Slack is one of the most useful Zapier integrations. If you use Slack in your business, you likely use it a lot. With Zapier, you can turn it into a kind of “hub,” and have reports, notifications and more all delivered there. That way it becomes a single place for you to go to know everything you need to know about your business.
This post & video shows you how to integrate Zapier with Slack, and demonstrates a few cool automation ideas.
First a quick note… if you’ve never used Zapier before, you should start with my Zapier tutorial to learn the basics, or take my extensive Zapier course to learn everything you need to know.
This post assumes you already know how triggers & actions work.
Zapier Slack Integration
The first place you should start with almost any Zapier integration is the app page on Zapier’s website. It gives you a great overview of what is possible.
Scroll all the way to the bottom to have a look at what triggers & actions are available.
You’ll see there are a lot of options! At the time of writing, that’s 11 triggers and 9 actions.
Zapier’s Slack Triggers
There’s a lot to unpack there, so instead let’s just focus on some of the most important ones.
My favourites are:
New saved message – Trigger workflows when you “save” a message in Slack. This option shows up on the right hand side when you hover over a message in Slack.New file – Start workflows when anyone uploads a fileNew reaction added – Start workflows when you add an emoji reaction to a messageNew pushed message – This one is AMAZING and allows you to manually start a workflow from any message.
You’ll see examples for all of these below.
Zapier’s Slack Actions
Likewise there are quite a few actions as well.
The main one you’ll need is to send a message.
There are just a few variations of this – one to send a channel message, one to send a private message, and one to send to a private channel.
In the screenshots above, you’ll notice there are “searches” as well, but for this post they are getting a bit too advanced. If you’d like to learn more about how searches work, consider taking my Zapier Mastery course.
Slack workflow ideas in Zapier
Now let’s have a look at some workflow ideas for these Slack triggers and actions.
Store saved messages in Evernote or other note taking app
In Slack you’ll find an option to save messages, like this.
A handy workflow is to add all your saved messages to a notebook, like this.
Using “Append to note” means that you can save them all in the one note. Optionally, you could use a different action to create a new note every time.
Process messages with a reaction
Reactions are a cool way to process messages.
The example below has a “bug” reaction added.
For example, you could say “whenever a bug reaction is added in Slack”, “add it to our bug list in Jira” or your project management system.
Saving feedback and testimonials
Another example of using reactions is working with feedback.
We automatically send all our feedback and reviews to a special feedback channel in Slack.
You can add reactions to these messages like this:
Your automations could say:
When a sad reaction is added – Send an email to the person to follow up on their negative feedback.When a heart reaction is added – Add the feedback to our testimonial file
Backup all uploaded files to Google Drive or Dropbox
If you’re on the free plan of Slack, you eventually lose access to messages and files once you’re over your quota.
Use this workflow to back up all your files to your Google Drive or Dropbox.
Create tasks from Slack messages
The “New Pushed Message” Slack integration is pretty amazing.
Once you create a workflow in Zapier and turn it on, you’ll see an option like this in Slack.
Then you see a popup like this where you can start a workflow with that message.
You can also type in the textbox to add extra information that is sent to Zapier.
For example, you might set up a workflow to save Slack messages as Tasks in Trello, or whatever task management system you use.
This can add a card in Trello with the name you typed into the text box, and add a reference to the Slack message for more information.
Create reminders in Slack
In Slack, you can use the “remind” feature for Slack to send you a message at a certain time so that you remember to do something.
You can create these reminders using Zapier.
After a client submits your initial inquiry form, you could set yourself a reminder to make sure your team have followed up and everything is as it should be.
Create channels for new clients
When you bring on a new client – for example, when they have signed their proposal, you could create a new channel for that client.
The third step here simply adds your teammates to the channel so you don’t have to do that manually.
Send reports and messages
The “Send message” action is by far the most common one we use.
If you want to turn Slack into a hub, where you get all the information you need to run your business, this action helps a lot with that.
You can do basic things like send a message every weekday to a channel to remind your staff to send you their daily reports:
But you can also use this action to send notifications like new sales:
Feedback:
Website downtime alerts:
Or basically any kind of information you need for your business.
Your automations
I’d love to hear what kind of automations you have created in Slack with Zapier, and if this post has given you any ideas. Let me know in the comments.
If you haven’t used Zapier before I’d recommend checking out my Zapier tutorial post & video, or taking my full Zapier course that will help you become an automation wizard, even if you’ve never used Zapier before.
Deixe um comentário