The Project:
Provide a Make automation solution to send and track declination letters to potential clients. This high volume custom solution carried the "never fail" requirement.
The Tools:
- Make
- Monday
- Postmark
The Solution:
Establish a two stage Monday CRM status column automation to mitigate the cost of listening to a highly active "tier 1" usage column with thousands of updates directly from Make. A sub-action status column listens to the main status column for free, while only the specific triggering status change counts against the enterprise usage allotment. Start the Make scenario with a trigger that listens to the secondary column.
Validation
Upon firing, gather the item's data and gate through an email validation router. If the email proves valid, move on; if not, reset the status columns and notify the user the email is not valid.
Send & Retry
If the email is valid, proceed to send. Create a personalized HTML email within the Postmark module and send, with retry built in to attempt three times and avoid scenario failure.
Confirmation
A sleep module allows both Postmark actions and API interactions to fully resolve. Retrieve email send data from Postmark, with three retries built in (sometimes the first ping failed even with the 20 second delay). Upon success, update the CRM entry with a copy of the email and a timestamp, notify the intake coordinators, and move the contact to declined.
The Result:
Every declination notice now carries a timestamped, retrievable record of delivery — removing any ambiguity about whether and when a client was notified. The two-stage listening design also kept this high-volume automation sustainable: a direct connection to the status column, with its thousands of entries and roughly 18 status options changing daily, would have burned a full month's Make spend in about four hours. The sub-column approach cut that same usage down to a fraction of the budget, with zero loss in reliability.