How to Send Automated Follow-Up Emails in Airtable

Follow-up emails come in handy in all sorts of situations.

Maybe you’ve sent a proposal but haven’t heard back. Perhaps you're managing a project and need an update from someone before the next milestone. Or maybe a client who seemed interested has suddenly gone quiet.

A well-timed follow-up can be the difference between a missed opportunity and a closed deal, or between a stalled project and one that stays on track.

Whether you're checking in with a sales lead, waiting on a teammate's update, or trying to re-engage a client, follow-ups help keep things moving.

In this article, I’ll walk you through how to set up automated follow-up emails in Airtable, so you can stay on top of things without having to manually chase people down.

Say you’ve emailed a lead, but after several days, there’s still no response. Instead of constantly checking dates and sending reminders yourself, you can let Airtable handle the follow-up for you—automatically.

Here’s how to set it up step by step:

1: Set Up Your Airtable Table

To make sure your automation runs smoothly, you’ll need these fields in your table.

2: Set a Daily Schedule

Start by creating a new automation and choosing “At a scheduled time” as the trigger.

Set it to run every day—say, 9 AM—so Airtable checks daily if any leads need a follow-up.

3: Find the Right Leads

Next, add a “Find records” step.

Here, you’ll filter records where:

• Status is “Email Sent”
• Days Since Email is greater than or equal to 7

This step will grab all leads who got your email but haven’t replied in 7 days.

4: Add a Repeating Group (for Each Record Found)

Now, for each record found in the step above, you’ll run two actions:

• Action 1 Send an email
  To: the email field
  Subject: “Just following up on my last message”
  Body: Something like “Hi {Name}, just wanted to check in and see if you had any questions about my previous email…”

  

• Action 2 Update the record’s status to “Followed Up 7 Days”, so that Airtable knows this person already got a follow-up.

  

What About More Follow-Ups?

If you want to send a second or third follow-up later (like at 14 days or 21 days), you’ll need to create separate automations for each one, with slightly different conditions.

For example:

• Status is “Followed Up 7 Days”
• Days Since Email is greater than or equal to 14

Why can’t we just do it all in one automation?

Because Airtable only allows one repeating group per automation. That’s the limitation.

5: Update Status When Someone Replies

To automatically update the status when a reply comes in (so you don’t accidentally send a follow-up to someone who’s already responded), here’s how you can set that up using Airtable’s “When email received” trigger.

Option 1: If You’re Using Outlook

Outlook has a built-in trigger in Airtable Automations:

• Choose the “When email received” trigger from Outlook.

• Select the folder you want to monitor (for example, your Inbox or a specific folder).

• Use a “Find records” action to look up any records in your Leads table that match the sender’s email address.

• Then use a “Repeating group” to go through each record found and update the Status to “Replied.”

Option 2: Generic Email Listener

If you’re not using Outlook, you can still make this work using the generic email trigger, but you'll need a business plan or higher to use it.

• Airtable will give you a unique email address.

• Set up your email provider (like Gmail) to automatically forward certain emails to that address. For example, you could forward any replies from leads to this special Airtable email.

• Then, just like in Option 1, use the “Find records” step to look for matching email addresses.

• Finally, use a “Repeating group” to update the matching records’ status to “Replied.”

And that’s it! You’ll have a fully automated flow that will handle your follow-ups and stop them when someone replies.