What is Zapier and How do I Automate My Business?
There aren’t enough hours in the day for business owners.
If at any point in your career you’ve said the above phrase, take a deep breath: you’re not alone. As a business owner, or even an employee, repeating mundane tasks only slows your workflow and takes your precious time away from other tasks.
We’ve talked about how to set yourself up for success by scheduling out your Social Media Posts so that you can take back time throughout your work days, but what about everything else that isn’t related to social media? We’re going to let you in on a little secret:
automation (noun):
the technique of making an apparatus, a process, or a system operate automatically
Albert Einstein said that “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”; while we’re expecting a different result by performing a mundane task, why continue to do it if the result is unequivocally the same each time? Let’s run through a very common scenario we see often:
John Smith runs a very successful local hardware store and has started his venture into E-commerce. John is overjoyed when he sees that he is receiving 5-10 new online customers a week. However, John’s database of online customers isn’t connected to his email marketing service provider. Every Friday, John allocates 30-45 minutes of his work day inputting his new customer’s data into his email marketing service so that he is able to send them a thank you email for being a paying customer. John even creates a new email campaign each Friday and specifically targets only the new customers.
Automation: the technique of making an apparatus, a process, or a system operate automatically.
While 30-45 minutes a week might seem like nothing compared to the 80-100 hour weeks most entrepreneurs and business owners endure, it does add up when the same task is repeated frequently. John can benefit from someone inputting the data for him, but hiring another employee just isn’t possible at the time and seems like a waste of resources for simple data entry, and John isn’t well versed in coding enough to code a solution.
What is Zapier?
Zapier is an automation tool for web services. While that sounds like a bunch of tech jargon, let’s revisit John Smith’s hardware store.
Instead of allocating 30-45 minutes a week, John could have set up an automation in which any new online order automatically added all of the customer’s information into his email marketing service, and then have his email marketing service send a Welcome email to any new customer! And through Zapier, it’s that easy. Seriously.
Zapier connects the services you already use in your business and gives you the power to connect them via triggers and actions. In John’s case, we can break it down to the following:
Trigger: Online order is placed through John’s E-Commerce website
Action: Take all inputted customer data (Name, Email Address, Phone Number, Address, Etc.) and input that as a new email subscriber into John’s Email marketing service.
While the example we gave may seem a bit basic and not fit your specific needs, Zapier has proved to be one of the most powerful automation tools that are used by all businesses, even enterprise! The use cases are endless, and continue to improve over time as Zapier adds more and more web services to their arsenal of apps they support. Check out some of their customer stories to get inspired!