bridge between outbound and the sales process. Is it perfect? Not at scale. Our friend Taylor sending millions of emails a month mentioned this system struggles at scale. But for now, it’s working — and it's helping our clients close more deals with less friction. We're looking at building our own unibox in-house down the line 👀 If your reply handling still feels scattered, try simplifying the path for your sales team. It makes a difference.