CASE STUDY
Automated school outreach engine for a children’s magazine
Context
Historically, building a list of relevant school contacts for the magazine publication was manual and inconsistent: exporting raw data from the government’s GIAS database, copying school websites by hand, guessing who to email, and then uploading ad‑hoc lists into our email platform. This limited our reach and made it hard to run systematic, personalised campaigns to promote free samples and school subscriptions.
Solution
I designed and implemented an automated workflow in n8n that turns raw school data into a clean, campaign‑ready contact list for Klaviyo. The workflow:
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Ingests and cleans a CSV export from GIAS, filters for our target segments (e.g. primary schools in specific regions), and normalises school website URLs.
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Uses rule‑based logic to construct a natural‑sounding salutation from messy title, first‑name, and last‑name fields (e.g. “Ms Rooney”, “Mr Harris”), and safely handles edge cases like initials or missing titles.
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Crawls each school’s homepage and contact page to extract all visible email addresses, then applies a prioritisation algorithm (contact‑page address > named person > office@ > the official GIAS email) to choose a single “best” contact per school while also logging alternatives for debugging.
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Combines everything into a final CSV containing: school details, the chosen email, salutation, role, region/phase, and the source of the email (contact page, homepage, GIAS), ready for import into Klaviyo as a segmented list.
Outcome
This workflow turned a process that would have taken days of manual research into an automated job I can re‑run whenever we want to expand or refresh our school pipeline. It enables much more personalised, high‑volume outreach: each school receives emails addressed to a realistic contact with a tailored salutation and context about their school, rather than a generic “Dear Sir/Madam” blast. It also gives us a repeatable way to maintain data quality over time, since the same logic can be rerun when school leadership or email structures change.
Follow-up workflows
To close the loop from outreach to fulfilment, I’ve added a second layer of automation around responses and form submissions. A follow‑up n8n workflow monitors our inbox and website forms: when a “Free school sample” form is submitted, it automatically creates a free‑sample order in Shopify, tags the contact appropriately in Klaviyo, and enrols them in a tailored onboarding sequence for schools trialling the magazine. If a school submits a subscription order form instead, the workflow creates a paid order in Shopify and generates a matching invoice in Xero, so finance and fulfilment stay aligned without manual data entry.
Together, these workflows act as an automated school‑outreach engine: they identify and prioritise the right contacts, deliver personalised cold campaigns at scale, and then seamlessly move interested schools into fulfilment and nurture sequences with minimal manual work.
Impact