The Branching Out Europe app of the month for April 2015 is the application integration software Zapier. More and more marketing and sales professionals are using various low-cost, cloud-based applications to help implement sophisticated lead generation processes. These apps can help automate marketing, nurture leads and provide better customer service.
Although using multiple apps to support many crucial business functions will often be a more cost-effective approach, compared to an expensive all-in-one solution, this can often lead to a situation where integrating and analysing data from several platforms becomes a confusing and disjointed operation. Zapier helps to facilitate the integration of hundreds of online apps, allowing you to easily integrate different software together.
What is Zapier?
As Zapier explains very nicely on their website “Zapier connects the web apps you use to easily move your data and automate tedious tasks”. You can integrate hundreds of applications, from Gmail to Mailchimp. With event-based automation, Zapier allows a plethora of tasks, which would have had to have been carried out manually previously, to now be carried out instantly and automatically.
How to use Zapier for lead generation
Every organisation will use their own preferred applications to assist with the day-to-day running of their business. Whether sales or marketing focused, there are hundreds of online applications that can help you:
- automate social media and email
- nurture customer relationships
- provide customer support
Zapier can help these apps ‘talk’ to one another, automating your important data sharing process.
As no business’ lead generation process is identical, it’s impossible to tell you exactly how Zapier can help your business. However below you can see a real life, high-level example of how we use it within our lead generation. Branching Out Europe’s process is split into three main stages, below is a diagram that shows some of the applications we use at each stage.
Zapier allows each application shown to integrate with one another on some level. To highlight just one specific integration, we use a CRM and marketing automation platform called Active Campaign. This app helps us provide segmented tailored emails and nurture contacts using event-based triggers. We also use Unbounce, which is landing page software that helps us utilise content marketing in a way that allows us to drive lead generation. Zapier is integral to these two platforms working together. Once a prospect has filled in a landing page form and downloaded a piece of our content, their details are automatically added to our CRM system. We then use this CRM system to nurture suspects or qualify them out from our marketing and sales activities.
Active Campaign and Unbounce are only two of 300 applications with which Zapier supports two-way integrations, which means that in most cases, no matter what apps you’re using, Zapier can help.
Why Zapier?
As far as we’re aware, there is only one other app that comes close to the functionality of Zapier, and that is IFTTT. This alternative app also helps automate and integrate different online software. However Zapier is far more commercially focused and allows integration between enterprise applications, beyond automatically uploading photos and changing social media profiles. IFTTT does a great job with the apps it does support, however unlike Zapier you will not be able to automate tasks across the likes of Salesforce, Marketo and Hubspot.
Conclusion
With an ever-increasing number of applications that claim to help your business improve its lead generation results, getting these apps to work in harmony can sometimes be very difficult. Zapier allows you to automate tasks and share data across applications, allowing them to truly add value to your business.
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