Automating Emails

Now there are a few tools out there to help you automate your emails to clients, whether it be Mailchimp, Constant Contact, or another mailing provider, but if you are looking for a simple solution you can use Zapier. The other providers are definitely recommended if email marketing is a big part of your marketing strategy, but if you are looking to just set up confirmation emails, emailing coupon codes, or sending automated responses for contact forms on your site, Zapier is a very easy solution. The best part is, you can use your Gmail, Outlook account your already are using, or use the built in Email by Zapier app.

One thing I would like to clarify is that these "Zaps" are all possible on other apps, but the key with Zapier is that you can do more with the info and most times it costs you much less. For example, if you wanted to conduct a survey to get some customer feedback and you wanted to offer a coupon code for participants, you have a number of options to send that automated email with the code. You could use a Google Form, you could create a form through your website builder like WordPress, Squarespace, Duda, etc., or use a form builder like JotForm or TypeForm. You can automate the collection of the responses to wherever you want to store the data, like Google Sheets or AirTable. You can also automate a thank you email with a discount code using Zapier's built-in email tool, or by using your own Gmail or Outlook account.

Social Media Publishing

This is by far my favorite task to automate with Zapier, and there are a few variations that can really help your business. In fact, I plan on creating a whole blog post on a few variations of publishing photos/captions to social media using Zapier.

The first method you can automate is scheduling posts. Of course there are apps out there already that can do that for you, like Hootsuite or Buffer, but if you are an agency or web designer I think this is a huge value-add to your clients if you can create a social media publisher hosted on your client's site.

I will create a whole blog post on how this process works, but basically you can do this by combining a couple everyday apps you probably are already using. The first thing you will need is a form. In this case, you can't necessarily use a Google Form because of how it hosts the photos, but if any form on your website builder should do. In my case, I used a Contact Form in Duda.

You will then want to create a Zap that connects this form to a Google Calendar. I recommend creating a new Google Calendar and calling it "Instagram Publisher" or something along those lines. This Zap will create a meeting on your Google Calendar based on the information from the form.

Next you will need to create a Zap that connects your Google Calendar to Instagram. Make sure that you align the information from the form to Instagram correctly. It gets tricky because a Google Calendar isn't set up to necessarily feed in to Instagram, but match up "caption" with "meeting description" and "photo" with "summary" and you should be good. I'll explain that more in my other blog post.

That is all you need to do. When set up correctly, Zapier should trigger an Instagram Post when the meeting time starts. You can then embed you Google Calendar to your website under your form and you have yourself your own DIY Hootsuite-like publisher on your own site. Check out the pictures below for a basic version. Feel free to get more creative!

By the way, this process can be done for LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. Instagram is just the best in my eyes because you can't publish photos from their desktop version, and as a business that is much more efficient.

The other element to social media publishing that I will mention is the ability to automate content. For one, you can automate social media post and email blasts to your subscribers. You can also aggregate relevant news content, as well. This is for someone who maybe doesn't want to spend all their time coming up with content to post on social media. Maybe you just want to post relevant things about your industry and want consistent content.

Well, Zapier allows you to automate social media posts using an RSS feed. An RSS feed is free content from blogs, news articles, and even Google search results.

You can create your own RSS feed based on feeds from relevant news sources from your industry, or certain search results on Google News. For example, if your in the business of selling skate boards, you can aggregate content from the best skate boarding publications and share those posts on your Instagram feed. Don't take credit for the content, just share the information with your followers and gain more followers from people who are interested in the industry, potentially your customers.

Managing Tasks on a Kanban Board

One popular way to manage your team's tasks is on Kanban boards. You may have heard of some popular task boards to manage projects like Monday.com, Trello, or Asana. In the traditional use, people (or their supervisors) can update a new task on the board and work to check them off of the list. It is a great way for teams to collaborate on projects and get things done together.

Using Zapier, you can automate a number of different tasks with Kanban boards to help you and your team work efficiently. Here are a few cool examples:

1. Create follow-up tasks for "Starred" or "Flagged" emails. This tool can help you stay on track with your busy work schedule, balancing hundreds of emails so you never let anything slip through the cracks. I find this particularly helpful for emails that I need to do a little bit of research for before answering.
2. Support tickets. Whether you are using a form on your site, or an advanced feature like Zendesk, you can create cards on your Kanban board to keep the team on track with your client support tickets. In fact, by using Zapier you could actually save your team money on using a support by not needing an expensive app like Zendesk. You could use a free widget like Tawk.to to collect tickets from your website, or a form built in to your members-only pages, and have those submissions sent to your Kanban board at no cost if you stay on the free Zapier plan.
3. Project Management. These Kanban boards were made for project management and Zapier can help enhance their capabilities. Whether you want to automate email reminders based on changes in an Excel document or Google Sheet, or send notifications to supervisors when a task is marked complete, Zapier can make your project management much more efficient with the use of Kanban boards. When a task is overdue, you can create notifications in advance to not lose sight of any assignments.

I hope you found these automation tools helpful. The capabilities with Zapier are endless, so have fun exploring what other automations you can find to help make you and your team more efficient.

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