Here are 18 Zapier examples from my own Zapier account. These are some of my best Zapier workflows, and I hope they give you some ideas for what you can do with Zapier.
The biggest question I get about Zapier & workflow automation is that people don’t know where to start. Every business is different, so it’s hard to give examples that apply to everyone – but this post and video should at least get some ideas flowing.
This is not a tutorial on how to use Zapier, and you’ll need a little bit of knowledge of how Zapier works otherwise this might move a bit fast. If you’ve never used Zapier before, start with my Zapier tutorial.
Not all of these workflows will apply to you, but they should give you some ideas. One of the best ways to come up with ideas for automation is just to see what other people are doing.
Social media
The first few Zapier examples are all about automating your social media.
Monitor Twitter for keywords
The process for this is:
- Search mention in Twitter
- Add to Digest
- Each day, create a task with all the mentions
The trigger works with a normal Twitter search, like this:
In this case I’m monitoring for people talking about SaaS, Zapier or automation, with the #journorequest hashtag.
The digest step simply creates a list of all the mentions each day. At the end of the day it is released, creating a task for me to check out all the mentions.
You can use a similar workflow to target:
- Google web search mentions
- Reddit mentions
Sharing randomized links
I share a different tool into my Facebook group each week, so I built this workflow to choose a random tool from my tools spreadsheet, and share it.
The spreadsheet looks like this:
So it’s going in and getting the name of the tool, the link and the post to share.
Getting a random row is a little complex, so there’s a specific video just for that. Check out this video on how to get a random row from a Google sheet with Zapier.
Sharing great articles to social media
The Zapier Chrome Extension allows you to trigger workflows from websites that you’re visiting. I’ve set it up so that when I find a great article, I just click the extension and type in what I want to say about it. The extension looks like this:
The the workflow:
- Takes the info and the article
- Puts it in a spreadsheet of my favourite articles
- Shares it on various socials using Buffer
Zapier marketing examples
These Zapier ideas will help you with your marketing.
Curating a weekly newsletter
This one is very similar to the above example.
Using The Zapier Chrome Extension, I send articles that I want to sent to my weekly newsletter. I store them in a spreadsheet, and create an RSS feed using “RSS by Zapier”.
I use Revue for my newsletters, and it imports the RSS feed, making it very easy for me to add those items to my weekly newsletter.
Incentivized surveys
We have a form on our site that asks people for a bit of information about how they heard about our product Content Snare. If they fill it out, they get their trial extended by 7 days.
This automation:
- Triggers when they submit the form
- Adds them to a spreadsheet
- If they a;ready exist in the spreadsheet, they must have filled it out before, so ignore it
- Adds time to their trial
Even if you don’t have a SaaS product, you can use this same idea in other ways.
When someone fills out your survey, you could:
- Email people an Amazon voucher (buy in bulk and store them in AirTable, ready to be sent out)
- Offer a coupon or discount
- Give them something else for free
Create a content library of all your blog posts & videos
This one is really simple. It says:
- Whenever we add a new post to our site
- Store in in a spreadsheet
This gives you a quick reference if you ever need to find one of your articles, or just want a list of all the content you’ve created.
Similarly, I add all of my YouTube channel content to an AirTable.
Promote new blog posts
In the above example, the spreadsheet is our checklist for all our marketing activities that need to be done on new posts.
You could also add a task to your project management system so that everyone knows what needs to be done.
You can use the “new items in multiple feeds” trigger to look for content on all of your websites, YouTube channel and more.
Identify your best leads
This is one of my favourites. Many don’t know this is possible with Zapier.
The key is “Lead Score by Zapier”.
This looks up someone using their email address, and gives you back info like:
- What business they work for
- What country they’re in
- How many staff are in the company etc
You can use this information to create a workflow that says: “If someone signs up from a company with more than 100 staff, create a task for me to manually reach out to that person”
This workflow has helped us convert some very large companies, by creating a more personal experience for them.
Processing payments
If you’re still processing payments manually, then these Zapier automation examples will help get that off your plate.
Adding tags to your CRM when someone purchases a product
The workflow below is triggered when a webhook arrives from our payment processor, ThriveCart.
It then finds them in our CRM and adds a tag to indicate they have made a purchase.
Get Slack messages when someone buys your product
Similarly, when someone signs up for a paid product of our product Content Snare, we get a message in our Slack. This helps us stay on top of new customers, but also is fun to see and adds motivation.
The result is this:
Contact synchronization
Sync unsubscribes
If you’re using multiple systems that can email your clients – if people unsubscribe from one, you should also unsubscribe them from the other.
And in reverse:
Keeping contact info in sync
When someone updates their details in our software, it updates their info in our billing system.
This workflow triggers when the info changes, and ensures we update their info in both Active Campaign and Intercom as well.
This process is much easier when you have a “single source of truth”. We know that the billing system is the correct info, so we can push it out to the other systems. If you want to be able to update ANY system and have it update everywhere, it’s more difficult. You may want to look at PieSync instead.
Website monitoring
Get alerts about website downtime
We use StatusCake to trigger notifications when any of our websites go down.
Instead of receiving a notification via SMS or email, we prefer them to come into Slack.
StatusCake sends a webhook to Zapier, and we post the info into Slack.
If you aren’t familiar with webhooks, learn more about them here.
Convert email alerts to Slack
If you use a tool like WordFence to get security alerts about your website, many of these tools only send email notifications.
That can be a pain if you would rather get those as Slack messages.
For this, you can use the Zapier Email Parser.
This catches the email, pulls out the important information and sends it as a Slack message.
The email parser allows you to create integrations with tools that don’t even have a Zapier integration!
General productivity
Many of the following Zapier workflow examples just don’t fit into the categories above, but they still help me save a ton of time.
Get messages when you’re mentioned in project management
When I get mentioned in our project management tool Jira, I want to get notified in Slack. Jira sends emails to my Gmail, so this workflow simply sends those into my Slack as a direct message.
It will only trigger on emails matching this search:
Uploading files from clients to your Google Drive or Dropbox
Content Snare is used by people to request files from clients.
This workflow takes every files uploaded into Content Snare, and backs them up in Google Drive.
Posting customer feedback to your team
Inside our software, overy so often a box pops up asking customers how likely they are to recommend our product to someone. It’s a 0-10 score called an NPS Score.
This is a great source of feedback, as people can also leave comments about why they gave a certain score.
We post all of that feedback in a dedicated channel in Slack, so everyone on the team can see it – positive or negative.
Meeting preparation
This talks about my podcast, but you can use the same process for any meeting.
When someone books in for my podcast, it creates a Google Document from a template. It fills in that template with the information they entered when booking the event.
This becomes a “run sheet” so I know exactly what we need to cover, and I have all their info in front of me.
The workflow:
- Only runs if it’s a podcast booking (ignoring other meeting types)
- Creates the document
- Adds the document to my task manager so I have it for quick reference
In the Google Doc, you simply use placeholders like this to tell Zapier where the info should go.
Wrap up
I hope these examples have given you some inspiration about what you can automate in your business.
While many of these won’t be directly applicable to you, most businesses have a process that is similar to these that can be automated. You just need to figure out how to apply the ideas.
If you’ve come up with something awesome or have questions, let me know in the comments!
