Send Personalized Emails from Clay

With Clay’s HTTP API column, you can push a unique, per-contact email straight into an Inflection Personalized Email Asset — so each contact receives their own version of one email, sent from one journey step. This connects Clay’s per-row personalization to Inflection’s sending, deliverability, and reporting. The flow: a Clay table (contact data and one HTML column per row) → an HTTP API column → Inflection’s Email Versions API. Each contact who has a version gets it at send time; everyone else gets the asset’s default email.

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Prerequisites

Before you begin, confirm you have:

• A Clay account with access to the HTTP API integration column.
• An Inflection account, and a Personalized Email Asset already created. Copy its asset ID from the asset URL (…/assets/email/per-user/<ASSET_ID>/versions) or the How to add versions tab.
• An Inflection API token — a Personal Access Token (PAT) from a connected app, or an OAuth access token. Both work as bearer tokens.
• Test contacts that already exist in your Inflection tenant. The API rejects versions for unknown contacts.

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Get Your Inflection Token

Create a PAT under Settings → Connected Apps — the step-by-step is in Get Your Personal Access Token. Copy the token and store it securely — you won’t be able to see it again.

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Prepare Your Clay Table

Your table needs one column for each field you’ll send: Use enrichment or an AI column (drawing on fields like first name, company, or title) to generate the Html column before the HTTP step.

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Configure the HTTP API Column

Click + to add a column, search for HTTP API, and select it. The column’s setup has a few sections — fill each one exactly as below.

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1. Account (Authentication)

The Account holds your Inflection token so it never sits in the table. Create it once and reuse it.

1. Click Select account → + Add account.
2. Under API Request Headers, add one row:
   • Key: Authorization
   • Value: Bearer <your token> — paste only the token after Bearer, with no quotes, no < or > or extra spaces.
3. Give the account a name (for example, Inflection PAT), save it, and select it.

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2. Column Mapping

Fill the request fields:

• Method: POST
• Endpoint: https://api.inflection.io/v1/email-versions
• Body: choose JSON and paste the following. Each /Column maps to that column’s value for the row:
  {
    "assetId": "YOUR_ASSET_ID",
    "email": "/Email",
    "subject": "/Subject",
    "preheader": "/Preheader",
    "html": "/Html"
  }
  

• Headers: add one key/value row —
  • Key: Content-Type
  • Value: application/json

Wrap string references in quotes ("email": "/Email"); leave numeric or date references unquoted. To expire a version automatically, add an expiresAt field (ISO-8601): either a literal "expiresAt": "2030-01-01T00:00:00Z", or map it to a Clay date column such as a “Date + 5 days” formula (unquoted). Omit the field entirely for a version that never expires.

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3. Retry on Failure

Leave Retry on failure off. A rejected version (for example, a missing unsubscribe link) is a data issue to fix in the row, not something a retry resolves — keeping it off makes failures visible.

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4. Run Settings

• Auto-run: off — so the column runs only when you click Run. This lets you test one row before pushing the whole table.
• Custom rate limit: optional. Set one if you’re pushing a large table and want to pace the requests.

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Test, Then Run

1. Click Run on a single row.
2. Confirm a 200 response. A stored version returns { "data": { "status": "stored" }, "meta": { "status": "SUCCESS" } }.
3. In Inflection, open the asset’s Versions tab and confirm the contact now shows a version.
4. Run the column across the full table.

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Optional: Create Contacts First

The Email Versions API rejects versions for contacts that don’t exist yet. If your Clay rows include new people, add an upstream HTTP API column that seeds them before the versions step — same Account, with:

• Method: POST
• Endpoint: https://api.inflection.io/v1/contacts
• Body: { "email": "/Email" }

Contact creation is asynchronous — allow a few seconds before the versions step runs.

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Troubleshooting

401 Unauthorized

• Confirm the Account header is exactly Authorization: Bearer <token> with no duplicated Bearer, quotes, or whitespace — a malformed value is the most common cause.
• Confirm the Endpoint is /v1/email-versions, not a /dash/... path.
• Confirm the token’s environment matches the host (preprod token → preprod host).

400 Bad Request

• Check the JSON — string values need quotes.
• Confirm assetId is a valid, existing Personalized Email Asset.

Version rejected

• Contact not found — the contact doesn’t exist in the tenant yet. Seed it first.
• Missing unsubscribe link — the Html is missing the literal {{unsubscribe_url}} token.
• Disallowed token — the Html contains a {{…}} token other than {{unsubscribe_url}} (often a Clay merge field that leaked through).
• Over size limit — the Html is larger than 500 KB. Keep it lean and use hosted image URLs instead of inline base64.

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Good to Know

• One version per contact, per asset. Re-sending updates that contact’s version.
• The default always covers the rest. Contacts without a version get the asset’s default email — never a blank send.
• Clay runs row by row. Large tables take time depending on your Clay rate limits.

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Additional Resources

• Personalized Email Asset — how the asset, versions, and default work
• Inflection MCP — push versions from an AI agent instead of Clay
• Clay HTTP API documentation