Automate Your Emails in Minutes: Make.com + Google Sheets + ChatGPT

What you'll build

A customized cold email automation. You could take the paid route and subscribe to Apollo or Instantly - or you can build it yourself and keep full control. This one takes rows from my cold call list (company name, category, email), has ChatGPT draft a customized email for each one - company name in the subject line, pitch tailored to the category (a day spa gets scheduling massages and spa treatments, a real estate agency gets automated property listing updates) - and drops them as Gmail drafts ready to send. It's a simple way to send 50 emails at a time without individually crafting each one.

What you'll need

A Make.com account
A Google Sheet with your lead list - mine has company name, phone number, website URL, category, owner name, and email
An OpenAI/ChatGPT connection in Make
A Gmail connection in Make

Step 1: Prep your lead sheet

Copy your lead data into a clean sheet - no headers or anything. The automation only actually uses three columns: the company name, the category, and the email address. Leave one column (J in my setup) empty as the status column - that's how the automation knows what's already been processed.

Step 2: Add the Google Sheets module

Add a Google Sheets → Get range values module and connect it to your sheet. Mine is called "outbound email automation," sheet name "main" (yours is probably Sheet1). Set the range:

A1:J25

Run it in batches of 25. You could extend the range, but at 100 rows it tends to error out somewhere mid-process - 25 at a time is just smoother.

Step 3: Add two filters

Between the sheet and ChatGPT, add filters so you're not processing junk:

J equals (empty) - if the status column has nothing in it, the row is good to send. If it says "completed" or "drafted," it gets skipped.
H contains @ - H is my email column. When emails get pulled by ChatGPT or scraped, you sometimes get rows without a valid address. This filter makes sure it's a real email before anything gets drafted.

Step 4: Set up the ChatGPT module

Add a ChatGPT Generate a completion module. GPT-4.1 mini works perfectly for this - it's small and it's cheap.

System role - the standing instructions. Mine starts:

You are an email writing assistant for Austin who helps small local businesses
with AI automation such as chatbots, voice agents, and workflow tools.

Then give it a template to work from - mine opens "Hi [company name], I'm Austin…" and ChatGPT customizes the business-type line and the top bullet per company. For cold email it's best to keep a consistent format and customize a little, rather than letting it freestyle - enough that it doesn't read as the same blast email, without going off-script. Also tell it to generate the subject:

The subject line must always follow the exact format: Quick question about [company name]

User role - this is where the changing data points go. I only feed it two things from the sheet: the company name and the business type. (You could also pass flags like "has chatbot / needs chatbot" to tailor it further - that's the V2.)

Step 5: Parse the JSON

Add a Parse JSON module after ChatGPT. Gmail can't take the raw ChatGPT result directly - this just cleans it up so the subject and body map properly.

Step 6: Create the Gmail drafts

Add a Gmail Create a draft module. You could send directly, but it's better to double-check each one before hitting send.

To: the email column (H)
Subject: the parsed subject from ChatGPT
Body type: raw HTML (that's the default - keep it)
Content: the parsed body

Step 7: Run once and check

Hit Run once. It picks up only the rows that aren't completed and have a valid @ - you can watch the filters do their job - and the customized drafts land in your Gmail ready for review.

That's all. You can obviously build off this workflow, but this gets you 50 tailored emails at a time without typing a single one. Good luck and happy building.

Resources

Make.com - https://www.make.com