n8n Cold Email Automation: Google Sheets + Gmail + Gemini

Automate Gemini-powered cold emails from Google Sheets—plus timed follow-ups and live reply tracking in Slack

This n8n workflow runs every day to generate personalized cold emails with Google Gemini, send them via Gmail, schedule two follow-ups based on when the first email was sent, and continuously monitor Gmail for replies to update your Google Sheets—including a Slack alert for hot leads.

What this workflow does

• Daily 9AM execution: at 9AM, it launches three parallel paths—new sends, Follow-up 1 checks, and Follow-up 2 checks—using the same Google Sheets “Leads” list.
• New lead processing: pulls pending leads from Google Sheets, validates required fields, then scrapes each company website using an HTTP request and cleans the page text for prompting.
• Gemini email generation: sends company details, cleaned website content, and your service to Gemini to produce a JSON subject and personalized email body, then sanitizes the output to remove leftover placeholders.
• Gmail sending + sheet updates: sends the cold email via Gmail and updates the matching Google Sheets row (by contact_email) with status, timestamps, and follow-up tracking fields.
• Timed follow-ups: selects leads whose sent_at is at least 3 days old (Follow-up 1) or 7 days old (Follow-up 2), sends prewritten follow-ups via Gmail, and marks sequence completion in Google Sheets.
• Reply monitoring + Slack alerts: polls Gmail for new unread inbox messages, matches the sender against Google Sheets leads, and if not already marked replied, updates the row and posts a hot-lead notification to Slack.

Use cases

• SaaS teams running consistent cold outreach using n8n, Google Sheets, and Gmail.
• Automation engineers needing structured follow-up sequences (3-day and 7-day) tied to lead status.
• Operators who want live reply visibility with Slack notifications and sheet-based tracking.

Technical details

• Google Sheets (leads list + row updates via contact_email)
• Gmail (send emails + trigger/poll unread replies)
• Google Gemini (generate subject and personalized body in JSON)
• HTTP request (scrape and clean company website text)
• Slack (hot-lead notifications)
• if, code, sticky note nodes for logic, data handling, and workflow documentation