What is Zapier and What Does It Do?
Zapier is an automation platform that connects the different tools and software you use, allowing you to pass data between them and automate manual work. You can build custom recipes for moving information between apps and automating tasks based on rules you set.
How to Set Up a Zap?
The process for creating a Zap through Zapier is very simple:
- Pick the apps to connect
- Add a trigger to initiate the recipe
- Add an action to perform (on paid plans, you can add up to 100 actions as part of your recipe).
- Customize and map the fields
- Test your Zap
- Publish your Zap
The only part that can be tricky is the final steps of testing to make sure everything works properly. In some cases, you might find the Zap doesn’t immediately do what you want (for example, if you map the fields incorrectly) and takes a couple of tests to get it to function properly. That’s why the final step of testing your Zaps before publishing is so important.
Tips and Tricks for Using Zapier
A great place to start with Zapier is to automate the repetitive tasks you frequently do, especially if it’s very formulaic.
Take stock of any processes that involve moving information from one app to another and any admin/data entry tasks that don’t require much thinking. There are likely at least a handful of simple processes you can automate to start saving time immediately.
Examples of How Zapier Can Be Used in Your Business
- Notify your team about new leads or customers
- Automatically create calendar events
- Add contact info of event attendees to a spreadsheet
- Automatically remind your team to fill out a daily standup form
- Auto-followup with leads
- Aggregate form responses
- Create tasks from important events
- Automate social media posts
- Add leads to your CRM
- Create data backups
- Send out summary reports
- Send thank you messages to customers
- Add leads from your CRM to your email marketing platform
- Add leads from paid ads to your CRM or a spreadsheet
How to use Zapier to Automate Your Sales Process?
Automate Lead Conversion
- Use Zaps to instantly send leads to the right place so they get the right messages.
- Keep track of new sales opportunities
- Send leads that fill out your forms to your CRM
- Send leads from your ads to your CRM
- Making sure leads are added to the right email nurture
- Use automation to send leads from your CRM to your email marketing platform and vice versa. That way, you keep track of your leads and put them in the right email nurture
- Keep your team updated about new leads
- Send automatic notifications to your team when you get a new lead
Automate Client Communication
- You can set up Zaps that send automatic reminders and follow-ups so your clients get quick responses and your team can focus on other value-added tasks.
- Send friendly reminders to your clients (notifications about upcoming meetings, time changes, or cancellations)
- Use Zapier to keep everyone informed about event changes with automated reminders.
- Send prompt messages before (and after) meetings.
- Automatically send sales brochures, confirm meeting details, or provide agendas before your meetings. You can also schedule customized follow-ups as soon as your meetings end. That way, your clients get seamless communication—without adding extra items to your to-do list.
Automate Client Retention
- Immediately respond to clients – immediately letting clients know that you’ve received their form, request, or question—even if you can’t respond with a customized answer right away.
- Get client responses where you’ll see them
- Streamline your customer testimonial process
- Schedule automated check-ins with clients on a specific schedule as you work with them, including asking for referrals.
Benefits of Using Zapier
Zapier Saves You Time
Your business processes involve manual tasks, typically involving many admin and data entry. With Zapier, you can connect all your apps and processes and automate repetitive tasks (sending an email, creating a calendar event, adding a transaction to your accounting app, etc.). This saves time while also removing human error.No More Missed Calls
Zapier can send reminders for calls, meetings, and other appointments to both you and the other recipients.Zapier Helps Scale Your Business
Reviewing your processes, streamlining them, and then using Zapier to automate them frees time for your team to focus on the core business. Zapier also automatically scales with your business because the additional volume of tasks is handled by automations rather than needing to hire more people.Zapier Streamlines Your Customer Onboarding.
After you’ve made the sale, you still have a series of tasks to get the new customer set up on various systems and start working with them. This can be automated with Zapier to ensure you never forget a step in the process while saving time.No More Losing Track of Leads
Keeping your pipeline up to date with all your leads, their status, and immediate next steps takes a lot of data entry work to keep up to date. But losing track of this info means losing track of your leads, which means losing out on new business. Use Zapier to automate data entry into your CRM, to assign next steps on specific deals, or any admin tasks involved with keeping track of your sales pipeline.Work Smarter, Not Harder
By using Zapier, you can focus more on the big picture. You’ll strategically create the process (by creating a zap) and be freed from the endless hours of repetitive admin tasks. Zapier helps you wear fewer hats and focus more on what you’re best at.Popular integrations for Zapier
Some of the most popular integrations for Zapier are:Google Sheets
Create, edit, and share spreadsheets wherever you are with Google Sheets, and get automated insights from your data.Slack
Slack is a platform for team communication: everything is in one place, instantly searchable, and available wherever you go. Offering instant messaging, document sharing and knowlEmail by Zapier
Send and receive email via a custom Zapier email address at “zapiermail.com.” This is great for triggering emails and sending custom emails. (Max of 10 emails sent per hour.) Have direct access to your email servers? Check out our IMAP and SMTP services!Schedule by Zapier
The schedule is a native Zapier app for recurring tasks. Trigger an action every day of the month, every day of the week, or every single day. You can also select the hour of the day. If you’re a developer, this is similar to a crontab, cronjob, or cron.Mailchimp
Share your ideas with Mailchimp email newsletters—then use its landing page and form builders to grow your lists and take marketing.Google Drive
Google Drive is Google’s file sync app that lets you store all your files online alongside your Google Docs documents and keep them synced with all your devices.Facebook Lead Ads
Facebook lead ads make signing up for business information easy for people and more valuable for businesses. The Facebook lead ad app is useful for marketers who want to automate actions on their leads.HubSpot
HubSpot is your all-in-one stop for all your marketing software needs.Trello
Trello is a team collaboration tool that lets you organize anything and everything to keep your projects on task.Discord
Discord is an all-in-one voice and text chat for gamers.Airtable
Organize anything with Airtable, a modern database created for everyone. Airtable is a fast and flexible way to create tables to keep track of anything, from sales leads to vacation planning to inventory management.Calendly
Conditional logic for your Zapier workflows. Paths lets your apps take different actions based on the conditions you choose.Paths by Zapier
Calendly is an elegant and simple scheduling tool for businesses that eliminates email back and forth. It helps save time so businesses can provide great service and increase sales.ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a customer experience automation (CXA) platform that helps businesses meaningfully engage customers. Access pre-built automations that combine transactional email and email marketing, marketing automation, e-commerce marketing, and CRM for powerful segmentation and personalization across social, email, messaging, chat, and text.Delay by Zapier
Put your Actions on hold for a specified time before sending data to another app. You can set up scheduled emails, get notified of incomplete tasks, send automatic follow-ups, and automate other tasks on your timeline.Typeform
Typeform helps you ask awesomely online! If you ever need to run a survey, questionnaire, form, contest, etc. Typeform will help you achieve it beautifully across all devices, every time, using its next-generation platform.Google Forms
Google Forms is an easy way to collect data from the web with a simple UI and powerful editor. Works hand-in-hand with Google Sheets!Notion
A new tool that blends your everyday work apps into one. It’s the all-in-one workspace for you and your team.Facebook Pages
Facebook Pages lets you connect with your customers, fans, and followers on the world’s largest social network. Share relevant content to engage people who Like your page, create events to build and grow your community, and run a Facebook ad campaign by targeting location, age, and more.YouTube
YouTube allows billions of people to discover, watch, and share created videos. YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers, large and small.Asana
Asana is a leading work management platform that helps teams orchestrate their work, from daily tasks to strategic initiatives. With Asana, organizations have a living system of clarity where everyone can see, discuss, and execute their team’s priorities.Pipedrive
Pipedrive is sales pipeline and CRM software for deal makers. Get super-organized. Close deals in less time. iOS and Android apps let you take your pipeline with you anywhere.Shopify
Shopify is a simple way to create an online store to list products, collect credit card payments, and ship your goods.ClickUp
ClickUp is a productivity platform that allows you to manage your work and personal tasks in a beautifully intuitive environment.Zoom
Zoom brings teams together to get more done in a frictionless environment. Zoom’s reliable, video-first unified communications platform provides video meetings, voice, webinars, and chat across desktops, phones, mobile devices, and conference systems.Clickfunnels
Create beautiful landing pages and complete marketing funnels.Squarespace
Squarespace is a website builder, blogging platform, hosting service, commerce platform, and domain name registrar.Dropbox
Dropbox lets you store your files online, sync them to all your devices, and share them easily. Get started for free, then upgrade for more space and security features.Zapier Pricing and Plans
Zapier has several pricing options based on the volume of tasks you need to automate and some of their premium features.
Free forever accounts are available for limited use (100 tasks/month, and 5 total zaps)
The main paid accounts are $19.99 / mo or $49 / mo, depending on the volume of tasks to automate and the number of Zaps you’ll need.
Finally, super high-volume team accounts can have unlimited users, 50k tasks per month, and some additional features (probably unnecessary for most).
To see the full pricing breakdown, Zapier Pricing
The Future of Zapier
Since the pandemic, remote work has become more and more prevalent. Zapier is a perfect (possibly even essential) tool for remote workforces norm for many companies changed the way we work. As the work-from-home lifestyle became the norm, employees began re-evaluating their work-life balance expectations. Many workers quit their jobs because their needs weren’t being met.
According to recent surveys by Zapier about remote work:
61% of all people say they would leave their jobs if they could accept a fully remote opportunity.
100% of people ages 18 – 24 would quit their job for a remote work opportunity.
64% say remote work has made them more productive.
While more and more businesses adopt remote work over time, Zapier has consistently added new integrations and functionality, keeping it the leading platform for process automation.
In 2021, Zapier added >1,400 apps to their App Directory. That’s almost 4 new apps every single day!
And that trend will only continue through 2022 and beyond.
FAQs
What is Zapier Used for?
Zapier is used to automate processes and pass information between different apps. This could involve copying over form submissions to a spreadsheet. Or triggering automated follow-up messages to leads that contacted you over a month ago.
How does Zapier Work?
Zapier works by linking and synchronizing the actions of most of the apps and software you use in your business. You do this by creating Zaps, which include a trigger and the corresponding automated action. This can involve passing data between systems or even fully automating processes.
How much does Zapier Cost?
Limited free accounts are available. Paid accounts cost $19.99 or $49 per month, with team plans costing $299 / month/
Which Apps Does Zapier Work with?
Zapier connects with over 5,000 different apps across a wide variety of industries. You can connect Zapier with apps for Project Management, Sales, Marketing, Admin, HR, and every other department in your business.
You can see the full list of apps here: Zapier Apps
How do I get Started with Zapier?
Before you create your Zap, consider exactly what you are trying to accomplish by asking yourself the following:
- What apps do I want to use? (A form app and a spreadsheet app)
- What event will trigger my Zap? (When there’s a new submission in our form app)
- What event will my Zap perform? (Add the form submission to a spreadsheet.)
- What information do I want to move between those apps? “(The contact’s name, email address, and the reason for contacting us)
Then follow these steps to create your zap:
- Pick the apps to connect
- Add a trigger to initiate the recipe
- Add an action to perform (on paid plans, you can add up to 100 actions as part of your recipe).
- Customize and map the fields
- Test your Zap
- Publish your Zap
Is Zapier an API Tool?
Yes
What are the Disadvantages of Zapier?
According to GetApp, some of the common issues with Zapier noted by some users:
- Zaps stop working by themselves (and they aren’t sure why)
- Customer support (for troubleshooting) isn’t always great
- Some users report that it’s hard to know when a Zap stops working unless you log in and check that everything is running properly every day.
Is Zapier a Free Tool?
You can use Zapier in a limited way for free
Get the full overview of pricing for Zapier here: Zapier Pricing
Can Zapier be Used for Marketing Automation?
Yes – Zapier is an excellent option for connecting all your marketing tools and automating the processes. You can use Zapier to segment leads, automate follow-ups, and more.
What are Some Alternatives to Zapier?
There are some alternative automation tools available, but Zapier is the leading option with, by far the most integrations.
Some alternative options include:
- LeadsBridge
- ZigiOps
- API Fuse
- IFTTT
- Microsoft Flow
- Integromat
- CloudHQ
