Understanding Zapier Automation Features

zapier is one of the most powerful tools for automating your business but what exactly is zapier and how does it work the average company uses an astounding 254 applications to power their business that might sound crazy but just think about all the apps you use from project management and crms to website Builders forms communication tools marketing accounting you name it without these systems talking to one another this lack of automation can cost businesses hundreds of thousands if not Mill millions of dollars in Lost productivity so where does zap your play into all of this instead of you being the glue that holds together all of your business applications constantly running reports exporting and importing data and firing off notifications now zappier connects your systems together letting them talk to one another and all without needing to know how to code before we get into building our first zap together there's a couple of terms you should know every zap consists of a trigger and one or more actions we can always start with a single trigger this trigger tells our zap when to start doing something and the action is what our zap actually does as a result when we pair together a trigger with one or more actions we call this a zap you might also think of this as an automation or a workflow hi I'm Dan Leman from Automation helpers.com and we help businesses like yours get automated and integrated with your business applications now this tutorial is a little bit longer in nature so we've included timestamps down below if you want to skip to the sections that are most relevant to you now it's time to build our first zap together so when you log in you see this dashboard it says create a zap and one of the really cool things about zap here is you can create as many zaps as many different automations as you want they're not going to charge you for that you get charged on the execution of those zaps instead of the zaps themselves so one of the things that happens is I really encourage experimenting a lot and creating lots of different zaps and so in order to do that I'd really recommend creating a folder structure for yourself so if you click on zaps down here you could create these different folders and store all of your zaps in those folders and we're going to give them good titles so that we don't lose track of everything that we're doing so I'll click into my demo examples folder for this video and let's go ahead and create a new zap here now let's talk about our use case for this zap so I might be using different applications than you there are free plans for all of these tools so you can follow along exactly with what I'm doing or you can just watch and then apply that to a zap that you're going to be creating but our use case is that we work in marketing and we have some videos that we need to create for our team so we've created a Google form for them really simple we're just capturing what's the topic of the video when do you need this video to be published by and then from there we want to help create a creative brief or an outline of what's going to happen for that video and then we want to have the system notify us to let us know hey you've got a new video waiting for you that you need to create now when you you get started you can certainly add your own triggers and this is what people always did for a very long time you'd be searching for the application that's triggering this which would be anytime there's a new submission to Google forms we're going to kick that off but you see there's this new feature that's in beta that we can actually use AI to help generate our Zap for us and this is really powerful especially if you have relatively simplistic zaps that you're creating so let's give this a try we'll say when a Google form submission is received then we're going to send some of that information to open aai then we're going to create a Google document with that outline that we get from open Ai and then finally we're going to send a notification in slack let's see what it comes up with now look at how cool this is it came up with all of our steps here is our trigger that we have there's a new form response and then we have three follow-up actions we're sending that prompt to openai we're creating a document in Google Docs and then we're sending a slack notification so let's let's click on try it now I'd love to say that that's all you have to do go ahead and publish it and it's good to go but we know that automation can be a little bit finicky so we're going to go through this and make sure that each step is configured in the way it needs to be in order for this to work so let's start by clicking on our trigger about this Google form submission and one of the things that you'll need to do is add your account this is going to walk you through the process of connecting to your application so it's going to look something like this if I go ahead and reconnect it it's going to bring you to a prompt to authenticate to give it the permissions it needs and you have to be able to grant that in order for it to interact with the accounts that you have and you'll find that this is a step that you need to do for most of the applications that you're interacting with because they're behind logins once you've authenticated and you can see your account there then we're going to go down to the trigger itself and here's where we need to choose the specific form because you might have created several different forms already I'll click on the form and we can search for it in the search box in this case I can see that I've got this video content creation one so we're going to select that and then here's where we're going to test that step this is an important part of any automation step that we want to make sure that we have test records to work with and that this is working properly before we go onto our next step so I'm going to click to test the trigger here and we can see that we have a form response I put in zap your tutorial cuz that's what we're doing so we'll see how this outline looks we've got that information that we need there could be multiple records and so could tell it which record you want to choose from but we're going to go ahead and continue with that selected record now we want to take what we did in the Google form submission step and send it to open AI so here we are going to configure this next step we're going to send a prompt we'll click continue and again you'll need to set up your own account so this is going to ask for an API key that you can utilize for it we'll go ahead and click continue and then we can scroll down we're going to use GPT 3.5 down here and we need to add a prompt this this is kind of the most important part that we need to get right so I've created a prompt already I'm saying hey your goal is to help outline this video topic that we have and we want you to create an outline format for us we want to keep it nice and short and tight we don't want it to expound as chat GPT often times does so notice the last thing I'm doing here is saying the topic for this video is because here is the beauty of zapier and automation we don't want to have to type in the topic for this video is zap your tutorial and then every time it relies on us to type in air table tutorial or whatever is next this is where we want to use data dynamically from our previous steps this is the whole beauty of automation here so what we can do is if we click on it you can see that there's this insert data and this allows us to grab information from any of our previous steps so I can search here I know that I called this topic so we can see here's the question what is the topic of this video zapier tutorial tutorial and I can click on that and it's going to insert this so it's not going to actually have the question here it's not going to say what is the topic of this video in the prompt that we're creating it's only going to take the value of it which in this case was zapier tutorial when we submitted that form so now we can X out of here and we could adjust different things if you're familiar with how gpts work you can adjust all of these settings but we're just going to take it as is for now press continue and you can see down below that it's generated this prompt accurately because we have the text that we gave it and then it's inserted that zapier tutorial text as well so let's go ahead and test this step and you can see this actually sent it to open aai and it's come back with our response here so in the response you can see it's built a nice outline for us now of course we'll probably want to tweak this ourselves but open AI helps give us a leg up here that looks good to me so let's go ahead and continue now we can choose our action for our Google doc there's a couple cool options like we could create a document from a template but we're just going to go ahead and create this from text again click continue you'll have to make sure that you're authenticated with your Google Docs account press continue again and then here is where we can set up our action so our document name another perfect way that we can use that data dynamically so let's go ahead and call this maybe the topic of our video so again we can search for this I'll search for topic so we'll call it zap your tutorial and then we can also add in static text so maybe we want to add a hyphen and then we're going to call this outline zap your tutorial outline if we wanted to we could include additional information like maybe we want to put in the publish date so I'll go ahead and search for publish when will the video be published we could inject that as well so you can have multiple pieces of data inserted into this text without any additional effort and we'll X out of here our document content itself we probably want to let the user know when the published date is maybe they don't see it in the title so let's first add our published date and again we will insert that data from our publish date now I'll put in a couple line breaks and let's put in the outline that we've now generated so this is going to be called from open aai the response you can see that we've got here's the introduction and all that information so we'll inject our response from open Ai and we can choose the folder that this goes to as well so do we just want it at the base the root of our Google Docs in this case probably not I'm going to click on my folder and we've got a demo folder for now now we can test this step and if I go into my Google Drive I can see it's actually created that document for us in the test I can open this up and see all the information about our outline and then our last step is to send our slack notification so we'll continue here let's set up our action I'm going to choose just a demo Channel but maybe we have one called video creation or something like that that would be a little bit more relevant here's where we can put in our message text we have our video topic up here but let's actually add the link to the Google Doc itself so I'm going to search for link there's a lot of different options to choose from I'll use this alternate link and then we should be good to go for our slack message you could add your own icons and there's additional slack settings if you want to dig into that as well let's go ahead and press continue and we'll test this step and now we can see that we've received a notification in the channel That We specified in slack and we can actually open up the hyperlink that we get to show the outline that we have so far now I'm going to retitle this because I don't love the automated name up here so we'll call this video outline process and then we're ready to go and publish our zap and turn this on so it's available and ready to go now we're live in production and we can submit the form for ourselves we've got clickup tutorial this time and we've got a date that we want this for we can submit it and then in the background our zap is running and then without any interaction on our part it automatically has created our slack notification and the new outline that we have for clickup tutorial congratulations you have finished your first zap now we're going to go ahead and talk about some other Advanced features that you can use within your zaps as well as what's coming down the pipe from what zapier is building but before we do all that I think it's important to talk about pricing just so you're not caught unaware about how zapier is charging you based on your zaps when it comes to zapier's pricing there's a couple different things that you need to think about for one we're not talking about the tables and interfaces pricing we'll cover those topics later in the video we're mostly focused on just the zaps right now so overall this is consumption based the more executions of your zaps and the individual actions within them is going to cost you more now additionally there's different plans below that offer different features so there's a free plan starter professional and team and then there's a company or Enterprise plan here and so depending on that you might have 2,000 tasks and get charged two different amounts depending on if you're looking for the additional features that team allows versus what you're getting with professional now to be honest if you're serious about automating your business you're not going to be able to stick on the free plan for very long one of the important reasons for this is that you're only limited to twep zaps twostep zap is more simple than the one we just did in the previous example now that zap you could complete if you were on a free trial for one of the paid plans but this two-step zap only consists of that trigger and a single action so in our case we had three actions let's take a look at that again where we had the trigger and then we had three follow-up actions to that so if you were on the free plan you could only do a trigger and then you could send a slack notification and we wouldn't create that Google Document at all so it's pretty restrictive when it comes to how you're planning and architecting your zaps so you can think of the math like this let's say you selected the professional plan 49 bucks a month and it's going to be for those 2,000 tasks now that first zap that we created together consumes three tasks every single time it runs well that $49 divided by 2,000 tasks is going to be 2.45 cents a task and then the cost of running that zap with three of those tasks each time is going to be 7.35 now some of you might be overjoyed this is literally costing me cents let's automate everything but you can imagine as you do this at scale those cents add up it's going to cost you more the more that you invest into Automation and so that leads people to ask the question is zappier the best choice for my business so so how is zapier position in the marketplace and how does it stack up against its competitors zapier by far has the largest market share even people who aren't very technical they'll probably have heard of zapier in some regards now in addition to this they're doing a lot with Innovation they've created canvas tables interfaces they're doing a lot with open AI so you can see that there's a huge investment in their product they also have the greatest selection of different applications that they connect to now this is a little bit of a marketing thing because in reality it doesn't matter if 6,000 or more different applications connect to zapier because you're only using a small fraction of them what's most important is that the applications that you're using work with whatever automation platform you're using but still it's helpful to have an application like zapier that invests so much in connecting to this huge ecosystem of applications zapier is also the easiest for clients to use and maintain themselves so you might work with an automation agency like ours as you're building and getting set up but if you want to make tweaks you don't have to be dependent on someone else you can make all those changes and maintain them yourself on the cons side zappier is definitely the most expensive automation tool that we work with on a regular basis so if you're concerned about cost you might want to take a look at some of the other tools that are out there it's also not quite as useful for more complex automations if you're trying to configure a lot of complex zap you might have more luck using a different tool next up we have relay like zapier it's very easy to use they're investing a ton in their AI features and one advantage they have over zapier is definitely around the pricing model I think you'll find it a lot more attractive on the con side they're newer to Market and so they're not quite as able to handle some of the more complex automations that you might need make is definitely the tool that gets compared to zapier the most so you might have heard of them as integrat in the past so on the pros side you can build much more complex automations than zapier and still a pretty easy to ous interface it's generally much more affordable than zapier based on their pricing model and they have a more generous free plan so we work with a number of clients who can just stay on their free plan they don't even need to upgrade to a paid plan on the cons it is a steeper learning curve I definitely think if you pair the two together and you ask someone hey which platform is easier for you to get started with I think you're going to find that zappier is easier for more people and if you're looking for the most complex automations and maybe need some code in there it's really not that great of a tool for coding automations there's better options out there and the final two that we're kind of pairing together are pipe dream and n8n on the pro side anytime that you want to run code like python or JavaScript these two are going to be the best options for you they'll also save a ton of money on the operational cost side and you can probably get these at the cheapest and for n8n they're also open source so if you want to self-host that's an option that you can do with them on the con side both of these applications are far more technical than the other options that we've talked about so this is really catering to a different audience if you've got Technical Resources on your team then these are both great options so hopefully you can see that zapier is this very easy to use platform position for beginners really easy for people to be able to maintain on their own and they're investing a lot in new innovation next let's take a look at some of my favorite triggers that you can use to do some more advanced things inside a zapier so what are you going to do if you're looking for a trigger but you can't find it for the application that you need or maybe you have an application and you want to just be able to click a button and have that trigger a new zap both of those are perfect use cases for web hooks now web hooks are a little bit more advanced of a concept so it's okay if you don't get it all right away but it's basically the idea that we're going to send some information from another application and we're going to send it via the URL we're going to have a special URL that zapier gives us and we can add on some additional information that we want to send it to and then Tada it kicks off our zap so in this case my trigger is a web Hook by zappier and we're going to use just a catch hook here we'll go ahead and say continue and let's check out the test area where this gives us the actual URL that we need to copy so I'll copy this and for this example I'm going to use an air table interface where I have a button where we want to contact a client so this will be our example but this would work if you have your own custombuilt application or anywhere that offers a button or even just opening the URL itself so air table has a special formula field and I'm just pasting in what we just copied of of our web hook and we've got it up until this point but what I want to do is we want to send it the email address of the person or of the account that we click that button on so we're using a little bit of fancy logic to concatenate or to combine an email address and with our URLs we have something called URL parameters which is to say we can have this question mark and have some query parameters in this case we're sending along the email address and we're setting that email address equal to a certain value that we have so if I save this this is what this is going to look like so now instead of just the web hook itself take a look at these URLs I've got the full URL which stays the same for all of these records and then we have question mark email equals and then for all of these different people it has their email address so now I have this button and I'm going to say hey let's actually have it open up that link from that zappier web hook that we have and now we can click our button to contact the client now back inside of zapier if we test this trigger it's going to listen for that event that we just triggered and here's the really cool part it's sent along that email address for us that Rose example.com now I know that this is more advanced of a concept and we'll have a separate video where we dig more into this so if this went by too quickly don't worry about it but just know anytime that you need your own special Trigger or you want to be able to integrate with some application that doesn't have that trigger available or you want to have a button these are all great use cases that you can have for web hooks because then we could click on our action and maybe we want to fire off an email so we choose email by zappier and we're going to send an outbound email and here in our action here's where we can use that data that rosit example.com from the query string that we just sent now if you don't want to use a web hook you could also have an Incoming Email trigger your automation as well and we can parse the details of that email to be able to send on to our follow-up actions so in this casee I'm using the email parser by zappier and we've got it for a new incoming email and what this does is it creates a special email inbox that we can have so think about all the different applications that you work with and even if they don't have an API or a trigger that you can use chances are they're sending you some kind of email notifications oh you have a new invoice email notification oh you added a new customer email notification so if you can take those email notifications and set up an autof forwarder in your email to send it to this custom email address you set up then we're going to be able to use that to trigger our actions and then the email parser itself if we have some kind of structured data we can actually tag the different attributes of this so we can say here's the name of this request here's the priority here's the date if you want to see more information about this we have a special video dedicated to the email parser but it's pretty cool how you can take any kind of data out of an email and use that to trigger your zap once you set up that parser you'll be able to use those values in your follow-up actions as well and the last trigger I want to talk about this one's super easy imagine you want to do something at the same time every single day like maybe in the morning you want to gather some news and send it to yourself or at the end of the day you need to collate some time sheets and send those to yourself any zap that you have that you want to do at the same time every day or the same date is going to be perfect for the schedule tool within the configuration settings you can say hey I want to do this every day every hour every month every week if we choose every day we can go a step further and say hey we want to do this at a certain time every single day and be able to do this on repeat in addition to those triggers that zapier has created they've also created several helpful actions one of the cool Parts about many of the actions that zapier has created is that you'll see this little tag that says free what this means is that if you're filtering something or formatting something it's not going to count as a task so you're not going to be charged for that think of these as utilities that make your life easier as you're actually creating your zaps so one that's really helpful is filter by zappier and as you can imagine if you have lots of zaps that are processing let's say you have leads that are coming in from your website well is every lead that you have qualified no probably not and so you want a way to filter out the leads that you don't want to process because if it's just a junk lead we don't want to get that slack notification or if it's a partner request we want that to go someplace else in the system so a filter is just kind of a gate that says hey if it matches this condition go ahead and process the rest of the zap if not then we're going to stop so in this case we can choose the field that we have from our trigger and we're going to look at the lead type in this case so the new value of that lead type is partner and in this case we're going to say okay if it contains in this case we'll say we want it to be a marketing qualified lead so if we had tagged it as a marketing qualified lead we're we're good to go so now when we test this out and we press continue we can see that it's very specific it's not that our data isn't functioning it's that we didn't match the criteria in order to process this so if we had a step for our marketing qualified leads that we wanted to do after this like a notification then this would have not continued because it didn't match that criteria but let's take this a step further maybe when those contacts come in from our website we want to do something with them if they're marketing qualifi lead or if they're a new partner in this case we're kind of splitting our logic we're saying okay well based on what we want them to do we want them to take one of multiple paths that's the exact reason that we have paths by zapier so now in this first path we could have what we just had with the filter before we could say hey if that lead type contains mql here's the one path we want to send you down and like before we don't pass that we're not actually going down that path but in our path B we're saying well if it matches with partner then we want to go down this other direction if we press continue here's where we're going to have success this is where we would continue down so maybe if it comes down to a partner we're going to log them to HubSpot or Salesforce or something else so that we can follow up with the partner appropriately now unfortunately a lot of the data that we receive isn't really usable in the way we want it to be which means we have to format that data so we can present it the way we want it to appear that's where the formatter comes into play so we can click on that and we can choose an event are we working with dates and times numbers maybe things like currencies we've got text and different utilities so this again is just to help that data function in the way we want it to let's take a look and see what we can do with numbers if we press continue we can see we have all of these different options you can think of this essentially like formulas and we're reformatting that data honestly the one that we use the most is probably around date and time because we get it from one system and it's presented one way and then when we're creating a task in another system then we need it to be able to match up with what whatever that secondary system is expecting so we can take a look and we can see that for date and time we can use this both to add and subtract time so maybe we get the initial date and we want to add seven days to that and then that's the due date for this object so we could say add and subtract time we could use this to compare dates or we could use one of the many date formatting options one of the actions that doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves is Code by zapier now I know this can sound a little bit intimidating but wait until you check out its AI featur so here I'm inputting a list of email addresses these are different sales reps that we have in the system and then we also have the lead count that we captured for each of them how many leads they currently have and we're doing a round robin lead assignment and then here I can just click generate with AI so I'm just going to give it some instructions using plain English find that sales rep with the fewest number of leads and return the email address of that sales rep let's click to generate our code and you can see it's created a bunch of code for us with comments and we can review our input put data here and then if we look at our output data Let's test out our code and you can see it returned the sales rep as well as the lead count so it's a little bit off here maybe we want to make a quick adjustment and say just return the email address and let's see if that makes a change for us let's run that code again and now we have the answer that we're looking for it returns just that sales reps email address for those of you who have an understanding of code but maybe aren't programmers yourself this is a great way to get started if you want to do some more Advan things in zapier now let's take a look at how zapier is continuing to innovate and some of the new offerings that they have in 2024 obviously it's been a huge year for chat gpt's advancements and one of the things that you can do is create your own custom GPT inside a chat GPT and by doing so this allows you to call zap your AI action so maybe you're interacting with a chat bot and then you say hey generate a contract or add something to my calendar and what that allows you to do is then utilize zap your AI actions so that you can call zaps directly from inside of your custom GPT if you're interested in that we have a video that dives deeper in how you can create your own zapier AI action and custom gpts but zapier has its own chatbots offering which is somewhat the inverse of this they utilize chat GPT in the background for their Bots but this is something that you can give people access to even if they don't have their own chat GP licenses so inside a zap year I'm creating a new chat bot and this feels very similar if you've worked at all with your own custom gpts if I scroll down here we can give it a directive and this is where I gave it some directions if you remember back to our first zap that we created together we were trying to get it to generate some information about a video outline well instead we could do this in chat form if we wanted to so I've created this bot with a similar kind of purpose here for outlining videos then up top we have our own custom link which we can share with other people so in this case I'm prompted to give a topic of what we want this video to be about let me press submit here and now we're getting some titles back as well as an outline that we can use for our video topic you'll notice one really cool thing that we've done here which is we've added our own custom actions so if I like how this looks and maybe we want to make some changes to it now I can go ahead and press that button to create a doc and then inside of my Google Drive it's automatically created that document for me so I don't even have to copy and paste anything across now another new tool that zapier has to offer is called canvas this is a process orchestration tool it's a diagramming tool we can use it to get our thoughts on paper or on a canvas to be able to document what our automations look like for example this process might start in a contact form if I open this up we can call out different actors that are a part of this so in this case this is the prospect on our website and so this identifies the different users that need to complete these processes and then in this case we have an app used and and this is interfaces by zapier and I'm going to show you in interfaces how we can build a contact form maybe we don't even need to use a thirdparty form service because we can do that all with an interface we can click and drag and move this around you can see here we have a split path so we're saying hey once that lead comes in from a form into our zappier tables that we have in the background then we kind of have this decision to make are they a lead in which case then we want to maybe have a zap and we log them into Salesforce or if they go on the partner side maybe we just notify the partner manager in slack so this finally gives us the functionality that we need to be able to diagram really complex automations so that it doesn't get lost in the shuffle of all the zaps that we might be creating now we talked about interfaces a moment ago so let's try creating our own I can click on create here and we've got some options we can either build things like a portal or a form or there's a huge template Library where we can see lots of different examples and this could be many different things so we're talking about an example of our our contact form but maybe you have a team that you want to manage approvals on the back end and so you have expenses come in and they can approve those expenses through an interface there's really a lot that we can do when we think of all the possibilities of interfaces with tables together so in this case let's go ahead and create a form you can see again we have lots of different forms to choose from so let's choose this get in touch template to get started within this interface it looks like we actually have two different pages we have the form itself of get in touch and then we presumably redirect to a thank you page so let's start by opening up our get in touch form and this is where we can see the template in action so we're capturing some different information here that we'd expect on a contact form if I scroll down to the bottom we can add our own components here so maybe we want to add some additional text we've got the form we could display information from a table you can see we have con bonss so there's lots of different ways that we can configure the look and feel of this maybe I want to be able to add my own custom fields to this so I can just click in here and we can see the existing fields that we have really easy to be able to add our own own custom fields and you can see we have several different types to choose from which correspond to the options that we have in zap's tables then if we click on the data we can see it's actually created a new table for us so anybody who submits their contact information all of that's going to be logged in the back end in this table and we can use that to spin off other zaps and automations that we have and then from here we also have our actions and so when the user submits this form we're going to navigate to that other thank you page that we have and we could kick off a new zap as well then when we're ready we can go ahead and open up this link and this is what we could link to from our website or social media profiles then as I mentioned this is connected to a signup table so over on the left hand side you can click on tables and we can see this new signup table that was automatically generated on our behalf so right now you can see that the table is empty of any data but we have our different fields our different columns across the top so from our form or our interface here we can fill out some information I can fill in that capture and let's go ahead and submit this now you can see it's created that record for us automatically in the background without need for a special zap you can add your own Fields as well so from here maybe I want to add a special button and we're going to use this to kick off a sales process so we could call it sales process and then for field type we can search for button and with that button we could use that to trigger a Zap for example and we could choose from a zap that we have or make a new one so in this way you can kind of have that human in the loop automation someone submits that contact information and then we have a user who might say I'm going to approve or qualify this and then kick off that automation via a button click when it comes to chatbots interfaces and tables the nice part is is that you can try all of them and use them even in production for free there's a free plan available however if you want to have some more upgraded features like you want to have additional access you want to have more chat Bots you want to have more interfaces you want to have more rows that you can store in your table then you're going to want to look to upgrade that so interfaces for example we've got that basic $0 it's free forever and then we have a premium and an advanced option depending on how many interfaces that we want and you'll see it also covers additional features like if you want to have your own custom domain then you have to pay for the more advanced plan so you can see just how much zapier is turning into a full-fledged automation platform whereas it used to be just about the zaps the individual automations you're running now with chat spots and interfaces and tables there's so much more that you can do I hope this has been helpful for you to get a taste of how zap year works both as we built our first automation as we saw some more advanced things that we can do with our zaps and to see the direction where zapier is going if you need any help in building your zaps or automating your business don't hesitate to reach out to our website at automation helpers.com where we're offering free 30-minute consultations

zapier is one of the most powerful tools for automating your business but what exactly is zapier and how does it work the average company uses an astounding 254 applications to power their business that might sound crazy but just think about all the apps you use from project management and crms to website Builders forms communication tools marketing accounting you name it without these systems talking to one another this lack of automation can cost businesses hundreds of thousands if not Mill millions of dollars in Lost productivity so where does zap your play into all of this instead of you being the glue that holds together all of your business applications constantly running reports exporting and importing data and firing off notifications now zappier connects your systems together letting them talk to one another and all without needing to know how to code before we get into building our first zap together there&#39;s a couple of terms you should know every zap consists of a trigger and one or more actions we can always start with a single trigger this trigger tells our zap when to start doing something and the action is what our zap actually does as a result when we pair together a trigger with one or more actions we call this a zap you might also think of this as an automation or a workflow hi I&#39;m Dan Leman from Automation helpers.com and we help businesses like yours get automated and integrated with your business applications now this tutorial is a little bit longer in nature so we&#39;ve included timestamps down below if you want to skip to the sections that are most relevant to you now it&#39;s time to build our first zap together so when you log in you see this dashboard it says create a zap and one of the really cool things about zap here is you can create as many zaps as many different automations as you want they&#39;re not going to charge you for that you get charged on the execution of those zaps instead of the zaps themselves so one of the things that happens is I really encourage experimenting a lot and creating lots of different zaps and so in order to do that I&#39;d really recommend creating a folder structure for yourself so if you click on zaps down here you could create these different folders and store all of your zaps in those folders and we&#39;re going to give them good titles so that we don&#39;t lose track of everything that we&#39;re doing so I&#39;ll click into my demo examples folder for this video and let&#39;s go ahead and create a new zap here now let&#39;s talk about our use case for this zap so I might be using different applications than you there are free plans for all of these tools so you can follow along exactly with what I&#39;m doing or you can just watch and then apply that to a zap that you&#39;re going to be creating but our use case is that we work in marketing and we have some videos that we need to create for our team so we&#39;ve created a Google form for them really simple we&#39;re just capturing what&#39;s the topic of the video when do you need this video to be published by and then from there we want to help create a creative brief or an outline of what&#39;s going to happen for that video and then we want to have the system notify us to let us know hey you&#39;ve got a new video waiting for you that you need to create now when you you get started you can certainly add your own triggers and this is what people always did for a very long time you&#39;d be searching for the application that&#39;s triggering this which would be anytime there&#39;s a new submission to Google forms we&#39;re going to kick that off but you see there&#39;s this new feature that&#39;s in beta that we can actually use AI to help generate our Zap for us and this is really powerful especially if you have relatively simplistic zaps that you&#39;re creating so let&#39;s give this a try we&#39;ll say when a Google form submission is received then we&#39;re going to send some of that information to open aai then we&#39;re going to create a Google document with that outline that we get from open Ai and then finally we&#39;re going to send a notification in slack let&#39;s see what it comes up with now look at how cool this is it came up with all of our steps here is our trigger that we have there&#39;s a new form response and then we have three follow-up actions we&#39;re sending that prompt to openai we&#39;re creating a document in Google Docs and then we&#39;re sending a slack notification so let&#39;s let&#39;s click on try it now I&#39;d love to say that that&#39;s all you have to do go ahead and publish it and it&#39;s good to go but we know that automation can be a little bit finicky so we&#39;re going to go through this and make sure that each step is configured in the way it needs to be in order for this to work so let&#39;s start by clicking on our trigger about this Google form submission and one of the things that you&#39;ll need to do is add your account this is going to walk you through the process of connecting to your application so it&#39;s going to look something like this if I go ahead and reconnect it it&#39;s going to bring you to a prompt to authenticate to give it the permissions it needs and you have to be able to grant that in order for it to interact with the accounts that you have and you&#39;ll find that this is a step that you need to do for most of the applications that you&#39;re interacting with because they&#39;re behind logins once you&#39;ve authenticated and you can see your account there then we&#39;re going to go down to the trigger itself and here&#39;s where we need to choose the specific form because you might have created several different forms already I&#39;ll click on the form and we can search for it in the search box in this case I can see that I&#39;ve got this video content creation one so we&#39;re going to select that and then here&#39;s where we&#39;re going to test that step this is an important part of any automation step that we want to make sure that we have test records to work with and that this is working properly before we go onto our next step so I&#39;m going to click to test the trigger here and we can see that we have a form response I put in zap your tutorial cuz that&#39;s what we&#39;re doing so we&#39;ll see how this outline looks we&#39;ve got that information that we need there could be multiple records and so could tell it which record you want to choose from but we&#39;re going to go ahead and continue with that selected record now we want to take what we did in the Google form submission step and send it to open AI so here we are going to configure this next step we&#39;re going to send a prompt we&#39;ll click continue and again you&#39;ll need to set up your own account so this is going to ask for an API key that you can utilize for it we&#39;ll go ahead and click continue and then we can scroll down we&#39;re going to use GPT 3.5 down here and we need to add a prompt this this is kind of the most important part that we need to get right so I&#39;ve created a prompt already I&#39;m saying hey your goal is to help outline this video topic that we have and we want you to create an outline format for us we want to keep it nice and short and tight we don&#39;t want it to expound as chat GPT often times does so notice the last thing I&#39;m doing here is saying the topic for this video is because here is the beauty of zapier and automation we don&#39;t want to have to type in the topic for this video is zap your tutorial and then every time it relies on us to type in air table tutorial or whatever is next this is where we want to use data dynamically from our previous steps this is the whole beauty of automation here so what we can do is if we click on it you can see that there&#39;s this insert data and this allows us to grab information from any of our previous steps so I can search here I know that I called this topic so we can see here&#39;s the question what is the topic of this video zapier tutorial tutorial and I can click on that and it&#39;s going to insert this so it&#39;s not going to actually have the question here it&#39;s not going to say what is the topic of this video in the prompt that we&#39;re creating it&#39;s only going to take the value of it which in this case was zapier tutorial when we submitted that form so now we can X out of here and we could adjust different things if you&#39;re familiar with how gpts work you can adjust all of these settings but we&#39;re just going to take it as is for now press continue and you can see down below that it&#39;s generated this prompt accurately because we have the text that we gave it and then it&#39;s inserted that zapier tutorial text as well so let&#39;s go ahead and test this step and you can see this actually sent it to open aai and it&#39;s come back with our response here so in the response you can see it&#39;s built a nice outline for us now of course we&#39;ll probably want to tweak this ourselves but open AI helps give us a leg up here that looks good to me so let&#39;s go ahead and continue now we can choose our action for our Google doc there&#39;s a couple cool options like we could create a document from a template but we&#39;re just going to go ahead and create this from text again click continue you&#39;ll have to make sure that you&#39;re authenticated with your Google Docs account press continue again and then here is where we can set up our action so our document name another perfect way that we can use that data dynamically so let&#39;s go ahead and call this maybe the topic of our video so again we can search for this I&#39;ll search for topic so we&#39;ll call it zap your tutorial and then we can also add in static text so maybe we want to add a hyphen and then we&#39;re going to call this outline zap your tutorial outline if we wanted to we could include additional information like maybe we want to put in the publish date so I&#39;ll go ahead and search for publish when will the video be published we could inject that as well so you can have multiple pieces of data inserted into this text without any additional effort and we&#39;ll X out of here our document content itself we probably want to let the user know when the published date is maybe they don&#39;t see it in the title so let&#39;s first add our published date and again we will insert that data from our publish date now I&#39;ll put in a couple line breaks and let&#39;s put in the outline that we&#39;ve now generated so this is going to be called from open aai the response you can see that we&#39;ve got here&#39;s the introduction and all that information so we&#39;ll inject our response from open Ai and we can choose the folder that this goes to as well so do we just want it at the base the root of our Google Docs in this case probably not I&#39;m going to click on my folder and we&#39;ve got a demo folder for now now we can test this step and if I go into my Google Drive I can see it&#39;s actually created that document for us in the test I can open this up and see all the information about our outline and then our last step is to send our slack notification so we&#39;ll continue here let&#39;s set up our action I&#39;m going to choose just a demo Channel but maybe we have one called video creation or something like that that would be a little bit more relevant here&#39;s where we can put in our message text we have our video topic up here but let&#39;s actually add the link to the Google Doc itself so I&#39;m going to search for link there&#39;s a lot of different options to choose from I&#39;ll use this alternate link and then we should be good to go for our slack message you could add your own icons and there&#39;s additional slack settings if you want to dig into that as well let&#39;s go ahead and press continue and we&#39;ll test this step and now we can see that we&#39;ve received a notification in the channel That We specified in slack and we can actually open up the hyperlink that we get to show the outline that we have so far now I&#39;m going to retitle this because I don&#39;t love the automated name up here so we&#39;ll call this video outline process and then we&#39;re ready to go and publish our zap and turn this on so it&#39;s available and ready to go now we&#39;re live in production and we can submit the form for ourselves we&#39;ve got clickup tutorial this time and we&#39;ve got a date that we want this for we can submit it and then in the background our zap is running and then without any interaction on our part it automatically has created our slack notification and the new outline that we have for clickup tutorial congratulations you have finished your first zap now we&#39;re going to go ahead and talk about some other Advanced features that you can use within your zaps as well as what&#39;s coming down the pipe from what zapier is building but before we do all that I think it&#39;s important to talk about pricing just so you&#39;re not caught unaware about how zapier is charging you based on your zaps when it comes to zapier&#39;s pricing there&#39;s a couple different things that you need to think about for one we&#39;re not talking about the tables and interfaces pricing we&#39;ll cover those topics later in the video we&#39;re mostly focused on just the zaps right now so overall this is consumption based the more executions of your zaps and the individual actions within them is going to cost you more now additionally there&#39;s different plans below that offer different features so there&#39;s a free plan starter professional and team and then there&#39;s a company or Enterprise plan here and so depending on that you might have 2,000 tasks and get charged two different amounts depending on if you&#39;re looking for the additional features that team allows versus what you&#39;re getting with professional now to be honest if you&#39;re serious about automating your business you&#39;re not going to be able to stick on the free plan for very long one of the important reasons for this is that you&#39;re only limited to twep zaps twostep zap is more simple than the one we just did in the previous example now that zap you could complete if you were on a free trial for one of the paid plans but this two-step zap only consists of that trigger and a single action so in our case we had three actions let&#39;s take a look at that again where we had the trigger and then we had three follow-up actions to that so if you were on the free plan you could only do a trigger and then you could send a slack notification and we wouldn&#39;t create that Google Document at all so it&#39;s pretty restrictive when it comes to how you&#39;re planning and architecting your zaps so you can think of the math like this let&#39;s say you selected the professional plan 49 bucks a month and it&#39;s going to be for those 2,000 tasks now that first zap that we created together consumes three tasks every single time it runs well that $49 divided by 2,000 tasks is going to be 2.45 cents a task and then the cost of running that zap with three of those tasks each time is going to be 7.35 now some of you might be overjoyed this is literally costing me cents let&#39;s automate everything but you can imagine as you do this at scale those cents add up it&#39;s going to cost you more the more that you invest into Automation and so that leads people to ask the question is zappier the best choice for my business so so how is zapier position in the marketplace and how does it stack up against its competitors zapier by far has the largest market share even people who aren&#39;t very technical they&#39;ll probably have heard of zapier in some regards now in addition to this they&#39;re doing a lot with Innovation they&#39;ve created canvas tables interfaces they&#39;re doing a lot with open AI so you can see that there&#39;s a huge investment in their product they also have the greatest selection of different applications that they connect to now this is a little bit of a marketing thing because in reality it doesn&#39;t matter if 6,000 or more different applications connect to zapier because you&#39;re only using a small fraction of them what&#39;s most important is that the applications that you&#39;re using work with whatever automation platform you&#39;re using but still it&#39;s helpful to have an application like zapier that invests so much in connecting to this huge ecosystem of applications zapier is also the easiest for clients to use and maintain themselves so you might work with an automation agency like ours as you&#39;re building and getting set up but if you want to make tweaks you don&#39;t have to be dependent on someone else you can make all those changes and maintain them yourself on the cons side zappier is definitely the most expensive automation tool that we work with on a regular basis so if you&#39;re concerned about cost you might want to take a look at some of the other tools that are out there it&#39;s also not quite as useful for more complex automations if you&#39;re trying to configure a lot of complex zap you might have more luck using a different tool next up we have relay like zapier it&#39;s very easy to use they&#39;re investing a ton in their AI features and one advantage they have over zapier is definitely around the pricing model I think you&#39;ll find it a lot more attractive on the con side they&#39;re newer to Market and so they&#39;re not quite as able to handle some of the more complex automations that you might need make is definitely the tool that gets compared to zapier the most so you might have heard of them as integrat in the past so on the pros side you can build much more complex automations than zapier and still a pretty easy to ous interface it&#39;s generally much more affordable than zapier based on their pricing model and they have a more generous free plan so we work with a number of clients who can just stay on their free plan they don&#39;t even need to upgrade to a paid plan on the cons it is a steeper learning curve I definitely think if you pair the two together and you ask someone hey which platform is easier for you to get started with I think you&#39;re going to find that zappier is easier for more people and if you&#39;re looking for the most complex automations and maybe need some code in there it&#39;s really not that great of a tool for coding automations there&#39;s better options out there and the final two that we&#39;re kind of pairing together are pipe dream and n8n on the pro side anytime that you want to run code like python or JavaScript these two are going to be the best options for you they&#39;ll also save a ton of money on the operational cost side and you can probably get these at the cheapest and for n8n they&#39;re also open source so if you want to self-host that&#39;s an option that you can do with them on the con side both of these applications are far more technical than the other options that we&#39;ve talked about so this is really catering to a different audience if you&#39;ve got Technical Resources on your team then these are both great options so hopefully you can see that zapier is this very easy to use platform position for beginners really easy for people to be able to maintain on their own and they&#39;re investing a lot in new innovation next let&#39;s take a look at some of my favorite triggers that you can use to do some more advanced things inside a zapier so what are you going to do if you&#39;re looking for a trigger but you can&#39;t find it for the application that you need or maybe you have an application and you want to just be able to click a button and have that trigger a new zap both of those are perfect use cases for web hooks now web hooks are a little bit more advanced of a concept so it&#39;s okay if you don&#39;t get it all right away but it&#39;s basically the idea that we&#39;re going to send some information from another application and we&#39;re going to send it via the URL we&#39;re going to have a special URL that zapier gives us and we can add on some additional information that we want to send it to and then Tada it kicks off our zap so in this case my trigger is a web Hook by zappier and we&#39;re going to use just a catch hook here we&#39;ll go ahead and say continue and let&#39;s check out the test area where this gives us the actual URL that we need to copy so I&#39;ll copy this and for this example I&#39;m going to use an air table interface where I have a button where we want to contact a client so this will be our example but this would work if you have your own custombuilt application or anywhere that offers a button or even just opening the URL itself so air table has a special formula field and I&#39;m just pasting in what we just copied of of our web hook and we&#39;ve got it up until this point but what I want to do is we want to send it the email address of the person or of the account that we click that button on so we&#39;re using a little bit of fancy logic to concatenate or to combine an email address and with our URLs we have something called URL parameters which is to say we can have this question mark and have some query parameters in this case we&#39;re sending along the email address and we&#39;re setting that email address equal to a certain value that we have so if I save this this is what this is going to look like so now instead of just the web hook itself take a look at these URLs I&#39;ve got the full URL which stays the same for all of these records and then we have question mark email equals and then for all of these different people it has their email address so now I have this button and I&#39;m going to say hey let&#39;s actually have it open up that link from that zappier web hook that we have and now we can click our button to contact the client now back inside of zapier if we test this trigger it&#39;s going to listen for that event that we just triggered and here&#39;s the really cool part it&#39;s sent along that email address for us that Rose example.com now I know that this is more advanced of a concept and we&#39;ll have a separate video where we dig more into this so if this went by too quickly don&#39;t worry about it but just know anytime that you need your own special Trigger or you want to be able to integrate with some application that doesn&#39;t have that trigger available or you want to have a button these are all great use cases that you can have for web hooks because then we could click on our action and maybe we want to fire off an email so we choose email by zappier and we&#39;re going to send an outbound email and here in our action here&#39;s where we can use that data that rosit example.com from the query string that we just sent now if you don&#39;t want to use a web hook you could also have an Incoming Email trigger your automation as well and we can parse the details of that email to be able to send on to our follow-up actions so in this casee I&#39;m using the email parser by zappier and we&#39;ve got it for a new incoming email and what this does is it creates a special email inbox that we can have so think about all the different applications that you work with and even if they don&#39;t have an API or a trigger that you can use chances are they&#39;re sending you some kind of email notifications oh you have a new invoice email notification oh you added a new customer email notification so if you can take those email notifications and set up an autof forwarder in your email to send it to this custom email address you set up then we&#39;re going to be able to use that to trigger our actions and then the email parser itself if we have some kind of structured data we can actually tag the different attributes of this so we can say here&#39;s the name of this request here&#39;s the priority here&#39;s the date if you want to see more information about this we have a special video dedicated to the email parser but it&#39;s pretty cool how you can take any kind of data out of an email and use that to trigger your zap once you set up that parser you&#39;ll be able to use those values in your follow-up actions as well and the last trigger I want to talk about this one&#39;s super easy imagine you want to do something at the same time every single day like maybe in the morning you want to gather some news and send it to yourself or at the end of the day you need to collate some time sheets and send those to yourself any zap that you have that you want to do at the same time every day or the same date is going to be perfect for the schedule tool within the configuration settings you can say hey I want to do this every day every hour every month every week if we choose every day we can go a step further and say hey we want to do this at a certain time every single day and be able to do this on repeat in addition to those triggers that zapier has created they&#39;ve also created several helpful actions one of the cool Parts about many of the actions that zapier has created is that you&#39;ll see this little tag that says free what this means is that if you&#39;re filtering something or formatting something it&#39;s not going to count as a task so you&#39;re not going to be charged for that think of these as utilities that make your life easier as you&#39;re actually creating your zaps so one that&#39;s really helpful is filter by zappier and as you can imagine if you have lots of zaps that are processing let&#39;s say you have leads that are coming in from your website well is every lead that you have qualified no probably not and so you want a way to filter out the leads that you don&#39;t want to process because if it&#39;s just a junk lead we don&#39;t want to get that slack notification or if it&#39;s a partner request we want that to go someplace else in the system so a filter is just kind of a gate that says hey if it matches this condition go ahead and process the rest of the zap if not then we&#39;re going to stop so in this case we can choose the field that we have from our trigger and we&#39;re going to look at the lead type in this case so the new value of that lead type is partner and in this case we&#39;re going to say okay if it contains in this case we&#39;ll say we want it to be a marketing qualified lead so if we had tagged it as a marketing qualified lead we&#39;re we&#39;re good to go so now when we test this out and we press continue we can see that it&#39;s very specific it&#39;s not that our data isn&#39;t functioning it&#39;s that we didn&#39;t match the criteria in order to process this so if we had a step for our marketing qualified leads that we wanted to do after this like a notification then this would have not continued because it didn&#39;t match that criteria but let&#39;s take this a step further maybe when those contacts come in from our website we want to do something with them if they&#39;re marketing qualifi lead or if they&#39;re a new partner in this case we&#39;re kind of splitting our logic we&#39;re saying okay well based on what we want them to do we want them to take one of multiple paths that&#39;s the exact reason that we have paths by zapier so now in this first path we could have what we just had with the filter before we could say hey if that lead type contains mql here&#39;s the one path we want to send you down and like before we don&#39;t pass that we&#39;re not actually going down that path but in our path B we&#39;re saying well if it matches with partner then we want to go down this other direction if we press continue here&#39;s where we&#39;re going to have success this is where we would continue down so maybe if it comes down to a partner we&#39;re going to log them to HubSpot or Salesforce or something else so that we can follow up with the partner appropriately now unfortunately a lot of the data that we receive isn&#39;t really usable in the way we want it to be which means we have to format that data so we can present it the way we want it to appear that&#39;s where the formatter comes into play so we can click on that and we can choose an event are we working with dates and times numbers maybe things like currencies we&#39;ve got text and different utilities so this again is just to help that data function in the way we want it to let&#39;s take a look and see what we can do with numbers if we press continue we can see we have all of these different options you can think of this essentially like formulas and we&#39;re reformatting that data honestly the one that we use the most is probably around date and time because we get it from one system and it&#39;s presented one way and then when we&#39;re creating a task in another system then we need it to be able to match up with what whatever that secondary system is expecting so we can take a look and we can see that for date and time we can use this both to add and subtract time so maybe we get the initial date and we want to add seven days to that and then that&#39;s the due date for this object so we could say add and subtract time we could use this to compare dates or we could use one of the many date formatting options one of the actions that doesn&#39;t get nearly the attention it deserves is Code by zapier now I know this can sound a little bit intimidating but wait until you check out its AI featur so here I&#39;m inputting a list of email addresses these are different sales reps that we have in the system and then we also have the lead count that we captured for each of them how many leads they currently have and we&#39;re doing a round robin lead assignment and then here I can just click generate with AI so I&#39;m just going to give it some instructions using plain English find that sales rep with the fewest number of leads and return the email address of that sales rep let&#39;s click to generate our code and you can see it&#39;s created a bunch of code for us with comments and we can review our input put data here and then if we look at our output data Let&#39;s test out our code and you can see it returned the sales rep as well as the lead count so it&#39;s a little bit off here maybe we want to make a quick adjustment and say just return the email address and let&#39;s see if that makes a change for us let&#39;s run that code again and now we have the answer that we&#39;re looking for it returns just that sales reps email address for those of you who have an understanding of code but maybe aren&#39;t programmers yourself this is a great way to get started if you want to do some more Advan things in zapier now let&#39;s take a look at how zapier is continuing to innovate and some of the new offerings that they have in 2024 obviously it&#39;s been a huge year for chat gpt&#39;s advancements and one of the things that you can do is create your own custom GPT inside a chat GPT and by doing so this allows you to call zap your AI action so maybe you&#39;re interacting with a chat bot and then you say hey generate a contract or add something to my calendar and what that allows you to do is then utilize zap your AI actions so that you can call zaps directly from inside of your custom GPT if you&#39;re interested in that we have a video that dives deeper in how you can create your own zapier AI action and custom gpts but zapier has its own chatbots offering which is somewhat the inverse of this they utilize chat GPT in the background for their Bots but this is something that you can give people access to even if they don&#39;t have their own chat GP licenses so inside a zap year I&#39;m creating a new chat bot and this feels very similar if you&#39;ve worked at all with your own custom gpts if I scroll down here we can give it a directive and this is where I gave it some directions if you remember back to our first zap that we created together we were trying to get it to generate some information about a video outline well instead we could do this in chat form if we wanted to so I&#39;ve created this bot with a similar kind of purpose here for outlining videos then up top we have our own custom link which we can share with other people so in this case I&#39;m prompted to give a topic of what we want this video to be about let me press submit here and now we&#39;re getting some titles back as well as an outline that we can use for our video topic you&#39;ll notice one really cool thing that we&#39;ve done here which is we&#39;ve added our own custom actions so if I like how this looks and maybe we want to make some changes to it now I can go ahead and press that button to create a doc and then inside of my Google Drive it&#39;s automatically created that document for me so I don&#39;t even have to copy and paste anything across now another new tool that zapier has to offer is called canvas this is a process orchestration tool it&#39;s a diagramming tool we can use it to get our thoughts on paper or on a canvas to be able to document what our automations look like for example this process might start in a contact form if I open this up we can call out different actors that are a part of this so in this case this is the prospect on our website and so this identifies the different users that need to complete these processes and then in this case we have an app used and and this is interfaces by zapier and I&#39;m going to show you in interfaces how we can build a contact form maybe we don&#39;t even need to use a thirdparty form service because we can do that all with an interface we can click and drag and move this around you can see here we have a split path so we&#39;re saying hey once that lead comes in from a form into our zappier tables that we have in the background then we kind of have this decision to make are they a lead in which case then we want to maybe have a zap and we log them into Salesforce or if they go on the partner side maybe we just notify the partner manager in slack so this finally gives us the functionality that we need to be able to diagram really complex automations so that it doesn&#39;t get lost in the shuffle of all the zaps that we might be creating now we talked about interfaces a moment ago so let&#39;s try creating our own I can click on create here and we&#39;ve got some options we can either build things like a portal or a form or there&#39;s a huge template Library where we can see lots of different examples and this could be many different things so we&#39;re talking about an example of our our contact form but maybe you have a team that you want to manage approvals on the back end and so you have expenses come in and they can approve those expenses through an interface there&#39;s really a lot that we can do when we think of all the possibilities of interfaces with tables together so in this case let&#39;s go ahead and create a form you can see again we have lots of different forms to choose from so let&#39;s choose this get in touch template to get started within this interface it looks like we actually have two different pages we have the form itself of get in touch and then we presumably redirect to a thank you page so let&#39;s start by opening up our get in touch form and this is where we can see the template in action so we&#39;re capturing some different information here that we&#39;d expect on a contact form if I scroll down to the bottom we can add our own components here so maybe we want to add some additional text we&#39;ve got the form we could display information from a table you can see we have con bonss so there&#39;s lots of different ways that we can configure the look and feel of this maybe I want to be able to add my own custom fields to this so I can just click in here and we can see the existing fields that we have really easy to be able to add our own own custom fields and you can see we have several different types to choose from which correspond to the options that we have in zap&#39;s tables then if we click on the data we can see it&#39;s actually created a new table for us so anybody who submits their contact information all of that&#39;s going to be logged in the back end in this table and we can use that to spin off other zaps and automations that we have and then from here we also have our actions and so when the user submits this form we&#39;re going to navigate to that other thank you page that we have and we could kick off a new zap as well then when we&#39;re ready we can go ahead and open up this link and this is what we could link to from our website or social media profiles then as I mentioned this is connected to a signup table so over on the left hand side you can click on tables and we can see this new signup table that was automatically generated on our behalf so right now you can see that the table is empty of any data but we have our different fields our different columns across the top so from our form or our interface here we can fill out some information I can fill in that capture and let&#39;s go ahead and submit this now you can see it&#39;s created that record for us automatically in the background without need for a special zap you can add your own Fields as well so from here maybe I want to add a special button and we&#39;re going to use this to kick off a sales process so we could call it sales process and then for field type we can search for button and with that button we could use that to trigger a Zap for example and we could choose from a zap that we have or make a new one so in this way you can kind of have that human in the loop automation someone submits that contact information and then we have a user who might say I&#39;m going to approve or qualify this and then kick off that automation via a button click when it comes to chatbots interfaces and tables the nice part is is that you can try all of them and use them even in production for free there&#39;s a free plan available however if you want to have some more upgraded features like you want to have additional access you want to have more chat Bots you want to have more interfaces you want to have more rows that you can store in your table then you&#39;re going to want to look to upgrade that so interfaces for example we&#39;ve got that basic $0 it&#39;s free forever and then we have a premium and an advanced option depending on how many interfaces that we want and you&#39;ll see it also covers additional features like if you want to have your own custom domain then you have to pay for the more advanced plan so you can see just how much zapier is turning into a full-fledged automation platform whereas it used to be just about the zaps the individual automations you&#39;re running now with chat spots and interfaces and tables there&#39;s so much more that you can do I hope this has been helpful for you to get a taste of how zap year works both as we built our first automation as we saw some more advanced things that we can do with our zaps and to see the direction where zapier is going if you need any help in building your zaps or automating your business don&#39;t hesitate to reach out to our website at automation helpers.com where we&#39;re offering free 30-minute consultations

Transcript for:Understanding Zapier Automation Features

Transcript for:
Understanding Zapier Automation Features