n8n Workflow: Auto Draft Weekly Follow‑ups for Quiet Leads

Auto-draft weekly follow-up emails for quiet leads—every Monday

This n8n workflow automatically finds your quiet leads in an n8n Data Table, generates a fixed-template follow-up in Gmail as drafts (not sent), marks them as followed up, and emails you a summary reminder to review and send.

What this workflow does

• Runs on a schedule: executes every Monday at 10:00 via a schedule trigger.
• Loads leads from your Data Table: pulls rows where followed_up_at is empty.
• Filters for “quiet” leads: keeps leads whose last_contact_at is older than your configured quiet period, and excludes leads that have replied or are unsubscribed.
• Prioritizes and caps volume: sorts by oldest last_contact_at and limits results to your weekly maximum.
• Drafts plain-text emails: generates a fixed-template message, inserting the lead’s first name and your sender/company details.
• Creates Gmail drafts: saves a draft email for each lead addressed in Gmail—no automatic sending.
• Prevents duplicates: updates each lead’s row with followed_up_at so they aren’t drafted again.
• Notifies you for manual sending: sends you a Gmail message listing drafted leads so you can review and send them yourself.

Use cases

• SaaS teams following up with leads who went quiet after an initial touch.
• Solo founders who want consistent weekly outreach without bulk automation sending.
• Automation engineers building predictable, template-based lead follow-up flows in n8n.

Technical details

• Schedule Trigger (runs Mondays at 10:00)
• Data Table (reads leads; updates followed_up_at)
• Gmail nodes (OAuth2 credential; “Save as a draft”; notify owner)
• Code, Set, Sticky Note (for data shaping and clarity)

Setup requires: an n8n Data Table with fields like email, name, last_contact_at, followed_up_at, replied, and unsubscribed; plus Gmail OAuth2 and your configurable settings (quietDays, maxPerWeek, senderName, companyName, ownerEmail).