Capture Every Email Lead From Your Inbox Using 17hats & Zapier

By Evan Schmidt, photographer, 17hats Ambassador. Adapted from his feature in the September 2026 issue of The Journey.

Last fall a woman emailed Evan Schmidt directly. A mutual client had recommended his studio for headshots, so she skipped the website and just wrote to him.

He read the message between sessions, thought “I’ll log this into 17hats tonight,” and got on with his day. That night turned into a busy week. Three weeks later she followed up to ask whether he was still taking bookings, and he had no memory of the original email at all.

He got lucky. She wrote again. Plenty of people don’t.

Forms only catch the people who use your website

17hats already handles website leads well. Somebody fills out a form, and a contact record shows up in your account within seconds without you doing anything.

But a form can’t help with the referral who emails you directly, or the past client who forwards your name to a friend, or the person who replies to your newsletter to ask about pricing. Those land in your inbox like everything else, and getting them into your system has always depended on you remembering to type them in.

Which you will do, most of the time. It’s the exceptions that cost you, and the exceptions tend to happen during the weeks you’re busiest, which are also the weeks the leads are worth the most.

Evan’s fix doesn’t remove the judgment call. He still reads the email and decides it’s a lead. What it removes is the retyping, and retyping is the part that gets put off until tonight.

The five steps

1. A dedicated inbox. He set up an alias inside his regular Gmail, something like leads@mydomain.com. Its only job is to receive messages he forwards to it. When he spots a lead, he forwards it right then, which takes about two seconds and works from a phone in a parking lot.

That small reframing is most of the value. The task stops being “log this properly in the CRM when I get back to my desk” and becomes “hit forward.”

2. Zapier watches the inbox. Zapier is a connector service that moves information between apps. A “Zap” is one automation that runs continuously. His watches the leads inbox around the clock, and when a forwarded message arrives it grabs the body and passes it along.

3. An AI step pulls out the details. Zapier’s built-in AI tool reads the email and extracts the name and contact information. Evan wrote a custom prompt telling it exactly what to look for and, importantly, to ignore his own name and signature, which show up all over a forwarded thread. Without that instruction you end up creating a contact record for yourself, which he found out the hard way.

4. The contact gets created. Zapier checks whether the person already exists in his account. If not, it makes a new contact with the details from the email.

5. He gets a link. Zapier’s 17hats connection can create contacts but not full projects, so Evan still opens the record and starts the lead project himself. The last step emails him a direct link to the new contact, so that’s one click instead of searching through hundreds of names.

Is it worth setting up?

The time saved per lead is genuinely small. A minute, maybe two, of typing.

The thing it actually buys is that logging a lead no longer competes with everything else at nine at night. For a business where responding quickly decides who gets the booking, Evan says that has meant real jobs he’d otherwise have lost to his own inbox.

Zapier’s free plan covers a lot of small business use cases. He’s on a paid plan at $20 a month, which he considers reasonable against the hours it saves across everything else he’s automated with it. If you’ve ever built a workflow in 17hats, the logic will feel familiar.

A few questions people ask

Why do lead capture forms miss leads?
They only catch people who visit your site and choose to fill one out. Referrals, direct emails, DMs and forwarded introductions all arrive outside the form, and those are usually your warmest prospects.

Do you have to pay for Zapier?
Not necessarily. The free plan covers many small business automations. Paid plans start around $20 a month and are usually justified once you’re running more than one or two Zaps.

How much time does this actually save?
Per lead, a minute or two. The real return is the leads you stop losing because logging them no longer depends on you remembering at the end of a long day.

If you want to try the smallest version of this, set up the alias and forward the next inquiry that hits your inbox. You’ll know within a week whether the habit sticks, and you can add the Zapier steps after that.

17hats keeps lead capture, contacts, projects and workflows in one account, so once a lead is in the system everything after it is already built. Start a free 7-day trial.

About the author

Evan Schmidt — in his own words:

“I left the corporate world to pursue photography in a way that supported the very types of businesses I’d led myself. For 15 years, I built teams, drove strategy, managed budgets, and answered for results. That experience is folded into my approach to photography, because it’s part of who I am.

My goal is simple: to help my clients achieve success through photos that move them toward their goals.

As a 17hats Ambassador, my goal is to share the knowledge I’ve gained as I’ve scaled my business with others in the community, so we can grow together!”

Evan’s Email Lead Automation guide is available in the 17hats Marketplace.

This article is adapted from Evan’s feature in the September 2026 issue of The Journey, 17hats’ magazine for solo business owners. Read the full issue here.