Zapier Use Cases: Unlocking Time-Saving Opportunities in Your Daily Tasks

Zapier Use Cases: Unlocking Time-Saving Opportunities in Your Daily Tasks

Automating tasks and workflows is Zapier’s whole thing. Its library of integrations boasts over 6000 apps for this exact reason. Instead of doing everything manually between your work tools, you can make an automated path between them through Zaps.

Zapier’s features are numerous. While it’s exciting at first to think about all the possible Zaps you can create, it can become daunting pretty fast. Linking 6000+ apps in any way you like… you don’t need to be great at math to know that’s a lot of possible combinations.

We can’t possibly help you find all the helpful Zaps out there. That is entirely personal to you and your business needs. What we can (and will) do, however, is give you some Zap examples for 3 different cases. Hopefully, you can either tweak these to fit your workflow, or be inspired by them to create your own.

3 Zapier Use Cases

Without further ado, let’s get into our Zap examples!

Personalized Email Onboarding.

Keeping email onboarding personalized is a great way to make customers feel welcomed by your company. It improves customer retention and just overall customer satisfaction. However, gathering individual information and adding it to emails manually is annoying if you’re a small business, and impossible if you’re a big one. Let’s do it through Zapier!

Step 1: Choosing the trigger. Typeform is a great way to collect information from new customers. Our trigger event will be “New Entry”. That means every time a new form is filled, your Zap will begin.

Step 2: Choosing the action. Link your action app, which in this case is your email marketing platform. Mailchimp is a good example. After the action app has been linked, you will be requested to create a template for the email and enter your own text. Here is where you'll insert dynamic fields like the user's name, email address, and any other data you gathered in the trigger app.

Step 3. Enabling the Zap. Once you've modified the email's content to your liking, you can test the Zap by sending a test email to make sure it's functioning properly. Check that the sample email has the desired personalized information. After the test is complete and the Zap is enabled, it will begin running depending on the trigger events you set up.

Event Registration and Management

By using automation, event planners can devote their attention only to ensuring that attendees have a positive experience. When working with people, it's not enough to only focus on the facts. You also need to make sure they have a good time while doing business with you. The fewer Human errors and the more time spent with your clients, the better the event!

Let’s a get a bit more ambitious with this Zap and add multiple actions. After all, there’s a lot that goes into event planning!

Step 1: Choosing the trigger. Select the app you are using for event registration. Eventbrite is one of the tools Zapier integrates with. Then, set the trigger as either “New Event Registration” or “New Attendee Registered”.

Step 2: Choosing the actions. Link your action apps. For now, we will be using Salesforce, Mailchimp and Google Sheets.

  • Salesforce – Provide information to generate a new contact or lead from the event registration. Fields from the trigger (e.g. event registration data) may need to be mapped to their respective fields in the CRM platform.
  • Mailchimp – Specify the information needed to send a confirmation email to the attendee(s). Prepare the email's body, subject line, list of recipients, and any personalized dynamic fields, such as the recipient's name or registration information.
  • Google Sheets – Give Zapier the details for adding a new row or updating specific cells in a designated spreadsheet. You can map the relevant event registration data from the trigger to the appropriate columns in the spreadsheet.

Step 3. Enabling the Zap. Register a test event or attendee to see if your Zap is working. If everything is in order, you’ve successfully automated your process!

Unified Customer Support

Customers have questions and complaints. All. The. Time. The best way to deal with them is through a well-oiled customer support machine.

Step 1: Choosing the trigger. Link the customer support app, as you probably already know by now. In this case, Zendesk. Our trigger will be “New Ticket Created”.

Step 2: Choosing the actions. We’ll be working with Slack, Asana, and Zapier’s built-in Filter tool.

  • Slack – Select the channel where the tickets will be consolidated. This way, you can ensure that the assigned team members are kept up to date.
  • Asana – Assign support tickets to appropriate team members through your project management tool.
  • Filter by Zapier – Zapier's built-in filter tool streamlines ticket management and resolution. It allows you to prioritize tickets, categorize them automatically, escalate when needed, and create customized workflows. In short, it ensures efficient handling of tickets based on specific criteria.

Step 3. Enabling the Zap. Add a test support ticket or trigger the event manually and make sure it works smoothly.

Add AI Into the Mix

There are two ways you can create the Zaps we’ve mentioned (and many others). You can select “Create a Zap from scratch” in the top right corner of your screen and do it the old-fashioned way. That means adding Triggers and Actions manually.

Or, you can go the Zapier AI route. Zapier considers this the better option. How do we know? Because creating from scratch is a small button on the top right, and creating a Zap with their AI tool is front and center on the Dashboard. Instead of creating the Zap step-by-step, you can just give AI a short prompt.

Zapier AI is in beta, therefore it’s a work in progress. When trying it out for our use cases above, it didn’t work quite as expected. Asking the AI to send out Slack messages for new tickets in Zendesk and then assign the Ticket to team members in Asana failed. It understood the trigger, and brought Asana into the mix, but failed to add Slack at all.

For easy triggers, the AI can be a shortcut. When more complex actions need to be carried out, it might still be easier to create your Zaps from scratch.