Zap yourself – 4 Reasons to Automate your App with Zapier

Have you ever felt like 24 hours in a day wasn’t enough? Wanted to do more work in less time? The struggle is real for digital entrepreneurs, with incredible amounts of data that needs to be processed on a daily basis.

Automation is the name of the game, and many app creators are finding ways to automate tedious everyday tasks. One of the tools that makes this super simple is Zapier, a company launched in 2012.

Sometimes described as “translator between APIs”, Zapier allows you automate the use of two or more applications. For example, you can set it up so that every time someone sends you an attachment in Gmail, Zapier uploads the files to Dropbox. And if you want to take it even further, Zapier can notify you about the Dropbox file on Slack. Sounds neat, right? That’s because it really is.

Here at LeadQuizzes, we’re huge advocates of Zapier… Which is why we’ll show you some of the reasons it’s an essential tool to get more work done, quickly and efficiently. 

1. You can Zap almost anything

One of the reasons why Zapier has become increasingly popular is the sheer number of available integrations – just over 750 at the moment of writing this article. If you take a look at their apps page, they are meticulously sorted according to a range of categories.

If there’s an app you like that you would love to see connected with Zapier, no biggie. You can simply reach out to their team and Zapier will do all in their might to get you connected.

List of apps in Zapier

On the other hand, if you have an app of your own, you can easily add it to Zapier. Thanks to their Developer Platform, you can easily get your own app fully launched in Zapier a very short timeframe. There is immense value in getting connected to Zapier – if nothing else, to be able to rub shoulders with giants such as Trello, Slack, Asana, MailChimp, ActiveCampaign and others. What’s more, the help documentation makes the process super easy so that people with almost no experience in coding can get the integration set up on their own.

Note: you can create your own personal Zaps which only you will use. However, you can also create public Zaps for your own app which are available to everyone using your app. If you want to do the latter, you will need at least 10 completed, tested and approved Zaps for your integration to go live, along with completed help documentation.

2. Anyone can use Zapier

Besides the ability to integrate hundreds of different apps, one of the main benefits of Zapier is that it’s incredibly easy to use. Even if you have absolutely no knowledge of coding and development, you will be able to set up your own Zaps with ease. Speaking from personal experience – the first two or three may be a bit complicated, but you will quickly get accustomed to how Zapier works. After that, you can start experimenting with different workflows and you will soon find solutions for problems you didn’t even know you had in the first place.

How does Zapier really work?

Everything is based on cause and effect, and in the case of Zapier, there are two key elements – triggers and actions. Let’s say that you want to set up a Zap where you get new Trello cards from emails in Gmail, i.e. every time you receive an email, Zapier uses that information and automatically creates a new card in Trello.

The trigger is the first step in the process. When setting up your Zap, you need to choose the trigger app, Gmail in our case. Simply search for it in the trigger app step. This is where things get interesting, as you can choose a range of different triggers, such as New Email Matching Search, New Thread, New Starred Email, New Labeled Email and so on. For our purposes, we’ll choose New Starred Email. 

Trigger step for Gmail in Zapier

Once you’ve selected the trigger, you need to authenticate the app. This means that Zapier will look up your data and confirm that this is indeed your account. 

Gmail authentication in Zapier

After this step, you can test the account (we strongly suggest doing this). After selecting additional filters, you can test the trigger. In our case, Zapier will look up our Gmail account for existing starred emails and see if everything checks out.

Test Gmail in Zapier

The next step is the action – the event after the trigger. We want to select Trello from the list of Action Apps. From the drop-down menu, you can choose a range of actions for Trello, such as creating a list, board or a card, adding members, attachments or checklist items to cards, and many more. We want to create a new card so that’s what we’re choosing. 

Trello action in Zapier

Just as with the trigger, you need to authenticate your account. We will connect our Trello account with Zapier and test it. Now you need to choose the specifics of your action – how the card being created will be titled, which board it will be placed on and so on.

Finally, you need to test the action and see that everything works according to the instructions we provided. In our case, Zapier will take an existing starred email and create a new card in Trello, which we’ll be able to see immediately.

If everything works, all you’re left with is to name and activate your Zap, which is pretty straightforward.

Does all this sound complicated to you? It could seem intimidating at first, but I assure you that it’s far less complicated than coding an integration between two apps on your own.

Take a look at it from this perspective – how much time would it take you to manually add all new starred emails from Gmail to Trello as cards? The amount of saved time is amazing, especially if you have repetitive, scalable processes.

3. The customizations are endless

If you think that this is where the story ends with Zaps, you’re in for a surprise. This is merely the simplest scenario with one trigger and one action… And it’s just scratching the surface of what Zapier can do for you.

If you really want to make the most out of this platform, you need to set up multi-step Zaps. Say that we want to complicate our example a bit further. We can set up Zapier to fetch starred emails from Gmail, add them as a new entry in Google Sheets, make a new card in Trello and finally send a direct message to you in Slack. If you did all of this manually, it would take a staggering amount of time – and Zapier does it within seconds. If you know how to set up Zaps with one trigger and one action, multi-step Zaps are a piece of cake.

Let’s go one step further. If just adding a card to Trello is too simple for your needs, we can give Zapier detailed instructions. Let’s start by adding a label to your card – you can select different colors from the drop down menu.

Trello labels in Zapier

 This is just the tip of the iceberg. Scroll down and you’ll see some more extremely useful options: 

Additional Trello steps in Zapier

You can select the position of the card in the list you’re putting it in, assign the card to a specific board member, set the the due date and manage attachments. Finally, something really neat – you can add a checklist to each card, along with a name and checklist items.

As you can see from just one example, the amount of customizations for a given app is massive.

Another great thing about automation is that you don’t have to worry about the event timeline. In Zapier, you can set up delays for all actions – just note that delays count as additional actions in the workflow. You can set delays for a certain time period or for a certain date.

4. We use Zapier at LeadQuizzes

We also discovered the power of Zapier recently at LeadQuizzes and we’ve been working on our integrations. Just this month, we were able to get LeadQuizzes fully launched on Zapier. This means that there are more than 30 Zaps currently at your disposal and the official LeadQuizzes/Zapier documentation is published. Here are some of the cool ways to use Zapier in combination with LeadQuizzes.

Hubspot integrations

One of the most important integrations for our users was HubSpot. We also use it internally, for everything from blogging and marketing to CRM. Thanks to the Zaps we published, you can do some great things in HubSpot with new leads from LeadQuizzes. Some of these include: creating new contacts, adding leads to workflows, creating new calendar tasks, form submissions and social media messages, deals and companies.

Email marketing integrations

Once your leads are done with your LeadQuizzes quiz, you will get their email. What better way to use it than get it in a piece of email marketing software? The following email marketing Zapier integrations are available for LeadQuizzes: MailChimp, Aweber, Sendlane, Act-On, Marketo and others. We’ve made getting leads from quizzes even simpler!

These are just some of the ways that you can harness the power of LeadQuizzes and Zapier together. If you’re looking for a great way to generate leads – definitely give quizzes a go!

Do you have a story about how Zapier made your life easier? Please let us know in the comments – we’d love to hear about your experience!

Build Your Email List By 100K This Year Using Quizzes

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Build Your Email List By 100K This Year Using Quizzes

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