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EmailOctopus helps you build email lists, create targeted campaigns, and design beautiful emails. Learn more and how to automate EmailOctopus with Zapier. Octopuses (and yes, that is the correct pluralization) are some of the smartest creatures on the planet. They can complete mazes, change color to match their surroundings, and even open jars to get the food inside. It makes sense, then, that EmailOctopus is one of the smartest ways to send marketing emails and newsletters. A cost-effective email marketing tool, EmailOctopus helps you build email lists, create targeted campaigns, and design beautiful emails that inspire action, so your email blasts are better than ever. EmailOctopus offers simple, sleek template designs that make it a snap to build beautiful emails, even if you're not a designer. If you're more hands-on, you can use the drag-and-drop editor to create a custom email that will that look great across all devices. Once you have an email that you want to send,...

Don't you wish there was something like bootcamp for your recruiting processes? Something that would whip your talent searches into tip-top shape? Well, with the right app, you can do just that. Zoho Recruit is an all-in-one, cloud-based applicant tracking system for the modern recruiter. Built to provide diverse, end-to-end hiring solutions for staffing agencies, corporate HR teams, and temporary workforces, Zoho Recruit is intuitive and easy to use. An efficient recruiting process starts with a solid employer brand, and Zoho Recruit lets you easily customize your Careers page, so it reflects your organization. You can also publish job openings on popular job boards. To build the best pool of candidates, you can use Zoho Recruit's powerful Source Boosters to run enhanced searches that find you the right talent. Or you can leverage your employees' networks to find eligible candidates with Zoho Recruit's referrals feature. If you have a team of recruiters—or work on...

Social media management got you feeling gloomy? Maybe it's time to get Loomly. Loomly is a brand success platform that empowers marketing teams to grow successful brands online through collaboration, publishing, and analytics features. With Loomly, you can manage all your social media content (both organic posts and paid advertising) from one platform. Whether you're a fan of a traditional calendar or more of a list type of person, you can customize your Loomly view to see the broad scope of your social content in a digestible way. Plus, the app can send you a notification—by email, push, or in your favorite chat app—every time someone on your team updates or comments on a piece of content. But Loomly does a lot more than just let you schedule social media content. Stuck for content ideas? Don't worry. Loomly serves up timely post ideas based on trending topics, RSS feeds, date-related events, and social media best practices. You can also draw upon your Loomly library f...

American knowledge workers are burned out as they continue to adjust to work-related issues caused by COVID-19. But even in the midst of that exhaustion, some are less likely to take time off from work. That's according to a new survey commissioned by Zapier and conducted online by The Harris Poll. Nearly a third of knowledge workers (32 percent) say their mental health has been negatively impacted by stress caused by the global pandemic—and 22 percent are currently experiencing job burnout. Despite this, 39 percent of Americans have shortened or flat-out canceled their planned time off since March. In this three part report, we’ll look at why knowledge workers may be avoiding time off, the most stressful parts about returning from a vacation , and strategies for preventing post-vacation burnout. About Zapier: Zapier helps businesses grow using the power of automation to connect 2,000+ apps. Founded in 2011, Zapier has always operated as an entirely remote company, and today ha...

Vacations are supposed to relieve stress, not cause more. And yet: an overwhelming majority of knowledge workers—87 percent—say there are things they dread about returning to work after taking time off. That's according to a new survey commissioned by Zapier and conducted online by The Harris Poll. The results reveal what employees dread most about getting back to work—and what they think could make it better. This three-part report looks at the effect the pandemic is having on people’s professional lives , how to deal with the stress of returning to work after time off, and strategies for eliminating post-vacation burnout . What people dread about getting back to work 87 percent of knowledge workers say there are things they dread about returning to work after taking time off. Some of the most dreaded tasks are: Getting back into a routine – 37 percent Catching up on administrative work – 31 percent Feeling overwhelmed with busy work – 27 percent Post-vacation blues – 27...

Nonprofit organizations do incredibly important work. But they're also notoriously lean teams with a lot on their plate—especially when it comes to raising money. And that can leave them without a lot of time for the work that actually matters: Helping people. Enter Donately , a payment system designed specifically for nonprofits. It makes it dead simple to raise funds for charity projects without worrying about building your own site or handling credit card transactions yourself. Donately also provides a space for nonprofits to manage their donors and track online giving activity over time. Getting started is incredibly simple. After you sign up for Donately, just connect your Stripe account—this is how Donately will process payments. If you run a nonprofit, you can also add your NPO status info. Doing this gets you access to Donately's lower fees and enables you to send your donors tax-deductible receipts. On your account's Campaigns page, you can use the Manage tab t...

I've had a lot of difficulty viewing myself as smart—or, at least, as smart as my peers. Some of those feelings are rooted in my family history, but there's also an aspect which is due to the misguided notion that it's not ok to acknowledge your own strengths or you'll be seen as conceited. A few months ago, I was thinking about applying for an internal job change for a more advanced technical role, but I was extremely hesitant to apply. I had been preparing for this shift for months, and I routinely got feedback that I was doing well, but I couldn't internalize that feedback. Every time I received praise about my performance, I dismissed it—in my outward response, but also internally. Surely, I couldn't be worthy of that praise, could I? And how would I be treated differently if I broadcasted my talents in a job application? I wanted to get the job, but I also wanted to be seen as a team player without assuming I was better, or deserved this job more than an...

Meetings, am I right? As the world has adapted to remote life, there's nothing quite as soul-sucking as seeing your calendar lined up with a day full of back-to-back Zoom meetings. Part of the dread is that you don't even know if they're going to be a good use of your time—or worse, you know they won't be but still feel like you have to show your face. As a product manager, I'm used to spending lots of time in meetings to get feedback from my colleagues in engineering and design as well as stakeholders across the company. Since joining the team at Zapier, I've been impressed with how much thought people put into making meetings effective by being intentional with asynchronous preparation. Here's how we do it. Instead of trying to manage your meeting action items manually, you can create and track meeting-related tasks with automation. Take a look at the best ways to streamline and track your meeting action items —without creating extra work for yourself. ...

We can all agree: Zaps give you superpowers. But for the most part, Zaps with just one action are fairly one-note: when thing X happens, Zap makes Y happen . What if we want more? By upgrading to any of Zapier's paid plans, you gain access to "multi-step" Zaps, which allow you to add multiple actions to the same workflow. Each time you add an action, you can double, triple, quadruple… quin-… tuple? your output! Now, instead of the Zap doing Y each time X happens, we can have it do Z , too (or A , or B , or… you get the point)! Sometimes you might need things to happen in different ways, rather than only in a series. We're going to cover three different ways to increase the possibilities for each Zap, allowing you to set up more complex workflows and save even more time: Stick to the important things with Filters Add variety to an action with a Lookup Table Give your Zap more options with Paths Stick to the important things with Filters Filter by Zapier le...

When's the last time you got a marketing email that you totally ignored? Chances are the answer is about five minutes ago, when you dragged that email advertising Croc knock-offs into the Trash folder. If you run your own business, you don't want that to happen to the email you worked so hard to create. You want people to actually read them, and, more importantly, make a purchase. Customer.io is designed to help you do just that: Get real results from your marketing. With Customer.io, you can send targeted emails, push notifications, and SMS to lower churn, create stronger relationships, and drive subscriptions. More than just the messages and how you'll send them, Customer.io keeps the focus on your goals to make sure you're reaching them. It all starts with your customer data. You can either import your customer data into Customer.io, set up a JavaScript snippet in your site to collect it, or add Customer.io API to your app to gather it. Now you have granular info...

Our lives are just screens now. There's work and entertainment, sure, but in 2020 every meeting and most socializing is also mediated. Reality feels like a distant memory. I spent too much time on screens before all of this, and I remember feeling like it was cutting me off from the people around me. That's strange, in retrospect: now any time not spent on screens makes me feel isolated. It's nice that everyone is still in my life, but all of the Zoom calls and text messages make the physical world seem…distant. So I've started using paper for more things. It's weird—I've always been a digital-first kind of guy—but something about the world as it is right now makes pulling out a pen and jotting something down feel comforting. I thought I'd ask my Extremely Online Coworkers here at Zapier if they do the same thing—it turns out they do. We've written about how to build the perfect productivity system with paper notebooks before, and a lot of it is ab...

Gravity Forms makes it easy to spin up tailored contact forms for WordPress sites. In minutes, you can configure the options you need, embed a form on your site, and start getting form submissions. But Gravity Forms has its limitations as a lead-cultivation tool. Gravity Forms users want to be able to seamlessly capture leads on their sites, but the value of those leads will decay over time if they're stuck in Gravity Forms. With Zapier and a few of these Gravity Forms integrations, you can automatically send form submissions to spreadsheets to track leads, customer relationship tools to manage leads, and lead cultivation apps to convert leads. Track Gravity Forms submissions The primary reason you set up a tool like Gravity Forms is to make data collection easy. Without a form submission tool, you're stuck using a business email address. That means each prospect is manually emailing you, and each email could range from too little information to far too much. On top of tha...

Project management is the difference between having an idea and getting it done. When you're managing projects effectively, your work is like alchemy. You help teams turn the results of a brainstorm into a project, a series of tasks, and eventually, a new product or feature. But that alchemy involves a lot of tasks, a lot of projects, and a lot of people. It's easy to get overwhelmed. When all that management becomes a struggle, it's a sign that it's time to turn to project management automation. Here, we'll go over several ways to use automation to streamline your project management. We'll explain how automated workflows—we call them Zaps—can help you can get more done while stressing out less. Automatically create tasks right when you need them Tasks are the atomic unit of project management. The first step for project management almost always involves breaking a project down into individual, practical tasks. Since this happens so frequently, it's ea...

Time is your most valuable asset. There's always more to do: Leads to develop, prospects to pitch, churned customers to re-engage, and sales campaigns to develop. Time spent on these high-value, high-leverage activities delivers business results. But there's a bottleneck: Repetitive information processing. Without sales automation, every task produces information that requires you to port it from one app to another. Below, we break down five automated workflows—we call them Zaps—that will enable you to sell faster and with less effort. You'll need a Zapier account to use the workflows in this article. If you don't have an account, you can sign up for free here . Note: Some of the apps highlighted in this article require a paid Zapier account, or that you be in your two-week trial period. Learn more about our plans and pricing . Automatically capture leads The speed of your sales pipeline depends on how fast leads flow through it. The faster you generate leads, th...

The worst part about taking a vacation is returning to work. You have to catch up on everything you missed, and of course something significant happened while you were out. While you're trying to read missed messages, emails, and memos, coworkers are forming a line for your attention. It's no wonder knowledge workers choose to check messages while they're on vacation. However, that's no way to live. Zapier can help you ease the transition from vacation to the workweek. Zapier helps you automate the tedious tasks in your day through our automatic workflows, which we call Zaps. These workflows send information from one app to another, so you can stop worrying about reading every email you missed and focus on more meaningful work. You'll need a Zapier account to use the workflows in this piece. If you don't have an account yet, it's free to get started . There are things that can make it easier to return from a vacation, so we rounded up a few Zap templates...

There you are, just mindlessly browsing the internet one morning. Suddenly, it's lunchtime, and you've spent half your paycheck on artisan-made, seasonally appropriate cookie cutters—all because you saw a spiffy ad while checking your horoscope. Chances are, that ad came from Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords), an online advertising platform developed by Google. With Google Ads, you can pay to display brief advertisements, product listings, and more to people surfing the web. That's a hugely valuable tool if you sell any sort of product or service. And unlike creating a TV ad, ads run through Google Ads are easy to set up. Once you've logged in, just click the + sign in the Campaigns tab, and you'll be ready to set up your first ad campaign. Google Ads will guide you through selecting a goal for your ad. Do you want to boost website traffic, sales, leads, brand awareness, or app promotion? From there, you're able to choose options like search network ads ...