What is email parsing?

What is an email parser or inbox parser?

An email parser, or inbox parser, is artificial intelligence (AI)-powered software that can extract structured or unstructured data from an email in a user’s inbox. A parser analyzes incoming emails and identifies information within them, such as the sender’s name, subject line,  body of the email, and attachments. This data is particularly beneficial for businesses when considering the details available in emails — order confirmations, shipping notifications, addresses, and more. 

These email data points are examples of first-party data generated directly by customers, prospects, and other users. With the help of an email or inbox parser, businesses can use this data to better understand their customers, equip internal teams with insights, or build features that engage their audience with every email they receive.  

Types of email parsers

There are two types of email parsers — structured and unstructured. Structured email parsers rely on predefined formats or templates, likely using rule-based methods to identify and extract the relevant data from an email. Unstructured email parsers, on the other hand, extract and convert unformatted email data into a structured format.

Structured email parsers

Parsing structured email data refers to extracting and processing information in email messages based on predefined patterns or templates. Because the emails they process adhere to specific formats, data extraction is managed through rules that identify where in the email to look for the required information. 

Structured email parsing uses software to extract and organize email data into standard formats like CSV or JSON, based on specific templates. This automated process, tailored to the email’s format and output needs, efficiently handles email data for analysis, reporting, and system integration, eliminating manual effort and improving data utilization.

Unstructured email parsers

Imagine your inbox —  a jumble of emails from colleagues, clients, and automated systems. Each email has valuable information, but it’s scattered throughout the email body, subject line, and attachments. With an unstructured email parser, you can transform it into a usable format, like a spreadsheet or database, for easier analysis and automation. 

Parsing unstructured email data involves analyzing the contents of an email, regardless of how the information is presented, and converting it into a structured format. This unstructured email data refers to information in emails that don’t have a well-defined format and typically contain a mix of text, images, and attachments. Unstructured email parsers, powered by AI and machine learning, can extract data from emails without a standard format. 

What is email parsing used for?

The data from email parsing can support many workflows, and these primarily revolve around three core pillars:

• Increasing revenue, improving retention, and decreasing churn: Create a constant stream of engagement that keeps your users returning and opens up new avenues for increasing revenue. This strategy enhances user experience and reinforces your application’s value, making every interaction an opportunity to solidify loyalty and drive sales.
• Automating internal processes: Improve operational efficiency by equipping teams with relevant data, like providing support teams with structured information directly from your customers to reduce the average time to close tickets and resolve issues.
• Leveraging customer intelligence: Enable data teams to build and analyze customer profiles with real-time user-generated data and develop insights about user behavior. Having more data about your customers supports your entire organization’s ability to better understand your customer base and drive your competitive advantage in the market. 

Email and inbox parsing benefits

Now that we’ve covered the basics of email/inbox parsing and its uses let’s examine some of the benefits.

Easily extract data at scale

Parsing emails involves extracting specific pieces of data from incoming emails from a user’s inbox. These emails are retrieved by authenticating, syncing, and maintaining a connection to that inbox through API requests to retrieve data and webhooks to receive new emails. The emails then need to be run through a filter so that only relevant emails are parsed and stored. 

Some examples of data that you can parse from emails include: 

• Contents of the body of the email
• Email metadata
• Subject lines
• Send dates/times
• Open dates/times
• Reply dates/times
• Attachments
• Signature data
• Links/hyperlinks

Context-rich insights

The first-party data in a customer’s email inbox is context-rich, direct, and up-to-date. Web analytics or third-party research provide passive insights that can already be months old. Access to comprehensive first-party data is essential for driving personalized customer experiences and is more secure and accurate than third-party cookies. 

An email parser allows businesses to access the highly valuable data in their customers’ inboxes, enabling them to build more engaging purchasing experiences that will drive repurchases, lower churn, and keep customer acquisition costs low.

Improved customer experience 

Businesses can improve their understanding of their customers by leveraging data and tapping into context-rich insights with artificial intelligence. This allows them to create more personalized experiences throughout the customer journey, leading to increased customer loyalty, repeat purchases, and reduced acquisition costs.

Increasing revenue, improving retention, and decreasing churn

• Order tracking: Monitor e-commerce orders and provide in-app tracking from purchase to delivery.
• Provide real-time shipping updates: Extract order and shipping data to give customers a single view to track and manage their orders. It can also conduct multi-carrier delivery tracking by consolidating orders from different carriers into one view.
• Personalize offers and promotions: Email data on purchase preferences and order history allows you to create personalized add-on recommendations as customers complete their purchases.
• Expense management: Track customer purchase trends and analyze their activity to give them unique insights into their spending.

Automating internal processes

• Automating customer support: Customer service teams can quickly extract data from customer emails and route it to the appropriate teams. This allows them to resolve requests more efficiently.
• Simplifying administrative tasks: Can be used for invoicing, account reconciliation, or generating reports. This eliminates the need for manual input, saving valuable time and resources while ensuring accuracy in the process.
• Improving data extraction: Teams can better analyze large amounts of incoming data, such as sales leads or user feedback.

Leveraging customer intelligence 

• Easing customer segmentation: Segment customers based on their interests or purchase history, allowing for more personalized outreach efforts.
• Enhancing marketing campaigns: Marketers can determine which leads will likely convert into paying customers by analyzing incoming emails. This helps them tailor their campaigns more effectively and target their email content appropriately. 
• Streamlining collaboration between teams: By extracting relevant information from incoming emails, teams can always work with up-to-date information regardless of its origin or format. 
• Aid dispute resolution and fraud detection: Catch issues with orders and delivery as they happen, assist your customers with complaints or claims, and resolve those issues.
• Power loyalty programs: Encourage repeat business and reward customer loyalty for individual merchants or category purchases.

How does email parsing work?

Inbox parsing, or email parsing, works by analyzing incoming email messages and extracting specific information from them. The process typically involves the following steps:

1. Users must give consent and authenticate inbox parsers to access their inboxes. 
2. Then, the email parsing software connects to the email server and retrieves historical and incoming email messages.
3. The software analyzes the structure of each email message, including the header, subject, and body text.
4. The software uses machine learning, natural language processing, and regular expressions to identify and extract relevant information from each message. 
5. The extracted data is organized into a structured format, such as CSV or JSON, for further processing and analysis.
6. Depending on the specific application, the extracted data may be used to trigger actions in other systems, such as notifying users about updates to their orders to bring them back into the application, resolving support queries, or building detailed customer profiles.

Take a deeper dive into how inbox parsing turns inboxes into actionable insights: Transform your email data into gold with email parsing

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How to use an API for email parsing 

This is the high-level process for using an API for email parsing:

Step 1: Sign up for a parsing API: To access the API, you need to sign up for an API key from the provider. This key authenticates your API requests.

Step 2: Integrate the API into your application: Your API provider should have clear documentation and a well-equipped support team to help your developers integrate the email parser. The easiest API will also support syncing and parsing emails.

Step 3: Store and use the data: The data extracted from incoming messages can then be stored in your database or used to trigger actions such as notifying customers, tracking leads, or processing orders. Learn more about email parsing with Python.

Step 4: Monitor usage and performance: Monitor the API’s usage and performance to ensure that you’re getting the desired results.

Benefits of using an API

Using an API for email parsing can benefit developers, businesses, and their end users. Some of the key benefits include:

• APIs allow developers to integrate email parsing functionality into existing systems, applications, and workflows faster than building internally.
• By automating the process of extracting data, APIs can help improve efficiency and productivity, saving developers months or even years in development time. APIs also enable businesses to launch products and go to market faster, ultimately saving business costs. 
• APIs provide a convenient and standardized way to access and extract data by parsing unstructured text into useful information. It also ensures that the extracted data is consistent and accurate. 
• APIs can provide real-time insights into customer behavior and interactions, allowing businesses to respond quickly to changing customer needs.

Add email parsing capabilities with Nylas Parsers

Nylas Parsers is an email parsing solution that helps companies build data-driven customer experiences that grow revenue, reduce churn, and improve operational efficiency with timely and relevant customer data. Nylas Parsers applies customized AI to your users’ inboxes to extract only the first-party data pertinent to your application, accelerating your roadmap to integrate AI across your company and unlocking your engineering team’s capacity to bring features to market fast.

Businesses can now easily overcome the challenges of managing multiple provider integrations, creating data uniformity across providers, and building individual data connectors for each provider. Nylas also solves data engineering challenges by integrating AI to parse emails, ensuring the communications data is accurately structured to fit pre-defined schemas. Hence, it’s readily available for integration or analysis within applications. 

By leveraging economies of scale and AI-powered email parsers, the Nylas API can process massive quantities of email data with high precision and accuracy — without the exorbitant financial cost and significant time commitment of building your own solution.

Our customers needed email features in their CRM, and the Nylas APls made it easy to build. We saved over 12 months of engineering time by building with Nylas.

Aaron George

Co-Founder, Lexicata (acquired by Clio)

With the data pulled from Nylas Parsing, you can transform your customer experience to give your application a timely and relevant reason to engage with your customers with every email they receive — increasing revenue, reducing churn, and improving retention rates. Request a demo today.