Automating Communications
Prime 8 consultants work across a wide range of projects to optmize and drive efficiency into business processes. Recently, one of our Prime 8 consultants deployed a better, scalable solution using Power Automate to reimagine a cumbersome manual workflow and primed that team for future growth with an efficient scalable solution.
A Completely Manual Process
A well known global tech giant recently asked us to help manage a new initiative. Part of the initiative involved sending a series of outreaches to their extensive partner network. Sounds simple until the group realized they would not be granted access to the corporate marketing automation platform. Thousands of emails would have to be sent manually!
The Prime 8 consultant embedded with the client crafted a manual process to send the personalized emails.
The data to create the emails lived in an Excel spreadsheet. Each cell had to be copied and pasted into the email. Only 15 emails could be sent an hour - one at a time- with this manual approach. For a campaign of 3,000+ personalized emails, the project would take roughly 180 hours to complete.
Its not hard to copy data out of Excel, paste it into Outlook and press ‘Send’, but it’s sure tedious if you need to do it a few thousand times. And if you’re focus and concentration is shared with other more mentally demanding tasks, you’re facing a risk of skipping or duplicating critical data records in the process. Further, sending emails one a time isn’t the best use of anyone’s time.
Using Power Automate for Workflow Automation
The consultant knew there had to be a better way and reached out to our Shared Services team to explore what could be done.
Assessing the client’s business and project needs the team learned that the client would need to scale the solution beyond the immediate project request.
To effectively address the client’s current and future needs, the approach needed to adapt to changes in email content to accommodate future campaigns as well as scalable to handle much larger recipient lists down the road.
For the solution, the team turned to Power Automate, a low-code cloud service, part of the Microsoft Power Platform, that allows repetitive tasks and manual processes to be automated. While it’s been available since late 2019, it’s not garnered the popularity it deserves for its capability to enable scalability without overhead, thereby saving time and money.
For this client, an automated workflow could send 1200x more emails per hour, eliminate the risk of human error, and easily scale for future needs - a solution that grows with them and doesn’t require additional coding, even after the consultant leaves. The Shared Services team at Prime 8 developed a Power Automate solution in collaboration with the consultant to ensure seamless operation and execution.
The resulting solution uses plug-and-play techniques in Power Automate that balance scalability and sustainability. It’s future-proof in that it allows users to quickly modify emails as new requirements or needs surface. Using the new approach to email automation, the consultant will be able to accommodate the client’s forecasted business growth while maintaining agility, time and cost savings, and simplicity.
The Prime 8 Approach
The team first built a proof of concept that started with cleaning up the existing dataset - removing redundant details, erroneous entries, or blank fields that might affect the data’s transferability.
Then, to pilot the solution, the Prime 8 team ran email tests, working with small data segments to send emails to the client for review. Testing allowed us to correct formatting irregularities and verify data integrity. Working together, we optimized the workflow to allow for real-time confirmation of email email the automation processed and iterated on the design before moving out of the pilot stage.
Ultimately, the Power Automate solution imported customer data from the Excel spreadsheet and images and documents from a OneDrive to embed in the emails. Upon importing the data, Power Automate’s role was to format the data and send each email using Outlook.
The tool allows the sender to drag information directly from their data storage and click a button. The entire email is automatically created and sent to each recipient. The only other step for the sender to do is to respond to any incoming emails that result from the campaign.
The Prime 8 team delivered the solution within a week.
Solution Saves 180 Hours and $18,000
In the pilot, the automated solution saved the client 180 hours, turning a tedious, hands-on task into an almost-no-touch process at a savings of $18,000 in people cost.
As the initiative matured, the client had more and more emails to send. At a later stage, the client leveraged the same solution to save 1,400 people hours and $1.4 million.
Need to get more done in your business? We help teams optimize and drive efficiency into business processes with fast track solutions like automation. Learn more on our website and reach out with questions for our team.
