Automation Inspiration: Popular Zaps for Business Owners

Zapier is a great tool for automating processes. You can create notifications and sync data so that you can spend more time doing what you love and less time on mundane busywork. 

There are so many categories that can be improved by automation with Zapier. Here are the most popular zaps for business owners as it pertains to project management, file management, marketing & surveys.

Project Management 

When there are multiple people or facets involved with managing a project, information inevitably gets scattered everywhere, from Slack, email, Trello, and Basecamp, there is a lot of opportunity for overlap and redundancy as well as a lack of a project's overall transparency. 

Create a task from email

When a message arrives in your inbox, you may want to get that action item out of your email and onto your to-do list as quickly as possible. Use this Zapier automation to turn emails into to-dos in a flash. Setting up your zap you will specify a trigger such as adding a label (like "urgent" or "due today") to a new email, Zapier will then automatically take that email that was labeled accordingly and proceed with your desired action of adding this email to a to-do list in Basecamp. 

Share project details with staff

When projects get updated, it's helpful to make sure your teammates are aware of the progress so everyone's in the loop. 

One option is to create a Zap that connects a project management tool like Basecamp to an information tool used by staff such as Slack. By adding project details from Basecamp into Slack you can keep everyone informed without lifting a finger.

File Management

Zapier can automatically organize your new files where you specify they should be kept. Perhaps people email you files, and you then need to save them to a folder. Or maybe they fill out a form. A zap can be created that is triggered by a file being received from an email or form submission and save them to your desired location. For example, saving a file from email into Dropbox. 

You can also be notified automatically when a file has been uploaded. An example of this would be creating a Zap that notifies you on Slack when a file is uploaded onto Google Drive.

Marketing

There are a variety of ways to simplify your marketing efforts. Automatically send new YouTube videos in a channel to your business's Facebook page, connect form submissions to your CRM, notify staff of form submissions, share blog posts to social media, pin your new Instagram posts to Pinterest, send personalized follow-up emails. 

Having a tool that automates the lead generation workflow will drastically improve your marketing success. Zapier allows you to automate a lead generation form submission to create a contact in your CRM, sends a thank-you email, notify staff of the lead and send follow-up nurture emails based on client activity and data within the CRM. 

Surveys

Behind the apparent simplicity in surveys lies the choice of apps to build the survey, the tedious field tweaking to make the survey works correctly, the careful wording of questions, and the work to analyze the data and make sense of it for your business.

Examples of Survey Zaps

Say you have a workplace survey where you are asking generic questions suitable for the whole company staff.  Within that survey, you can have a question that asks for the employee to reveal which department of the company they work in.  You would then be able to set up a Zap that automatically sends an email to that employee containing a link to a new survey made to address issues specific to his/her selected department.  This makes organizing surveys faster and easier!

Automatically send a survey to any person who comments on your blog or leaves a review.

With Zapier the opportunities for automation are endless. Hopefully, you are feeling some automation inspiration.

For more detailed information on recommended zaps to use with Pike13 check out our eBook on Ways to use Zapier with Pike13.