Make.com tutorial for beginners: your first automation in 20 minutes

Sun Jun 28 2026 00:00:00 GM

By the end of this page you'll have a real automation running: every time a certain kind of email lands in your inbox, Make writes it to a spreadsheet — sender, subject, date — without you touching anything.

No code. About 20 minutes. Two free Google apps you almost certainly already have.

I picked this build on purpose. It's small enough to finish in one sitting, but it teaches the three things every Make automation is made of: a trigger, an action, and the mapping that carries data from one to the other. Learn those three and you can build almost anything.

What you'll need

A free Make account (sign up takes two minutes)
A Google account with Gmail and Google Sheets (both free)
A blank Google Sheet with three column headers in row 1: Sender, Subject, Date

That's it. Make it the blank sheet now — name it something like "Email log" and add those three headers across row 1. You'll point Make at it in a minute.

A quick word on how Make thinks

Make calls each automation a scenario. A scenario is a left-to-right chain of modules — little circles on a canvas. The first module is always the trigger (the thing that starts the run). Every module after it is an action.

One thing worth knowing before you start: on August 27, 2025, Make switched its usage unit from "operations" to "credits." Every module that runs uses credits, and the free plan gives you 1,000 a month. That's plenty to learn on and run a couple of small automations. Don't overthink it yet — just know that's the meter.

Step 1 — Create the scenario

Log into Make. On the left sidebar, click Scenarios, then the purple Create a new scenario button in the top right.

You'll land on a blank canvas with a single big + in the middle. That plus is where your trigger goes.

Step 2 — Add the Gmail trigger

Click the +. A search box opens. Type Gmail and click the Gmail app.

A list of Gmail actions appears. Choose Watch emails — this is the trigger that fires when new mail arrives.

Now connect your account. Click Create a connection, sign in with Google, and grant the permissions Make asks for. (Google may show a "this app isn't verified" notice — that's standard for Make's connection; continue through it.)

Once connected, configure the trigger:

Folder: pick the Gmail label or folder you want to watch. Watching your whole inbox works, but it's noisier — a dedicated label (say, Receipts or Leads) makes this far more useful.
Criteria: choose All emails for now so your test definitely catches something.
Maximum number of results: set it to 1 while testing. You can raise it later.

Click OK. Make will ask where to start — choose From now on. That tells it to ignore your existing mail and only watch for new messages.

Step 3 — Add the Google Sheets action

Hover over the right edge of the Gmail module. A small + appears. Click it.

Search Google Sheets and pick it, then choose the action Add a Row.

Connect your Google account again (same steps as before). Then:

Spreadsheet: select the "Email log" sheet you created.
Sheet name: pick the tab (usually Sheet1).
Table contains headers: set this to Yes. Make will read your header row and show you Sender, Subject, and Date as fields to fill.

Step 4 — Map the data (this is the important part)

This is the step that makes the whole thing work, so go slowly here.

You'll see your three columns — Sender, Subject, Date — each with an empty box. Click into the Sender box. A panel pops up showing every piece of data the Gmail trigger captured, with a little Gmail icon.

Into Sender, click the field Sender name (or From) from that panel.
Into Subject, click Subject.
Into Date, click Date.

What you're doing is wiring the trigger's output into the action's input. Those colored tags in the boxes aren't text you typed — they're live references that fill in with each email's real data when the scenario runs.

Click OK.

Step 5 — Test it

Send yourself a test email to whichever label you're watching. (If you're watching a label, remember to apply that label to the test message.)

Back in Make, click Run once in the bottom-left. The scenario runs immediately. Both modules should get a little number bubble showing "1," and a new row should appear in your spreadsheet a second later.

Open the sheet. There's your email — sender, subject, date — written automatically. That's a working automation.

Step 6 — Turn it on

Right now the scenario only runs when you click "Run once." To make it run on its own:

Set the schedule. Click the clock icon near the Run button and choose an interval. On the free plan the minimum is every 15 minutes — fine for this.
Flip the big toggle in the bottom-left from OFF to ON.

Done. From now on, every matching email logs itself while you do something else.

Troubleshooting the three things that usually go wrong

"Run once" pulls nothing. The trigger only sees emails that arrive after the "From now on" start point — it won't grab old mail. Send a fresh test email to the watched label, then run again. If you're watching a label, double-check the test message actually has that label applied.

A connection or permissions error. This is almost always Google scopes. Delete the connection, recreate it, and make sure you tick every permission box Google offers during sign-in. If you skipped one, Make can't read your mail or write to your sheet.

The row appears but a column is blank. Your mapping didn't land. Open the Google Sheets module, check that "Table contains headers" is Yes, and re-map the empty field by clicking the matching item from the Gmail data panel. A blank column means that box is empty, not that the data is missing.

Where to go from here

You now know the pattern. Swap the pieces and you've got a different automation:

Watch a Typeform or Google Form instead of Gmail, and log responses.
Add a third module — a Slack or email action — to get pinged the moment a row is added.
Save email attachments to Google Drive (this one needs an extra module called an Iterator to handle multiple files — a good next lesson).

The free plan carries you through all of this: 1,000 credits a month and up to two active scenarios. When you outgrow it — more scenarios, faster than 15-minute runs — the Core plan is $9/month for 10,000 credits, unlimited scenarios, and 1-minute intervals. Pro at $16/month adds priority execution and better logging; Teams is $29/month. Annual billing knocks roughly 15% off. (All prices in USD.)

For most people learning automation, Make is the right first tool. It's visual, the free tier is genuinely usable, and you can see your data move across the canvas as it runs. Create a free Make account and build the email logger above — 20 minutes from now you'll have something real running.

If you're weighing Make against the more technical option, I broke that decision down in n8n vs Make.com.

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