9 ms·

Zapier is a god send for the non developer portions of a company. I work in marketing. Marketing projects are inherently speculative, you don't know what they

by cm2012 5y ago

Zapier is a god send for the non developer portions of a company. I work in marketing. Marketing projects are inherently speculative, you don't know what they will achieve until they're done. Add to this that dev teams at every company have full sprints planned for months. Getting a marketing project done through the dev team is months of exertion and sweat. Or... get Zapier approved by security, get platforms plugged in officially, nice and tidy. And then the marketers can do what they need in the platform, and they're able to iterate and learn at a much faster pace. It changes the whole game.

dnndev 5y ago
This is exactly the kind of comment I was hoping to see. May I ask, what kinds of things are you using zapier for that are not just nice to haves. Something that you would say it pays for itself (increases revenue somehow)
- tucaz 5y ago
  I would love to get an answer to this question as well. I keep comings back to Zapier and the likes hoping I will find a useful use case but can’t. It seems that all it does is add stuff from email marketing forms to Google spreadsheets.
  - bag_boy 5y ago
    Google form > email action was my best use case
  - crisnoble 5y ago
    Even if that was literally all it could do, it would easily be worth $50/month for marketing teams.
  - dsaavy 5y ago
    For more complex things Zapier falls flat IMO. I've been using Make.com (formerly Integromat) and it offers way more flexibility and it's easier to configure for more complex automations.
    - jimmySixDOF 5y ago
      Not to mention Make has a much better entry level cost point: 1 Month (billed Monthly): ---Zapier $29 ---(5 triggers / 750 events) ---Make $11 ---(unlimited triggers/10,000 events)
- duxup 5y ago
  Yeah I was wondering too. Not that people wouldn't use it, but I wonder about what the transition is from "this is handy" to "I want to continuously pay for this service / enough that it is consistent enough / earns me money back enough to do this and not something else".
- xhkkffbf 5y ago
  Indeed, this unbundling is already happening. Many of the so-called Customer Data Platforms offer a low-code, no-code option for creating and iterating on marketing campaigns. They've already done the work of integrating with the various storefronts and ad platforms.
- cm2012 5y ago
  Facebook and LinkedIn leads ads to Marketo/Hubspot/Salesforce, Facebook Conversion API from Salesforce to FB are vital connections for B2B companies.
  - georgesequeira 5y ago
    Would love to hear more about your experience with these platforms. Thought they were mostly plug-n-play these days. Could I email you?
- dshanahan 5y ago
  Great convo, thought I'd share some valuable zaps I've used over the last few years to save $$$ on headcount, dev time, and burn/debt on unproven ideas/experiments. - Slack - pipe all kinds of events into special #channels to cross teams can check one spot for external happenings: new users, new sales, support chats, form/data submissions - Forms > CRM/Sheets - shouldn't be understated. Using lead page or no-code CRM (webflow my fave) I've swapped out various signup flows to test ideas/friction/followups repeatedly before asking dev to build actual signup flows into the backend app. Can swap paperform, typeform, mailchimp, google forms in under an hour for multiple signup/landing pages w/o any devs. - Calendar - I use Motion (similar to Calendly) across sales team to speed up meeting flows + use Zaps to pipe those bookings into sheets/Slack/CRM or EMS. Sales team calendars can be public on marketing site (webflow) and bookings generate all the alerts and data we need to just show up to the meetings. - Leverage SMS channel - One-click surveys, recurring survey campaigns using SimpleTexting or YesInsights and piping results wherever I need 'em. Google Sheet with charted dashboards already set up to auto-update. Great for ecomm, great for call/response feature testing with zero dev required. Can add phone signups via form integration or email campaign. - Manual issue / todo alerts: Use specific tag in Asana to pipe a ticket into Slack channel when team member wants to surface for manager/teammate - instead of asana firehose - Light @mention feed - Pipe brand mentions/topics, including web (reddit etc - use F5bot) into sheet or #channel for marketing eyes to check daily - Twitter bot - built @carryonbagsizes using just Zaps: anyone tweets airline name and gets carry-on bag size restrictions back from the bot (including variations on airline names ie United vs United Airlines)
  - Dwolb 5y ago
    Piping user data into Sheets is literally my nightmare. Especially if there's any sort of editing or data transform in sheets, there's 0 traceability of the change.
    - aaaaaaaaata 5y ago
      Is there any way to lock a Sheet from edits except for API-based changes?
- tungle 5y ago
  set a Google calendar event every working day, then connect Zapier to post to Mattermost to remind my team do to virtual stand-up meeting.
rockostrich 5y ago
> get Zapier approved by security How do you manage this when marketing relies on PII to do anything? We just went through a switch over to a multi-channel messaging SaaS from an internal solution that "worked" for 6 years. Handling the PII aspect of things was taken care of by the SaaS being SOC 2 and GDPR compliant, but something like Zapier seems like it gives users the control to move PII into systems that don't have that compliance. Or are there controls around which data can flow where?
- Kalium 5y ago
  Long story short, you don't. No competent security organization taking their responsibilities seriously is going to issue a blanket approval of something as broad as Zapier. What you can do is get an enterprise relationship in place, deploy tight endpoint monitoring and management, careful management of permissions at every level, and then make the review processes relatively fast. Not marketing-wants-to-build-a-whole-new-thing-with-lots-of-PII-tomorrow fast, but fast. Having strong systems for generating realistic test data and systems will make this prototyping much easier, though from experience Marketing will tend to dismiss such things. Marketing's needs and goals are real and important and valid and blah blah blah blah. Mostly their institutional incentives are to barrel ahead as fast as possible with any and every tools available. A security organization's remit is to make sure that this isn't reckless and liability-inducing, which often means dialing back the speed from breakneck to manageable and maybe even doing some token amount of planning around what you hope to achieve.
  - cm2012 5y ago
    Yep, in small companies you get carte blanche, and there are two kinds of big companies. Those that make it work with a process like the above comment (which looks like a great and reasonable set-up), and those that kneecap their marketing departments by rejecting the tools needed for modern marketing. As a side note, I've worked with 60+ startups. One thing that kills start-ups whenever it happens is giving too much power too early to the "default to no" departments of a company - security, legal, brand.
    - 5y ago
LunaSea 5y ago
This would have been true 5 years ago but based on the current pricing, any non-trivial use case is far more expensive than identical internal development and maintenance.
Forgeties79 5y ago
I should look into more features with it. Right now I mainly use it to link my Slack and GitHub presence. Very very useful since I get all sorts of notes from folks on both platforms. It's been critical to avoid having things fall through the cracks. I keep a special private slack channel that has slackbot message me whenever someone pings me on GH and lays out all the relevant info.
KnobbleMcKnees 5y ago
> Add to this that dev teams at every company have full sprints planned for months. Getting a marketing project done through the dev team is months of exertion and sweat. I'm confused by this, can you clarify? This sounds like the exact opposite of agile sprints (assuming you're talking about agile)
- guitarsteve 5y ago
  It doesn’t sound too far off from what I’ve seen. The details of the sprints may not be worked out, but a dev team might have several months of high priority project queued up and marketing might be deemed lower priority. So getting extra work done from another team can sometimes take a very long time.
  - mylons 5y ago
    i agree that this is mostly what i see too. but it’s not agile, it’s people claiming they’re agile and doing something else.
    - jtwaleson 5y ago
      We outsource a lot of the marketing tech and website related work so marketing is not blocked by our own development team. We don’t see marketing tech and our Wordpress website as our “secret sauce”. The devs are just focused on product development.
      - iamacyborg 5y ago
        Does your product not generate data that would be useful for the marketing team?
        jtwaleson 5y ago
        Yes, and we do try to prioritize work on data exporting :)
    - 5y ago
samstave 5y ago
Can you please share some example workflows enabled by Zapier that benefits your org?
- stevesearer 5y ago
  Not marketing, but we use it to automate some WordPress tasks. WordPress Gravity Forms submission -> Zapier -> Airtable to assign calendar -> Zapier -> Create WordPress draft Have someone fill out a structured Google Sheet -> upload to private Gravity Form -> Zapier to process > Create WordPress draft I'm sure I could spend time figuring out how to do this stuff directly in WP with coding, but it is nice to connect existing things together relatively easily as a first step.
- nickfromseattle 5y ago
  1. New demo booked via Calendly --> find/create deal in CRM --> send Slack message to #notifications-sales 2. New app sign up --> webhook to Zap --> create new deal in CRM --> create new contact in email automation platform --> send a Slack message to #notifications-signups 3. New in-app purchase --> Update CRM Deal as 'Won', update Deal LTV --> push Slack notification --> change email sequence from 'free trial' to 'paid subscriber' 4. New Facebook Group member --> add as contact in email automation platform and subscribe to 'Facebook Group' email list 5. New charge in stripe --> update CRM LTV value
iamacyborg 5y ago
As a Marketing Ops guy, this gives me pause. > nice and tidy. And then the marketers can do what they need in the platform, and they're able to iterate and learn at a much faster pace. It changes the whole game. The reality is, marketers will frequently plug in any and every thing they can without thinking about the broader context. Sure you can plug all this stuff together, or you can spend a bit of time with ETL and rETL tools and develop a stack that isn't reliant on a bunch of third party silos.
- emteycz 5y ago
  I would have no idea where to start with rETL and I'm a software engineer... Search turns up some medicine and other non-related stuff. If it's a typo, then sorry. But ETL is the same beast. I have few ideas where to start thanks to my programming background, but I can't imagine the marketing department guys do any of it. Non-ideal but less expensive is still better than nothing (or too expensive to stay profitable). Not all operations are huge companies that can afford IT teams working on their behalf.
  - iamacyborg 5y ago
    Basically, reverse ETL, ie get data from the warehouse to operational platforms. The two big players are Census and Hightouch. https://www.getcensus.com/ https://www.getcensus.com/ https://hightouch.io/ https://hightouch.io/ Both offer no-code tools to help non-technical users make use of the data.
    - emteycz 5y ago
      Thanks for the links, I'll have a look.
    - maxerickson 5y ago
      What does the L mean then?
      - me_bx 5y ago
Dwolb 5y ago
One time, when we were much smaller and a team of 10, we had a marketer who also thought they were a developer. Instead of choosing an off-the-shelf tagging solution like Google Tag manager, they used Zapier + custom injected code into Wordpress + Segment to attempt to hand-roll a "marketing tech stack". All the data was wrong and all the integrations would break constantly. Eventually we moved on and a team had to figure out how to rip out all the code and deprecate the integrations. We ended up just moving to a new CMS to start clean.
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
This is how sites get burdened with a half dozen analytics scripts.
eru 5y ago
> I work in marketing. Marketing projects are inherently speculative, you don't know what they will achieve until they're done. Add to this that dev teams at every company have full sprints planned for months. Getting a marketing project done through the dev team is months of exertion and sweat. Slightly off-topic: you basically just described why spreadsheets were such a huge deal when they were first introduced in the 1980s.
- disgruntledphd2 5y ago
  And also why the world still runs on Excel.
  - eru 5y ago
    Yes, definitely! Excel is actually a relatively decent programming language when you want to quickly _write_ a business application. The big problem occurs when you want to _read_ the application. Alas, reading is necessary for maintenance and debugging and reviewing/auditing.

by cm2012 5y ago

dnndev 5y ago

This is exactly the kind of comment I was hoping to see. May I ask, what kinds of things are you using zapier for that are not just nice to haves. Something that you would say it pays for itself (increases revenue somehow)

tucaz 5y ago
I would love to get an answer to this question as well. I keep comings back to Zapier and the likes hoping I will find a useful use case but can’t. It seems that all it does is add stuff from email marketing forms to Google spreadsheets.
- bag_boy 5y ago
  Google form > email action was my best use case
- crisnoble 5y ago
  Even if that was literally all it could do, it would easily be worth $50/month for marketing teams.
- dsaavy 5y ago
  For more complex things Zapier falls flat IMO. I've been using Make.com (formerly Integromat) and it offers way more flexibility and it's easier to configure for more complex automations.
  - jimmySixDOF 5y ago
    Not to mention Make has a much better entry level cost point: 1 Month (billed Monthly): ---Zapier $29 ---(5 triggers / 750 events) ---Make $11 ---(unlimited triggers/10,000 events)
duxup 5y ago
Yeah I was wondering too. Not that people wouldn't use it, but I wonder about what the transition is from "this is handy" to "I want to continuously pay for this service / enough that it is consistent enough / earns me money back enough to do this and not something else".
xhkkffbf 5y ago
Indeed, this unbundling is already happening. Many of the so-called Customer Data Platforms offer a low-code, no-code option for creating and iterating on marketing campaigns. They've already done the work of integrating with the various storefronts and ad platforms.
cm2012 5y ago
Facebook and LinkedIn leads ads to Marketo/Hubspot/Salesforce, Facebook Conversion API from Salesforce to FB are vital connections for B2B companies.
- georgesequeira 5y ago
  Would love to hear more about your experience with these platforms. Thought they were mostly plug-n-play these days. Could I email you?
dshanahan 5y ago
Great convo, thought I'd share some valuable zaps I've used over the last few years to save $$$ on headcount, dev time, and burn/debt on unproven ideas/experiments. - Slack - pipe all kinds of events into special #channels to cross teams can check one spot for external happenings: new users, new sales, support chats, form/data submissions - Forms > CRM/Sheets - shouldn't be understated. Using lead page or no-code CRM (webflow my fave) I've swapped out various signup flows to test ideas/friction/followups repeatedly before asking dev to build actual signup flows into the backend app. Can swap paperform, typeform, mailchimp, google forms in under an hour for multiple signup/landing pages w/o any devs. - Calendar - I use Motion (similar to Calendly) across sales team to speed up meeting flows + use Zaps to pipe those bookings into sheets/Slack/CRM or EMS. Sales team calendars can be public on marketing site (webflow) and bookings generate all the alerts and data we need to just show up to the meetings. - Leverage SMS channel - One-click surveys, recurring survey campaigns using SimpleTexting or YesInsights and piping results wherever I need 'em. Google Sheet with charted dashboards already set up to auto-update. Great for ecomm, great for call/response feature testing with zero dev required. Can add phone signups via form integration or email campaign. - Manual issue / todo alerts: Use specific tag in Asana to pipe a ticket into Slack channel when team member wants to surface for manager/teammate - instead of asana firehose - Light @mention feed - Pipe brand mentions/topics, including web (reddit etc - use F5bot) into sheet or #channel for marketing eyes to check daily - Twitter bot - built @carryonbagsizes using just Zaps: anyone tweets airline name and gets carry-on bag size restrictions back from the bot (including variations on airline names ie United vs United Airlines)
- Dwolb 5y ago
  Piping user data into Sheets is literally my nightmare. Especially if there's any sort of editing or data transform in sheets, there's 0 traceability of the change.
  - aaaaaaaaata 5y ago
    Is there any way to lock a Sheet from edits except for API-based changes?
tungle 5y ago
set a Google calendar event every working day, then connect Zapier to post to Mattermost to remind my team do to virtual stand-up meeting.

rockostrich 5y ago

> get Zapier approved by security How do you manage this when marketing relies on PII to do anything? We just went through a switch over to a multi-channel messaging SaaS from an internal solution that "worked" for 6 years. Handling the PII aspect of things was taken care of by the SaaS being SOC 2 and GDPR compliant, but something like Zapier seems like it gives users the control to move PII into systems that don't have that compliance. Or are there controls around which data can flow where?

Kalium 5y ago
Long story short, you don't. No competent security organization taking their responsibilities seriously is going to issue a blanket approval of something as broad as Zapier. What you can do is get an enterprise relationship in place, deploy tight endpoint monitoring and management, careful management of permissions at every level, and then make the review processes relatively fast. Not marketing-wants-to-build-a-whole-new-thing-with-lots-of-PII-tomorrow fast, but fast. Having strong systems for generating realistic test data and systems will make this prototyping much easier, though from experience Marketing will tend to dismiss such things. Marketing's needs and goals are real and important and valid and blah blah blah blah. Mostly their institutional incentives are to barrel ahead as fast as possible with any and every tools available. A security organization's remit is to make sure that this isn't reckless and liability-inducing, which often means dialing back the speed from breakneck to manageable and maybe even doing some token amount of planning around what you hope to achieve.
- cm2012 5y ago
  Yep, in small companies you get carte blanche, and there are two kinds of big companies. Those that make it work with a process like the above comment (which looks like a great and reasonable set-up), and those that kneecap their marketing departments by rejecting the tools needed for modern marketing. As a side note, I've worked with 60+ startups. One thing that kills start-ups whenever it happens is giving too much power too early to the "default to no" departments of a company - security, legal, brand.
  - 5y ago

LunaSea 5y ago

This would have been true 5 years ago but based on the current pricing, any non-trivial use case is far more expensive than identical internal development and maintenance.

Forgeties79 5y ago

I should look into more features with it. Right now I mainly use it to link my Slack and GitHub presence. Very very useful since I get all sorts of notes from folks on both platforms. It's been critical to avoid having things fall through the cracks. I keep a special private slack channel that has slackbot message me whenever someone pings me on GH and lays out all the relevant info.

KnobbleMcKnees 5y ago

> Add to this that dev teams at every company have full sprints planned for months. Getting a marketing project done through the dev team is months of exertion and sweat. I'm confused by this, can you clarify? This sounds like the exact opposite of agile sprints (assuming you're talking about agile)

guitarsteve 5y ago
It doesn’t sound too far off from what I’ve seen. The details of the sprints may not be worked out, but a dev team might have several months of high priority project queued up and marketing might be deemed lower priority. So getting extra work done from another team can sometimes take a very long time.
- mylons 5y ago
  i agree that this is mostly what i see too. but it’s not agile, it’s people claiming they’re agile and doing something else.
  - jtwaleson 5y ago
    We outsource a lot of the marketing tech and website related work so marketing is not blocked by our own development team. We don’t see marketing tech and our Wordpress website as our “secret sauce”. The devs are just focused on product development.
    - iamacyborg 5y ago
      Does your product not generate data that would be useful for the marketing team?
      - jtwaleson 5y ago
        Yes, and we do try to prioritize work on data exporting :)
  - 5y ago

samstave 5y ago

Can you please share some example workflows enabled by Zapier that benefits your org?

stevesearer 5y ago
Not marketing, but we use it to automate some WordPress tasks. WordPress Gravity Forms submission -> Zapier -> Airtable to assign calendar -> Zapier -> Create WordPress draft Have someone fill out a structured Google Sheet -> upload to private Gravity Form -> Zapier to process > Create WordPress draft I'm sure I could spend time figuring out how to do this stuff directly in WP with coding, but it is nice to connect existing things together relatively easily as a first step.
nickfromseattle 5y ago
1. New demo booked via Calendly --> find/create deal in CRM --> send Slack message to #notifications-sales 2. New app sign up --> webhook to Zap --> create new deal in CRM --> create new contact in email automation platform --> send a Slack message to #notifications-signups 3. New in-app purchase --> Update CRM Deal as 'Won', update Deal LTV --> push Slack notification --> change email sequence from 'free trial' to 'paid subscriber' 4. New Facebook Group member --> add as contact in email automation platform and subscribe to 'Facebook Group' email list 5. New charge in stripe --> update CRM LTV value

iamacyborg 5y ago

As a Marketing Ops guy, this gives me pause. > nice and tidy. And then the marketers can do what they need in the platform, and they're able to iterate and learn at a much faster pace. It changes the whole game. The reality is, marketers will frequently plug in any and every thing they can without thinking about the broader context. Sure you can plug all this stuff together, or you can spend a bit of time with ETL and rETL tools and develop a stack that isn't reliant on a bunch of third party silos.

emteycz 5y ago
I would have no idea where to start with rETL and I'm a software engineer... Search turns up some medicine and other non-related stuff. If it's a typo, then sorry. But ETL is the same beast. I have few ideas where to start thanks to my programming background, but I can't imagine the marketing department guys do any of it. Non-ideal but less expensive is still better than nothing (or too expensive to stay profitable). Not all operations are huge companies that can afford IT teams working on their behalf.
- iamacyborg 5y ago
  Basically, reverse ETL, ie get data from the warehouse to operational platforms. The two big players are Census and Hightouch. https://www.getcensus.com/ https://www.getcensus.com/ https://hightouch.io/ https://hightouch.io/ Both offer no-code tools to help non-technical users make use of the data.
  - emteycz 5y ago
    Thanks for the links, I'll have a look.
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    What does the L mean then?
    - me_bx 5y ago

Dwolb 5y ago

One time, when we were much smaller and a team of 10, we had a marketer who also thought they were a developer. Instead of choosing an off-the-shelf tagging solution like Google Tag manager, they used Zapier + custom injected code into Wordpress + Segment to attempt to hand-roll a "marketing tech stack". All the data was wrong and all the integrations would break constantly. Eventually we moved on and a team had to figure out how to rip out all the code and deprecate the integrations. We ended up just moving to a new CMS to start clean.

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago

This is how sites get burdened with a half dozen analytics scripts.

eru 5y ago

> I work in marketing. Marketing projects are inherently speculative, you don't know what they will achieve until they're done. Add to this that dev teams at every company have full sprints planned for months. Getting a marketing project done through the dev team is months of exertion and sweat. Slightly off-topic: you basically just described why spreadsheets were such a huge deal when they were first introduced in the 1980s.

disgruntledphd2 5y ago
And also why the world still runs on Excel.
- eru 5y ago
  Yes, definitely! Excel is actually a relatively decent programming language when you want to quickly _write_ a business application. The big problem occurs when you want to _read_ the application. Alas, reading is necessary for maintenance and debugging and reviewing/auditing.