I hope that if you apply some of the tasks automation, I will show you today, you’ll save at least 10 hours a month of your work.
If you’re a digital business or startup, I will assume you know Zapier, a tool that lets you connect your apps to automate routinary tasks.
Personally, I think Zapier is one of the most memorable software products out there. It’s a great example of building something people love so much they will talk about it and they will come up with their own use cases.
Some interesting facts about Zapier, at least to me are:
It’s a 50 million ARR business profitable since 2014 with a seed round of 1,2 million.
The company hired Jonathan Rochelle as its Chief Product Officer, the co-creator of Google Docs and the person behind iconic Google products like Classroom, and Forms. Such hire, along with the virtuous cycle Zapier has created of connecting more apps to build more use cases that would drive more users, so more apps would like an integration with Zapier, has led to an explosive growth:
Also, Zapier is recognized to be a fully remote company, with hires from over 50 countries. The company’s culture went viral when they offered a de-location program, which offered $10,000 to employees who decided to leave the Bay Area, known for its high costs of living.
As you know more about Zapier—from its exponential growth and promising future to its culture— we will show you some cool automation ideas you, as a digital business, can implement to make your life happier. By the way, Zapier comes from “Happier” and API.
Zapier and Hubspot
Hubspot CRM is a great free tool that I’d recommend virtually to any B2B or SaaS business.
One great automation I love is that Hubspot lets you sync your Facebook Leads Ads contacts.
. Once you connect your Facebook Lead Ads contacts to Hubspot you can send them anywhere with Zapier.
We actually wrote a blog post to do that: Automatically send your Facebook Lead Ads contacts to Google Sheets—for free
An automation idea with Zapier could be sending those new contacts to a Google Sheet and create a dashboard or report with Google Data Studio, Google’s free dashboarding tool.
We’ve got a tutorial about that, too. Think of a dashboard like this one, but showing your Lead Ads data:
As this dashboard syncs with a Google Sheet, you may simply create a new row every time you get a new lead from Facebook Lead Ads.
Zapier and Shopify
Shopify is the leading e-commerce provider and has awesome use cases with Zapier.
As shown with HubSpot, you could log every new order into a Google Sheet and create an automatic report with Google Data Studio.
Or you could send your new contacts to an email marketing list to perform up-sells, down-sales or cross-sales campaigns.
Some time ago Shopify announced it would end its partnership with Mailchimp due to poor customer experience, which represented a great opportunity for email marketing tools like Mailerlite, Sendgrid, Active Campaign, and Klaviyo.
Another great example and use case is that for digital products the purchase happens on Shopify, you’re hosting your product somewhere else.
That’s the case of Thinkifick, a platform to host, create, and sell your online courses. The company wrote an article on how to enroll a student after purchase on Shopify.
If you want more use cases about how to use Zapier for e-commerce, GrowthSpark shares the integrations templates (aka zaps) for Shopify with multiple tools:
- Adding Shopify Customers to a MailChimp List
- Adding Shopify Customers to ActiveCampaign
- Adding Shopify Customers as HubSpot Contacts
- Adding Shopify Orders to Google Sheet
- Creating Trello Cards from Shopify Orders
- Creating Todoist Tasks from Shopify Orders
- Adding Shopify Customers to Zendesk
- Adding Shopify Customers to Infusionsoft
- Adding Shopify Customers to Salesforce
- ending a Promoter Survey to Shopify Customers
- Sending Trustpilot Invitations to Shopify Customers
- Sending SurveyMethods Surveys to Shopify Customers
Zapier and Airtable
If you’re a content marketer or you’re pushing hard on the content you will realize that there are many details that go beyond writing. As part of your daily tasks, you should include:
- Doing keyword research
- Writing content
- Design and on-page SEO optimization
- Content promotion
- Content calendar and reviews
- Measurement
Content marketing is a process and should be treated like that.
If this is your case, using Zapier and Airtable might save you dozens of hours.
If you don’t know Airtable, it’s, as they call themselves, spreadhseets on steroids. But such a definition is vague.
To me, Airtable may replace most of your productivity and collaboration tasks.
One of the most common use cases is content calendars. Just like this tutorial shows:
You may use Zapier to send notifications via email or SMS when something on your Airtable workflow changes so your team is aligned, on time. This tutorial from Jimmy Daly explains the whole process with great detail.
Zapier and Mailchimp
Maybe, the most common Zapier use case is email automation and notifications.
It’s specially useful when leading Ads platforms offer lead forms already. If you’re not familiar with them, here’s an introductory video for each of them:
Google Lead Forms:
LinkedIn Lead Forms
Facebook Lead Forms
As a B2B marketer, I like these ads format. Generally, these built-in forms will outperform your landing pages in terms of conversion rates; the trade-off is that I’ve found their cost per click tends to be higher.
So, what about using Zapier to automate email workflows when you generate leads from any of these forms?
- How to connect Mailchimp and Facebook Lead Ads
- LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms + Mailchimp Integrations
- Google Lead Form Extensions + Pipedrive Integrations
You will notice, though, that Zapier offers these integration only for paid users.
Zapier and Woocommerce
A must-have Woocommerce (or any e-commerce feature) is automating invoicing.
It sound weird, but not all e-commerce solutions have a built-in invoicing system and you need a third party to do so.
And that’s where using Zapier to connect tools like Xero of Freshbooks becomes handy.
Zapier and Slack
I’d argue that you don’t need Zapier to connect apps to Slack.
The communications tools has already massive apps library to automate and send notifications to your team.
However, Zapier goes beyond triggers and actions — it also offers actions that lets you transform the data coming from apps.
For instance, you may be using a CRM that connects to Slack and sends a notification when a new contact enrolls. However, with filters, you could request only the contacts that happen to be qualified leads or belong to a specific list.
Also, Slack apps let you send data and create notifications or features on Slack, but what about sending something from Slack to anywhere else?
For instance, logging a public conversation as a new Trello card or task on Google Tasks or Notion.
Zapier and Pipedrive
Personally, I don’t like Pipedrive. It’s a good CRM for sales team, but it doesn’t contain marketing automation components like email or user tracking on website, like Hubspot does.
However, they solve such a downside with Zapier.
Check out this outbound lead generation tactic with Pipedrive.
You may use Lemlist to send personalized cold emails.
Add a Calendly link to those emails.
And once someone schedules a meeting with you, you create a new deal on Pipedrive.
If you don’t know Lemlist, it is an email marketing tool that lets you send cold, yet personalized emails that reached $250k ARR in less than a year.
And Calendly, which needs no introduction, and is my go-to tool when it comes to lead generation. While a form collects contacts data, Calendly will also help you convert more contacts into actual meetings as users can instantly schedule a meeting with you.
Zapier and Calendly
You may also improve your Calendly workflow by sending email reminders to your guests and sales teams.
Here’s how a Calendly+Automizy zap looks like:
As you can see, as a user sets an hour and date, you can create time-based alerts that happen before or after meetings; before is better for reminders; after is to collect reviews.
Zapier and WordPress
Automation goes beyond email – you can also automate tasks related with your WordPress webiste. Some examples are:
- Automatically publishing your new blog posts on your social media channels
- Collect contacts on WordPress (from comments) to your CRM
- Backup your posts and files in a cloud storage solution like Dropbox
What’s next?
We get it, you want to automate tasks to save time and money. So we do!
That’s why we share with you our best automation ideas and resources so you don’t need to start from scratch. Want to see more?
