222 zaps to crush your current process automation

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https://www.process.st/process-automation/

222 Zaps to Crush Your Current Process Automation

Ben Mulholland February 21, 2016

Use These Premade Zaps to Kickstart an Easier Life One of the downsides of Zapier is undoubtedly its complexity; when you’re just starting out with process automation it’s almost a requirement to have some sort of premade indication as to what you can actually do.

When I first started using zaps to sort out my work life, I was, frankly, crap. Nevertheless, I stuck with it, and today I’m saving (at least) an hour a day, along with some serious worrying about minor tasks.

The turning point for me? Seeing examples of premade zaps.

Once you get a grasp of what other people are using the platform for (and, by extension, what you can use it for) the possibilities open up. Some sort of magical knowledge is imparted which allows you to see the true light! Or, at least, you can start to confidently make more complex zaps.

So, in order to help you all along to your automation dreams, we here at Process Street have collected together 222 premade zaps to show you exactly what you can do with a powerhouse like Zapier.

Accounting

Yes, we just had to start with a boring one, but hear us out. Accounts and invoices are a necessarily evil in the function of businesses, but for all of the time you can invest in them, your efforts will pretty much only be noticed when there’s something wrong. Whether you’ve forgotten to save (or accidentally lost) a vital invoice or a customer just slips through the cracks, problems with your accounting system can cripple your entire foundation.

It’s not all doom and gloom though! With these premade zaps you can ensure that all of your invoices are automatically generated and your accounts will be in order.

Creating Invoices First things first, let’s deal with saving secure copies of your invoices. Whether you need to create an invoice from a form or directly due to a received payment, Zapier already has you covered. Add a couple of extra actions or filters and you’ll have a formidable system which requires no effort on your part.

Saving Data For Your Accounts Now let’s get those invoices safely into your accounting software; remember that if you can’t see your accounting software in these premade zaps, all you need to do is take the zap and swap it in!

To round off the accounting section, why not give your customers some attention? Have the details of the people who are paying you automatically updating and ready to access whenever you wish. Well, it certainly beats forgetting important names.

Add new JotForm form entries to Salesforce as leads Use this Zap powered by Zapier

Backups

As I learned pretty quickly in my time professionally writing, backing up your work is an absolute must. Sometimes this can take the form of using cloud storage systems, such as a locally-synced Google Drive folder (“Godsends”, as I like to call them) or platforms like Evernote and Workflowy.

However, there comes a point where extra automation is required; perhaps you just need to archive a metric ton of data for later analysis, or maybe you need to record your activity within a particular app for later reference. Either way, Zapier once again has your back.

Archiving Data Here’s a few handy zaps for if you’ve ever felt the need to archive data for later, be it saving content to Airtable, useful Tweets to later analyse or sales data to keep an up-to-date record.

Saving Activity The humble text file is a sadly underestimated resource for one reason; its accessibility. Whether you’re the world’s No.1 programmer or the average Joe on the way back from the gym, everyone and anyone can read and understand a basic text file.

Don’t worry though; we won’t be forcing you to use text files if you don’t want to. Instead, here’s a selection of zaps to use with your program of choice (remember that you can use a zap and change one of the apps if you need to).

File Management

File management has been a problem since long before computers were ever invented. For your average office, you solved it through coded binders and filing cabinets; to organise your computer, it’s time to use Zapier. Use the following zaps to automatically create folders for your new clients, collect all of your data into one cloud storage account and even automatically copy files uploaded to your chosen location.

Collecting Files in One Place Kicking off our file management automation are a series of zaps designed to collect all of the required files into one place. Whether you’re swapping file storage provider or collecting client-uploaded files which you need, use these zaps to avoid the tedious process of downloading and re-uploading the data you need.

Separating Clients into Folders Storing important information for your clients in separate folders is an absolute must in order to avoid a spaghetti junction of a mess. Tasty as that may sound, give these zaps a try to save yourself the hassle of separating your clients’ folders as soon as they sign up, by automatically generating a new and distinct folder or form entry for each one.

Inbox Automation

Now that Google’s mail service has close to a billion subscribed users, it’s a pretty safe bet that these zaps will come in handy at some point or another.

Saving Attachments Let’s start off nice and easy, with some zaps to automatically save any received email attachments to your choice of service.

Task and Todo List Generation If you were to start labelling your emails, you could also automatically generate task or todo lists! Whether you use Trello, Asana, Basecamp or even Google Task for your task management, these inbox zaps can take a chunk out of your workload.

Whilst those zaps are brilliant for emails you receive, if you’d rather send an email to create a task list, you can use any of the following.

Whilst those zaps are brilliant for emails you receive, if you’d rather send an email to create a task list, you can use any of the following.

Archiving Emails Alternatively, if you want to keep a record or backup of all of your emails (never a bad thing to do with important information), you can use these zaps in conjunction with either labels or tags in Gmail.

Recurring and Reminder Emails Whether you need to periodically send reminders to your team or touch base every so often with a particular customer, Zapier can work wonders with both your recurring and reminder emails. Use these zaps to send prompt reminders to your customer success outreach program, or to just make sure the you’re getting shit done.

Lead Management

Generating and nurturing leads is one of the most important aspects of any company; by carefully generating and cultivating your leads, you can quickly see your customer base grow and your monthly recurring revenue soar.

So why not focus on the important work which actually requires your attention, and automate the rest?

Saving Leads to an Email List First up in lead management, we have some process automation for moving leads from a web form into an email list. With these you can cut out the intermediate stages, generating leads from a web form interacting with your landing page, whilst Zapier automatically moves them into a mailing list.

Use Wufoo entries to create MailChimp subscribers Use this Zap Add subscribers on Emma for new Formstack submissions Use this Zap Create new Campaign Monitor subscribers for new rows on Google Sheets Use this Zap powered by Zapier If you’d rather transfer your leads to an email list straight from your CRM, these zaps will hit the spot.

Perhaps you’re hosting an event or webinar and wish to generate leads as you go? No worries, you can still automate their transition to a mailing list!

What if you’ve already secured the lead and wish to nurture it through a separate mailing list to your potential customers? Well, then you need only use one of these processes to get you going with no human input!

Managing Leads Within Your CRM Your mailing lists are now set up and automatically adding the appropriate new leads, but the automation doesn’t stop there! The situation may arise whereby your email lists or web forms are registering leads without them first being processed through your CRM. So, to start you off, we’ll cover the basics. Take a look at these zaps designed to update your CRM leads, from either your email list or web forms!

Create New Highrise Contacts From a Wufoo Forms Use this Zap Add new MailChimp subscribers to Highrise as new contacts Use this Zap Save JotForm Leads to SugarCRM Use this Zap Add new Unbounce submissions to Zoho CRM as leads Use this Zap Save All New Wufoo Entries as Leads in Salesforce Use this Zap Add new AWeber subscribers to Salesforce as leads Use this Zap See more Highrise integrations powered by Zapier Now for the more in-depth automation; use these zaps to push leads into your CRM when they attend your events or webinars.

Finally, when automating your CRM your want to ensure that your new customers will not be forgotten. From Paypal to Chargify, the following zaps provide a straight-out-of-the-box route to managing your new customers.

Process Street Automation

As you’re probably well aware by now, Process Street is dedicated to taking the hard work out of your workflows, so integrating with Zapier can yield some especially potent results. Not only will you have access to detailed and easily actionable workflows, but they will be able to automatically run themselves and assign the relevant team members!

Check out our previous post on the full list of our integrations with Zapier for more details, however, I’ll relay the meat of the tag-team here.

Hacking Your Sales Salesforce, Close.io, Pipedrive or more, none are too far for us to integrate with and lessen your workload by doing so. These zaps are designed to automate various aspects of your sales methods, for example, standardising a high quality of service by running checklists for every new customer.

Perfecting Your Customer Support Never again be afraid of your customers being lost in the chasm of customer support (let’s be honest, it happens to the best of companies); use any of the following to track your progress with recurring checklists, update your customers’ status and even monitor your customer success teams as they deal with feedback!

Project Management

Project Creation Countless articles have discussed the value of automating as many of your project bottlenecks as possible. This is especially true of the start of a new project, as you don’t want to be stuck waiting around for someone to fill out a web form’s details in every fresh start. So, instead of waiting, set up any of these zaps to automatically start your projects from a web form.

This zap creates a new Basecamp project when a Wufoo form is completed.

Use this Zap Create a new TeamworkPM project from a Formstack submission.

Use this Zap powered by Zapier If, however, you prefer to start your projects from when you send your client an invoice, any of these zaps will have you covered.

Create new Basecamp projects from new Freshbooks invoices.

Use this Zap We do project management in Trello. This Zap creates a Trello board from new Harvest invoices.

Use this Zap We track projects in Asana. This Zap creates Asana projects from new Ronin invoices.

Use this Zap powered by Zapier

Moving Todo Items to the Correct List

Organizing a team to have up-to-date todo lists across their various platforms can be a nightmare, but quite often there would be far too much information to plug into one medium and remain legible. So why not automatically move items between your todo lists in various applications?

Automatically create new Asana tasks from new Trello cards.

Use this Zap Automatically create AgileZen story cards from new Basecamp todos.

Use this Zap Automatically add tasks to Google tasks from new tasks created by you in Podio.

Use this Zap powered by Zapier Alternatively, you could even go one step further and make the creation of your todo tasks completely automatic!

Project Tracking When you’re working on a project, you want to be able to ensure that you have a way to look back on the relative progress you’ve made, such as the work time you’ve logged and the project’s current status. Once again, Zapier automation is here to save you the trouble of carrying out these tasks manually!

First up, we have a bunch of zaps all designed to automatically log your time spent within a certain project.

If, instead, you wish to track your projects via company dashboards, then these are the use cases for you.

Maintaining a Universal Project Calendar As this heading would suggest, these zaps are based around automating a universal project calendar to ensure that no deadlines are missed. Tasks, milestones, events, you name it and Zapier can create a calendar entry out of it.

Organizing Project Data By archiving your project data you can create an easily accessible and documented copy of your project at any point which can be used for reference later. If a project does exceptionally well (or fails), this will allow you to take a step back and look t what may have caused this, or where everything started to change, based on the data from the time.

Save new Podio actions to Google Sheets as new rows Use this Zap Automatically create new Evernote notes from new Asana tasks.

Use this Zap This Zap automatically saves my Gmail attachments from a specific Gmail label to Google Drive.

Use this Zap powered by Zapier

Sales

Sales teams are a fantastic avenue you can use to see tangible benefits of your process automation efforts. After all, if your team is bogged down by the leg work of manually sorting and recording all of your customers, along with creating records of the purchase, they will have significantly less time to sell your product to other customers.

Although we’ll later show off some nifty zaps to help out in the general management of a sales team, putting these automations in place to work alongside your team will give you some of the most immediately noticeable performance increases.

Organizing New Customers Kicking us off are a few zaps based around dealing with those precious new customers as soon as the deal is set. Using these processes will allow you to add your customers to your mailing lists and CRM without the sales team (or any other team, for that matter) ever having to lift a finger.

Another feature which savvy entrepreneurs have cottoned onto is sending an email to their new customer as soon as possible after their purchase. Touching base with them as quickly as possible can be a huge boon to your customer retention, and so here’s some ways to send automatic emails as soon as a new customer purchases your product.

Processing Orders Once you’ve made the sale, it’s a good idea to also have a little automation to take care of duties such as putting the order into your accounting software and creating follow-up tickets. The accounting software is self-explanatory (financial records are a must), but by also generating a follow-up ticket, you can ensure that the customer’s progress and problems can be tracked from the moment they purchase Who’s for helping out your sales and support process at the same time?

Social Media (Monitoring)

Practically nothing is more prevalent in the field of process automation than monitoring your social media. Rather than having to trawl through awkward apps or ludicrously specific search results, using these zaps will save you so much time that, frankly, my vocabulary fails me.

A little creativity (especially with the new multi-step zaps) pays huge dividends in this field, but we’ll give you some nifty starting points, ripe for the editing.

Monitoring Twitter To start us off, never again lose track of your brand on Twitter! These automations specialise in gathering all of the data you’ll need to analyse your presence on this social media giant, whether you’re monitoring the times your brand is mentioned or saving tweets to later sift through.

Dealing with Webhooks Webhooks can be a little more complex, however, they can allow you to refine your social media monitoring operations to be that much more useful. RSS and API are both supported, but you’ll once again be required to do a little tweaking to get the exact results you’re after.

Social Media (Sharing)

One of the most basic, yet omnipresent tasks in the worlds of content promotion and marketing is the duty of syncing up a network of social media posts. From ensuring that all of your posts are shared across the relevant channels to scheduling posts for even more automation, this section of our Zapier use cases guide has got you covered.

Syncing Up to Social Media The first thing that you should be doing for any blog post is making sure that all of the appropriate social media channels under your control are sharing your content. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and more – all of these are available to be automated at the push of a button!

Sharing Status Updates Social media can be a dangerous place to work; even ignoring the potential backlash or trolls, there’s one aspect which is especially prevalent in dealing with this platform… You can get distracted!

Even the best of up are tempted to follow just that one more link before heading back to work. What should be a 20second visit to share a status update turns into a 15-minute tangent, ending in that weird part of Youtube and a stray thought of “How the hell did I get here?”.

So, why not cut out the middleman and use these apps to ensure that the temptation of Buzzfeed can never rear its ugly head in the first place.

Scheduling Share Times You don’t want to have to log into your various social media accounts every time you want to share something, so why not set a time for your posts to automatically go out? Zapier says “Why not, indeed”.

Sharing on Work Channels This practice can be every bit as valuable as organising your general social media sharing, as your work team are perhaps the most likely group of people to give your content the initial push it will need to garner that first hint of

attention. Does the change in platform mean that you won’t be able to get in some process automation?

Hell no!

Team Management

Behind any business (be it SaaS or a Hawaiian-themed restaurant) is a team devoted to making everything run smoothly. An old analogy springs to mind of a swan; the public face of the company (barring total meltdown) is calm, serene and in perfect order, but below the water its legs are madly paddling against the current. To put it bluntly, without your team backing you up, you’ll drown.

Although this point may be hammered to death by the end of the post, automation = extra time for your team to work on what really matters. Rather than chasing vital information around the company or remaining unaware of a new customer signing up, automation through Zapier will blast out almost any chance of inefficiency or inaccuracy (at least for the tasks you’re automating).

Sharing Information and Team Activity If your team isn’t on the same page, with up-to-date information and prompt alerts of what they need to know (such as incoming workflows or processes which need carrying out), your productivity will go down the drain faster than you can say “Who’s meant to be doing this?”. So, to avoid this happening, here’s a few zaps to ensure that your team stays up to date on everything they need to know!

Managing Your Sales Team Your sales team is absolutely vital for bringing in your new leads and attracting the right kind of customer, so why waste time either waiting to be notified of a new customer, or manually communicating important information?

To start us off, we’ve got a zap designed to automatically call both your new customer and a member of your sales team upon their signing up. The practice of quick communication (especially after the initial sign up) vastly increases the likelihood that said customer will stick around, so why not give it a go?

Make calls via Calldrip for Wufoo leads Use this Zap powered by Zapier If an automatic call isn’t quite enough for you, how about automating the process of saving the notes from the call into your CRM? We thought so.

Whether or not you instantly call them, the sales team will also greatly benefit from being notified of a hot lead as soon as possible. Well, nothing says ASAP like an automatic alert, be it a text or email!

Time Management

Personally, I find time management to be one of the hardest aspects of my working life. Juggling my various tasks and duties is a wonderful challenge, but it took practices such as the Pomodoro Technique to put the time I spent on anything into focus. If you can manage your efforts just right, you can find that sweet spot that lies right at the tipping point of when more work is just not worth the time taken.

So, why not hit that sweet spot every time with a handy time management process automation?

Creating Calendar Events First up, you’ll need to set up a process by which you can automatically create or note down any important calendar events. All of these zaps assume that you use Google Calendar, however, if you prefer a different app, all you need to do is swap out Calendar and fill in the details.

Alternatively, you can use any of these zaps to allow events to be scheduled using a web form, such as Wufoo or Formstack.

Adding Due Dates What good is a set of tasks if they don’t have a set due date which is easily visible? Not much is the answer. By allowing these zaps access to your related accounts, all of your due dates will sync up with your calendar to provide an easily digestible timeline for you to base your efforts on.

Consolidating Calendars Finally, if you happen to have several calendars (or need to sync your own calendar with a team member), do yourself a favour and use one of these zaps. Not only will you save yourself an insane amount of time, but you’ll never again have to worry about constantly switching between calendars.

Any time someone buys something from you in PayPal add them to an AWeber mailing list.

Use this Zap Post message to Yammer for new Wufoo entries.

Use this Zap Saves an Evernote screen clipping or file to a new Basecamp file Use this Zap powered by Zapier

It’s Time for some Imagination!

So, now that you’ve seen some solid examples of premade zaps just waiting for you to use, why not go out and make your own? We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again; the most important thing to remember when using Zapier is that you’re only limited by your creativity!