The Scenario
The campaign goes live in three days. The content lead finished the variants this morning — ten rows in an Excel workbook: Subject, Body, and Segment columns. Before anything is scheduled or sent, the account manager and the legal reviewer both need to approve the drafts. The process requires the drafts to be staged in Zoho Mail so the reviewers can see exactly what will be sent. Each draft ID needs to be captured back in the workbook so approvals can be tracked by row.
The bad version:
- Copy the subject from row 2, open Zoho Mail, click Compose, paste the subject, copy the body from the workbook, paste the body into the compose window, type the recipient from the Segment column into the To field, click Save Draft, find the draft in the drafts folder, somehow locate its draft ID from the Zoho Mail interface (which does not display message IDs prominently), go back to the workbook, paste the ID into column D.
- Repeat for all 10 rows, with the additional problem that Zoho Mail's compose view does not show you the message ID immediately after saving — you have to retrieve it from the draft list separately.
- Spend an hour on draft administration instead of anything that moves the campaign forward.
The reviewers need the drafts staged before end of day. The content lead needs the IDs in the workbook for the approval tracking workflow. Both requirements are straightforward — but the manual path to satisfying both at once is not.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent embedded in your Excel workbook. It reads the campaign rows and creates the Zoho Mail drafts through the integration, then writes the resulting draft IDs back into the workbook automatically. Open the sidebar, describe the operation.
Create one Zoho Mail draft for each row in this Excel workbook using the Subject column as the email subject and the Body column as the email body, then write all resulting draft message IDs into column D
What You Get
- One Zoho Mail draft created per row, staged in the drafts folder and ready for reviewer access.
- Each draft carries the exact subject and body from the corresponding workbook row.
- The draft message ID written back into column D for each row, so approvals can be tracked against specific draft IDs.
- Rows where the subject or body is empty get a "Missing content" note in column D instead of a draft ID.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Body fields mix HTML and plain text across rows
Before creating drafts, check the Body column — for any row where the value contains HTML tags, leave it as-is; for rows with plain text, wrap the content in paragraph tags so all drafts render consistently in the Zoho Mail compose view — then create a draft for each row and write the draft ID into column D
Some rows are missing subjects
Create Zoho Mail drafts only for rows where the Subject column is not empty — write "Missing subject" into column D for any row without a subject, and create the draft and write its ID into column D for all valid rows
The recipient needs to be set based on the Segment column
Create a Zoho Mail draft for each row in this workbook — use Subject as the email subject, Body as the body, and look up the corresponding recipient email address from the Segments worksheet based on the Segment column value — write each resulting draft ID into column D
Validate, normalize body formatting, set recipients by segment, and create all drafts in one shot
Check all rows for missing Subject or Body values and mark those "Skipped" in column D — normalize plain-text Body entries to basic HTML — look up the recipient email from the Segments worksheet using the Segment column — then create a Zoho Mail draft for each valid row and write the draft ID into column D
One prompt gets the drafts staged and the IDs recorded so the review-and-approval cycle can start immediately.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with email campaign content ready to stage as drafts, then ask it to create the draft set. See also: Create drafts from an Excel workbook for team review. Or return to the Zoho Mail hub.