Do recurring tasks dominate your workday? Manual work not only consumes valuable time but also prevents your team from focusing on strategically important activities. Make offers the solution! In this blog, we will guide you step by step on how to get started with Make as a beginner. Using a practical scenario, we will explain the automation process in a simple and easy-to-understand way.
Why automation is essential for businesses
According to a 2023 survey by Karen Butner for the IBM Institute for Business Value (2023), 92% of executives agree that by 2025, their organization's workflows will be digitized and benefit from AI-powered automation. Business leaders are increasingly focusing on innovation and investing more in workflow automation as a key strategy to increase revenue, ensure success, and secure their company’s survival in a highly competitive market.
A crucial step in starting the automation process is using automation tools to optimize business processes and minimize human intervention. These tools include end-to-end automation strategies and focus on seamlessly integrating tasks into a business workflow. Make enables companies to streamline their operations without coding knowledge, integrate different applications, and automate repetitive tasks.
Introduction to Make
You’re probably reading this blog because you’ve come across Make and want to find out how to integrate it into your workflows. With Make, you can connect different applications, build custom workflows, and automate manual tasks, allowing you to focus on more strategic activities.
Make provides an intuitive visual interface based on scenarios. A scenario functions like an automated production chain, where each step is designed to execute a specific task without manual intervention.
How does a scenario work in Make?
A scenario in Make consists of modules, which represent specific actions within an automation. You can think of these modules as building blocks in an assembly line: each module performs a particular function, and together they create an efficient workflow.
A module can:
- Receive data from an application (e.g., when a new email arrives or a form is submitted).
- Process information (e.g., filter data, convert formats, or perform calculations).
- Trigger actions in other applications (e.g., send a message in Slack, create a row in Google Sheets, or update a CRM).
How to get started with creating a scenario in Make
Before creating a scenario in Make, you should first identify a recurring task that you want to automate.
In this example, we will build a scenario that automatically categorizes incoming emails in a central inbox (e.g., info@company.com) and performs different actions based on the category. These actions may include:
- Creating items in monday.com
- Sending messages in Slack
- Forwarding emails
- Saving attachments in Google Drive
This automation helps streamline your workflow and reduce manual effort.
Here’s a structured, step-by-step guide to help you build this scenario from the ground up.
- Log in to Make – If you already have an account, you can get started right away by creating a new scenario. Simply go to your dashboard and click on "Create a new scenario."
- Sign up if needed – If you don’t have an account yet, you can register for free and start automating immediately.
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1. Add the first module to check your inbox for new emails
Click on the purple button in the center of your editor to add a new module. Select a Gmail module and choose "Gmail > Watch Emails." This module continuously monitors your inbox and automatically retrieves new emails.
Connect your email account to Make
When adding a module, you first need to set up the connection to your email account. This allows Make to get the necessary permissions to access your emails.
Additionally, you can specify which folder Make should monitor and define criteria for email retrieval. This ensures that only relevant messages are included in your scenario.
Here you can find more details on how to configure the required fields:
2. Process the Email Content with OpenAI
Add a second module: OpenAI GPT-4o > Create Completion. This module uses AI to analyze the email content and classify it into predefined categories.
For example, you can instruct ChatGPT to assign a label to each incoming email, allowing you to categorize it and trigger further actions accordingly. These categories could represent different departments in your company, such as Marketing, Finance, Operations, and HR.
You can configure the prompt as follows:
Analyze the following text and classify the message into one of the four categories:
Human Resources, Finance, Operations, or Marketing.
If none of these categories apply, assign it to "Other."
Respond with only the category as a single word.You can fill out the remaining parameters as follows:
The AI will process the email text and returns a single word category (e.g. "Marketing").
3. Forward categorized emails
After the emails have been categorized using the OpenAI module, we can add a Router to direct them into the appropriate workflow.
The Basic Router in Make is used to split a workflow into multiple paths based on specific conditions. In this scenario, the router forwards emails to different actions depending on their assigned category (Marketing, Human Resources, Finance, Operations, or Other).
How to add a router in Make
- Click on "Add another module."
- Type "Flow Controls" in the search bar and select "Router."
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