Google Drive Business Card OCR to Gmail Lead Email | n8n

Turn business cards into lead emails automatically—using n8n + Google Drive OCR → Gmail

This n8n workflow watches a Google Drive folder for newly uploaded business card files, extracts contact details with OpenRouter (GPT-4o vision), logs the lead to Google Sheets, researches the prospect with Tavily, and generates a personalized Japanese outreach email draft in Gmail.

What this workflow does

• Monitors Google Drive: triggers when a new file is created in your selected business card folder.
• OCR + structured extraction: downloads the uploaded card and uses OpenRouter (GPT-4o) to extract company and contact details into structured JSON.
• Updates Google Sheets: appends or updates the extracted lead information in your chosen spreadsheet and sheet (with columns such as company and contact name).
• Pulls your offerings from Airtable: searches Airtable for your services/products and aggregates relevant records into a single list for later use.
• Prospect research + email drafting: uses an OpenRouter-powered agent with Tavily search to research the prospect’s company and draft a Japanese email body (optionally proposing a relevant service).
• Creates a Gmail draft: generates a draft addressed to the extracted email address, with a subject that includes the company and contact name.

Use cases

• Sales teams capturing leads by uploading scanned business cards into Google Drive.
• SaaS operators who want instant lead enrichment + a tailored Japanese outreach draft.
• Automation engineers building an OCR-to-CRM-like pipeline using Google Sheets and Gmail drafts.

Technical details

• n8n Trigger: Google Drive “new file created”
• OCR/LLM: OpenRouter with GPT-4o vision → structured JSON output
• Lead logging: Google Sheets (append/update)
• Offer/service aggregation: Airtable
• Research: Tavily inside an OpenRouter-powered agent
• Email output: Gmail draft creation