Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices to Enhance Your Productivity

We’ll soon be coming to the end of our Zapier coaching journey. We have covered many topics that will help you to create effective workflow automations in your business or for your clients using Zapier. In this chapter, we will discuss the best practices for utilizing Zapier effectively and build on the tips and tricks we learned in each chapter. First, we will recap the steps covered throughout this book to help you with your Zap building. We will also explore a range of tips and tricks that you can use to effectively create workflows in Zapier for top performance.

We will cover the following key topics in this chapter:

• Best practices for using Zapier effectively
• Tips and tricks to enhance your use of Zapier

Once you have worked through each of these topics, you will have a better understanding of the best practices to use when building workflow automations in Zapier.

Technical requirements

To get the most out of the content in this chapter, you will need access to a Zapier account. The Zapier Free plan will be adequate for you to create single-step workflows and use Zapier’s pre-built templates. The Zapier Starter plan will be required for you to use Premium apps and to create multi-step workflows.

Best practices for using Zapier effectively

The best way to understand how to optimize using Zapier in your business is to review the content we explored in each chapter of this book so that you have a point for quick reference. Let’s briefly explore the content we covered in this book as an overview of the best practices to use when building workflows in Zapier.

Starting with the basics

Getting the groundwork done at the beginning will prepare you for success. Once you’ve chosen the best Zapier plan for you and created a Zapier account, the next step is to familiarize yourself with navigation on the Zapier platform and then edit your settings and preferences to suit. Make sure you’ve also grasped the terminology used on the Zapier platform as this will help you when troubleshooting. We covered these topics in Chapter 1, Introduction to Business Process Automation with Zapier.

Preparing before you automate

Preparation is the key to success and will...

Tips and tricks to enhance your use of Zapier

Now that you’ve learned how to build your first few Zaps and you’re on your way to supercharging your business and running it on autopilot, there might be times that you come across pain points that can be solved relatively easily if you know what to do next. Let’s go over a few tips and tricks that will help you.

Trigger data not pulling through

Some app integrations may have issues pulling through real trigger data for you to use when building your Zap and you try to test your trigger. In many cases, if no trigger data can be found, Zapier will pull through dummy data that you can use in your action step mapping. Sometimes, Zapier doesn’t produce any dummy data, and if you click on the Skip Test button, you should be able to use placeholders in your action steps that will fill with data once the Zap is turned on and running. Rest assured that your Zap will run with the correct mappings once you have turned...

Summary

In this chapter, we discussed the best practices to adopt to enhance your success with using Zapier in your business. First, we did a recap of the topics that were covered in this book, which will help you use Zapier effectively. Then, we explored some practical tips and tricks for optimum Zap building.

You now know the best practices to follow to enhance your success with Zapier while implementing and using it in your business.

In the next chapter, we’ll look at various scenarios that will help you assess your problem-solving and Zapier workflow-building skills. We will look into a specific problem that can be solved using Zapier and work through each example practically, with tips given along the way. The scenarios are classified by skill level, and you will have the opportunity to put your knowledge to the test and adapt your problem-solving and Zap-building skills.

Questions

1. What are the two first best practices to follow to ensure success in automating your processes?
2. Is it possible to do more than what is presented to you with the triggers, actions, and searches in a Zapier integration?