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Draft personal outreach emails from a list

Every contact in your sheet gets a short personalised email written into the row, ready for you to send.

Runs: Hourly
Apps: Google Sheets
AI: Yes, uses the built-in AI allowance
Access: read+write

Send this to your assistant

Create a ClickRuntime automation: every hour, for contacts in my Outreach sheet without a draft, write a short personal email based on their company and role and save the subject and body in the Email column.

Paste it into your assistant. It tells you what it will send or change before it runs live.

Add to ChatGPT Add to Claude

First time? Adding ClickRuntime to your assistant takes about two minutes.

Why use it

Why teams use this automation

Anyone who sends outreach from a spreadsheet knows the choice: a mail merge that reads like a mail merge, or an hour of writing individual emails to fifty contacts. Sales development reps, recruiters and founders doing partner outreach usually keep a sheet with name, company, role and a note on why this person matters. The notes never make it into the email because writing each one by hand does not scale.

Every hour, rows that have no draft yet are picked up. For each one the built-in AI writes a subject line and body using that row's fields, writes both back to the sheet and marks the row's status as drafted. Nothing is sent; the drafts wait in the sheet for you to read, edit and send yourself.

It works best when your sheet has at least one real piece of context per contact, such as a recent funding round, a talk they gave or a mutual connection.

What you get out of it

Personal emails at list scale
Fifty contacts with notes become fifty distinct drafts that reference what you actually know about each person. Response rates generally depend on relevance, and this gets relevance without an afternoon of typing. A rep can spend the saved hours on replies and follow-ups instead.
A human reviews every email before it is sent
Drafts live in the sheet, not in an outbox, so nothing leaves without your say-so. You catch the wrong company name or an awkward claim before it reaches a prospect, which protects your sender reputation.
No double drafting
Rows are marked once drafted, so a contact never gets a second version overwriting your edits. You can safely tweak a draft in place while the next batch is processed.
Quick starts for blank-page problems
Even when you rewrite half of a draft, starting from a decent subject and opening beats a blank compose window, especially for people who dread cold email and put the task off for weeks.
Everything stays in the sheet you already use
Status, drafts and notes sit in one row, so a teammate can see who has been drafted, who has been sent and who still needs a note, without another tool. It also means onboarding a new teammate takes a minute.

How it works

What happens, step by step

Every hour ClickRuntime reads your outreach Google Sheet.
It picks the contacts that don't have a draft yet.
AI writes a subject line and a short personal email using each person's name, role and company.
The draft is written into the row and the status is updated, ready for you to review and send.

Before it runs live

Connect your Google Sheets account and pick the spreadsheets it may use

What you get

RunsHourly

Draft personal outreach emails from a listtoday, 9:00Succeeded

Google Sheets · OutreachSubject: Quicker month-end at Northwind? Hi Casey, as Head of Finance at Northwind you probably…

Build your own

Need it to work differently?

This template is a starting point. Copy the prompt and change it, or describe a different automation from scratch, with your own conditions, more apps or an AI step. Your assistant writes it, tests it and runs it on ClickRuntime.

Your own rules
Conditions, thresholds, filters and exceptions, written the way you'd explain them to a colleague.
Any number of apps
One automation can read from one app and update several others. Over 248 apps are ready, and anything with an API works too.
AI where it helps
Summaries, classification, extraction and drafts use ClickRuntime's built-in AI, with no extra key.
On a schedule or on each event
Runs as often as every 5 minutes, or the moment an app sends an event, and keeps track of what it already handled.

Changes you can ask for

Run it at a different time, more or less often, or only on weekdays
Change what the AI looks for, or how it writes the result
Add another app, for example also send it to Slack
Combine it with other Google Sheets steps into one automation

Under the hood

The code that runs this automation

This is the Python script that runs each time the automation starts. Your AI assistant writes it for you when you send the prompt, and you allow each step in your assistant. To change how the automation works, describe the change to your assistant and it updates the script for you. For every function it can use, see the script reference.

personalised_outreach_emails_drafted_from_a_sheet.pyexample

from google.oauth2.credentials import Credentials
from googleapiclient.discovery import build
from clickruntime import on_trigger, credentials, ai

SHEET_ID = "your-spreadsheet-id"
SCHEMA = {"type": "object", "properties": {"subject": {"type": "string"}, "body": {"type": "string"}}, "required": ["subject", "body"]}

@on_trigger
def run(event):
    sheets = build("sheets", "v4", credentials=Credentials(credentials.connection("google", "work")), cache_discovery=False).spreadsheets()
    rows = sheets.values().get(spreadsheetId=SHEET_ID, range="Outreach!A2:E").execute().get("values", [])
    done = 0
    for i, row in enumerate(rows, start=2):
        name, email, company, role, drafted = (row + [""] * 5)[:5]
        if drafted or not email:
            continue
        d = ai.generate(f"Write a short, personal cold email (under 90 words) to {name}, {role} at {company}. "
                        "Offer a 15-minute call. No hype.", json_schema=SCHEMA, max_output_tokens=250).json
        sheets.values().update(spreadsheetId=SHEET_ID, range=f"Outreach!E{i}", valueInputOption="RAW",
                               body={"values": [[f"Subject: {d['subject']}\n\n{d['body']}"]]}).execute()
        done += 1
        if done == 20:
            break
    return {"drafted": done}

FAQ

Common questions

Does it send the emails for me?

No. It only writes the subject and body into the sheet and updates the status column. Sending stays a manual step, so you decide who gets what and when. This also avoids surprises with deliverability or sending limits.

Which columns does it need?

At minimum a name and an email or company, plus any context columns you want mentioned, and a status column it can use to skip finished rows. The more specific the context field, the less generic the draft sounds.

Do I need an OpenAI or Anthropic key for the writing?

No. The writing step uses ClickRuntime's built-in AI, so there is no separate key to create or pay for. Your Google account connection is the only credential needed, and it is stored as a secret.

What permissions does it need?

read+write. Nothing else in your accounts is used.

Does it need AI?

Yes. It uses ClickRuntime's built-in AI, so you don't need an OpenAI or Anthropic key. Every plan includes a monthly AI allowance.

How many runs does it use?

One run each time it runs (hourly). Checks that find nothing to do and stop right away aren't counted.

Can I change how it works?

Yes. Describe the change to your AI assistant, for example a different schedule, channel or filter. It updates the automation, tests it and tells you what changed.

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