If you work in marketing or software, you’ve probably heard people mention ‘Zaps’ and how they seem to magically solve just about any problem that involves getting apps to “talk to each other.” Well, at least that’s how one of our product marketing managers likes to describe it.

While it’s certainly fun to imagine that all of our favorite apps come to life and play with each other when we’re not looking—like a digital version of the movie “Toy Story”— Zaps are about the closest thing we have right now to a virtual toy box. They allow your most important apps to connect to one another, exchanging data and information behind the scenes.

Zaps are integrations using Zapier, an innovative web app that connects your favorite apps through APIs, enabling you to easily automate tedious and repetitive tasks. It’s free to try, and incredibly useful as it allows non-developers to make use of APIs without the need for coding. It quickly accomplishes tasks that, in the past, would have required significant planning and development work.

Using Zaps, you can combine apps in lots of fun and useful ways, and the number of connections and automations that you can create are absolutely endless. Through SharpSpring’s native Zapier integration, you can actually connect your marketing automation toolkit to a plethora of third-party apps, including major CRMs like Zoho and Pipedrive, and Google Apps like Google Calendar and Google Sheets, enabling you to auto-create contacts and opportunities, trigger tasks and workflows, and much more.

As Marketing Operations Manager for SharpSpring, I rely on our Zapier integrations daily to assist with many of our campaigns and to automate time-consuming processes. I’m always looking for interesting and helpful ways to streamline processes that involve multiple applications, which is why I’m sharing some of my favorite Zaps that increase productivity. Read on to see how you can use SharpSpring along with Zapier to automate and enhance your day-to-day marketing and sales activities. Keep in mind that the examples are all just suggested use cases and can be adapted to work with other apps, so feel free to get creative and swap in your favorite apps of choice to see what SharpSpring and Zapier can do for you.

A note to SharpSpring customers: Feel free to reach out to our support team dedicated to connectivity/integrations for help and ideas with implementing any of these zaps for your business.

1. GoToWebinar → SharpSpring*

http://www.gotomeeting.com/webinar/
Difficulty: Medium

Objective: Automatically build lists of webinar registrants who attend and don’t attend your webinar for the purpose of sending out follow-up emails.

If your company frequently offers webinars, then this is a must-use Zap. There’s a lot of value in sending follow-ups to your webinar registrants since it allows you to continue to engage with contacts who attended, as well as attempt to reconnect with contacts who didn’t. This Zap will save you the time of having to manually build or import lists from GoToWebinar and help you get your follow-up emails out the door.

Step 1:
First, you can use SharpSpring’s native GoToWebinar integration to register contacts who sign up on a SharpSpring form for your upcoming webinar. Create a dynamic list that will add all of the registrants.

Step 2:
When a contact attends the webinar, you can use Zapier to send a fixed value to a custom field in SharpSpring. Here we are sending a value of “Yes” to the custom field “Attended The Price is Right? webinar.”

Step 3:
This custom field will trigger an automation that will remove the contact from the initial list and add them to an “attended” list. After your webinar ends, you are left with two perfectly segmented lists (“attended” and “did not attend”) and are ready to send your follow-up emails.


Take it a step further…

Try also triggering the “thanks for attending” email to go out when people attend your webinar. Make sure to add a delay in your workflow so they get the email after the webinar ends.

2. Typeform → SharpSpring

https://www.typeform.com/

Difficulty: Easy

Objective: Create a beautiful interactive survey that demands attention and increases response rates. Score these recipients based on fit with SharpSpring lead scoring, and trigger notifications to your sales team.

Typeform allows you to easily craft fully interactive web forms for a wide variety of uses. The options include all of the standard fields that you would expect from a typical form builder; however, they have really taken things to the next level by adding in a lot of form options that would usually require a developer to implement. You can use Typeform to create interactive surveys for prospects, and use lead scoring and automation in SharpSpring to have sales reps contact leads who are the best fit.

Step 1:
Use Zapier to have Typeform create/update leads in SharpSpring, and map the fields you want to score in SharpSpring.

Step 2:
Use SharpSpring lead scoring to assign point values to the specific answer you find most valuable.

Step 3:
Trigger notifications in SharpSpring for specific lead score values and have your sales team reach out immediately to hot leads who are the best fit for your company

3. FullContact → SharpSpring

https://www.fullcontact.com/

Difficulty: Easy

Objective: Scan business cards on your smartphone to automatically create new contacts in SharpSpring and trigger follow-up emails.

This is a unique Zap that is a great tool for the traveling salesperson. If you frequent trade shows, conferences, etc., you can use FullContact to scan business cards from any new contacts you meet while on the road. With Zapier, you can automatically create these contacts in SharpSpring and even trigger a follow-up email.

Step 1:

Scan business cards using the FullContact Card Reader
https://www.fullcontact.com/cardreader/

Step 2:

Use Zapier to automatically create a new contact in SharpSpring when a new contact is created in FullContact.

Step 3:

Send a fixed value to a SharpSpring custom field whenever this Zap is triggered.

Step 4:

Trigger a workflow in SharpSpring with this custom field in order to send an automatic follow-up the next day.

4. SharpSpring → Google Sheets

Difficulty: Medium

Objective: Share new lead info in a shared Google Sheet. Useful for sharing with third parties who don’t have access to SharpSpring.

If you ever coordinate campaigns with other organizations, or have a need to share leads with individuals who don’t have access to your instance of SharpSpring, then this is a very helpful Zap. Using Zapier, you can add rows to a shared Google Sheet every time you get a new form-fill.

Step 1:
Add a trigger for every time a specific form is filled out in SharpSpring. Make sure you add a filter to specify which forms you want this to trigger on.

Step 2:

Add an action to update or create a row in your spreadsheet. Make sure to map the required fields.

Take it a step further…

Try this Zap in the other direction! Create a Zap that will trigger automations in SharpSpring when you update specific columns in your spreadsheet.

5. SharpSpring → GTasks

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dayup.gtask&hl=en

Difficulty: Easy

Objective: Create reminders for follow-ups when new CRM opportunities are created. Filter which opportunities get reminders by using $ value, or opportunity owner.

SharpSpring has a great task and reminder system built in to the app; however, this is a great Zap for those who don’t always work in SharpSpring or want to integrate with their current task management tool. Using Zapier, you can create reminders in GTasks to follow up with an opportunity due on the expected close date. This is very useful for a sales manager who wants to keep an eye on valuable opps. You can even filter these reminders so that they’re only created for high-value opps or opps owned by specific sales reps.

Step 1:
Add a trigger to create a reminder in GTasks when a new opportunity is created in SharpSpring.

Step 2 (Optional):

Add filters to only create reminders for high value opportunities or for specific sales reps.


Step 3:

Finish your Zap by adding an action to create tasks in GTasks. Make sure to map the required fields.

* Denotes a premium Zap. Premium Zaps can only be used in an On Zap during your trial period, and when you are on a paid plan.

AUTHOR
Myles Stupp