Send email notifications to Slack channels automatically

In this integration article, we will show the steps on how to automatically send email notifications to your Slack channels with zero coding knowledge.

What is Slack?

Founded in 2013, Slack has become one of the most popular collaborating platforms for an organization. Slack Technologies is now owned by Salesforce. Slack provides dedicated channels for different topics.

Did you know that Slack stands for "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge"?

Big brands like Netflix and Uber use Slack for their team collaboration. Slack is not just instant messaging but it also provides features such as:

• Audio and video calls
• Sharing of any type of document
• Integrations with other applications
• Automatic workflow building

In a nutshell, Slack provides better organization for communication and is more secure than email.

Why should you integrate Parseur with Slack?

Parseur is a powerful document processing and email parsing tool that automates data extraction from emails and PDFs. Parseur is integrated with thousands of applications such as Zapier, Power Automate and Integromat.

Slack can be the perfect platform to manage a business and stay up to date with all kinds of notifications and by integrating it with Parseur, you can send real-time email notifications in Slack.

Our customers use the integration of Parseur and Slack to receive notifications for various business situations, such as:

• When a new booking is made on their website
• When they receive a new sales order on their e-commerce website,
• A new alert has been generated by the monitoring system

In this way, they can stay up to date with all kinds of notifications.

Use case example: Get a Slack message every time a customer orders some food for delivery

For this article, we will use the example of a food delivery company that receives thousands of food orders via email on a daily basis. The company has a Slack channel for all its drivers. Each time they receive an email, it is copied and posted manually in the channel. The driver can then see all the order details and coordinate with each other to deliver the food.

But manually copying full email notifications received via email into your Slack channel isn't optimal because:

1. it can get overwhelming with long messages filling up your chat queue.
2. it's not an efficient use of your team's time.

The solution: use an email parser to automatically send notifications to Slack

Let Parseur automatically extract out the important data from email notifications. Parseur will then push the right parsed text to your Slack channel in real time where your team can take action on it.

Step 1: Create your free Parseur account and mailbox

Parseur is free to start with all the features available. For this article, we will use the option "food delivery orders" to create the mailbox. However, no matter in which industry you are in, Parseur can help you automate your business. Custom templates can also be created and parsed with Point & Click.

Step 2: Forward the document to your Parseur mailbox

Note: We recommend that you send emails and documents from your original client emails such as Gmail or Yahoo.

Parseur will receive the food order confirmation within 10 seconds.

Step 3: Data is extracted automatically with Parseur

With Parseur multi-template feature, data is parsed automatically with zero parsing rules. Parseur supports multiple food ordering platforms and thus, can processed those documents and emails instantly.

The parsed results from the food orders will appear like this:

Option 1: Using Slack incoming Webhook feature to send simple messages

You can send messages directly to your Slack channel via Webhook. All you have to do is create a Slack app and activate Webhook on it.

You will then be able to generate a Webhook URL to create the integration between Slack and Parseur. Select the Slack channel where you want to send the email notifications automatically.

One limitation to keep in mind here is that you can only send 1 field which is called text. So, you will have to group all your messages into one single field in your Parseur mailbox.

You will have to create a custom template by highlighting all the data that you want to send to Slack together and create a field called text. Your parsed data will appear like this:

Once done, go to "export" and click on "webhook" and "new webhook". You can then paste the URL generated from Slack into the target URL.

Now, you can re-process any document and the email data will be sent to the Slack channel.

As you have noticed, the direct integration via Webhook is limited. If you need to do more complex workflows, you can use Zapier, Integromat or by using the post processing feature of Parseur.

Option 2: Using Zapier to send email notifications to Slack

How this email to Slack integration work with Zapier?

1. A new email notification is received in your Parseur mailbox
2. Parseur extracts the relevant information
3. Parseur sends the data to Zapier
4. Zapier formats the message sends it to your Slack Channel

Zapier is an automation tool which connects different applications together. On your Parseur mailbox, go to "export", click on "zapier" and look for "slack"

This will redirect you to your Zapier dashboard.

Connect Zapier with Parseur

Select your Parseur account and mailbox so that Zapier can retrieve your parsed data.

Connect Zapier with Slack

Zapier will ask you to log into your Slack account and choose the channel where you want to send the extracted data.

From there, you will be able to customize the message that you want to send to the Slack channel.

Send a test from Zapier to Slack

You can send a test trigger to Slack to check whether the automation workflow has been successful.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the test has been successful. From now on, every document that is sent to this Parseur mailbox will be processed automatically and, a notification will be sent to this Slack channel.

We recommend that you create an auto forwarding rule so that all your emails and documents are sent to your Parseur mailbox. This integration helps you and your team saves hours of manual work and speed up the business process. With the Zapier integration, you don't need to create a custom template. The whole process is automated.

As mentioned in the beginning of the article, you can also use the post processing code for more advanced workflows. Our support article will help you get started with advanced data post processing.