Lesson 2: Lecture and Quiz
Welcome back to Zapier 101!
This video will teach you how to build your first Zap.
Do you learn better through reading? We've got you covered! Underneath the review session, we've provided you with a full transcript of the video lecture and below that are a few helpful links.
Lesson 2 Quiz
Lesson 2 Lecture Notes
Welcome back to Zapier 101! Now that you know a little bit about what Zapier does and the language of workflow automation let's put this into practice and build a Zap together.
This Zap is going to be a single step. That means the Zap will only have one action after our trigger.
In our example we're going to have our Zap trigger from new items added to an RSS feed. Our example RSS feed will be the Zapier blog.
Then, we'll have our Zap send us an email to let us know when new posts are available.
That means once this Zap is turned on, we'll get an email notification each time there's a new blog post added on Zapier.
To build this Zap we'll need to navigate to our Zapier dashboard.
When you sign into your Zapier account you'll automatically be taken to your dashboard. The dashboard is the home for all of your Zaps.
From there you're going to click the orange “Make a Zap!” button at the top of the page. This is going to take us to the Zap editor. The editor is where you'll build and edit your individual Zaps.
Our first step in the editor is to select the trigger app. This is the app we're going to watch for new information to trigger our workflow. Because we want to watch an RSS feed we're going to choose the RSS app by typing the name into the search box.
Next we're going to choose the specific trigger we want for this app. We want the “New Item in Feed” trigger so we can capture new posts on the Zapier blog.
We'll select that and click “Save & Continue” to move to the next section.
It's good to know that Zapier's editor automatically saves your work as you make changes to your Zap so you won't lose anything as you build your workflow. As soon as you finish entering your details into a field or make a selection, we will save your progress.
Next, we're going to enter the URL for the RSS feed we want to watch. Here's the Zapier blog's RSS url: https://zapier.com/blog/feeds/latest/
This field is marked in red as required. That means that we have to pass data to this field to make this Zap work.
The rest of these fields are optional and for what we need, we don't have to make any changes to those.
Next we're going to test the trigger to draw in a sample item into our test editor.
A sample is here to help you build and test the rest of your Zap. It represents the information this trigger will return when it actually runs. In this case it means we're going to grab a recent blog post from our feed so we can use it's data in our Zap editor.
To do that we want to hit “Fetch & Continue” and Zapier will go out and grab an example for us. The next page will show us a success message and we can view the example we captured to see what sort of data we'll get to use in the rest of the Zap.
Once we're happy with our example data we'll click Continue to work on our action. Just like when we selected our trigger we'll now enter the name of the app we want to use as our action.
Zapier has a built-in email tool called Email by Zapier that we'll use.
After choosing the action app we have to pick which action we want. For Email by Zapier there's only one choice - “Send Outbound Email.”
Select that then click “Save + Continue” to move into the “Edit Template” step. Each step in a Zap has an editable template.
Think of the template as the instructions for that step of your Zap. It tells us what to do with the trigger data when we create our action. First, we'll do all of the fields marked required.
In the To field I'm going to enter my email address by typing it in.
For the email's Subject, I want to pass data from the new blog post we found in our feed. To do that, I'm going to click the “insert fields button” and then click the “Title” field.
This means that every time there's a new blog post this Zap will send an email to my email address with a subject line that's the title of the new post.
Next, we're going to insert some data from our blog post into the body of the email itself. I'm going to choose the description field which contains a brief summary of the post and then, beneath that, a link to the post itself so I can read the rest.
I'm going to skip the rest of these optional fields and click “Continue.” This next page is a test for our action. In the test summary box we see what data we'll be sending as our email based on the sample we drew in when we first setup the trigger.
Everything looks good here so I'm going to click “Create & Continue.” That's going to send out a real live email with that data so I can see exactly what that looks like. Keep in mind that whenever we run a test on an action, it will perform this action in your selected app.
This test was a success so let's go look in my inbox to see it.
Since we're happy with that how this email looks, I'm going to go ahead and click “Finish.” I'm going to give this Zap a name so I know what it does on my dashboard and then I'm going to turn it on!
And that's it. We've built a Zap that will send us an email each time there's a new post on the Zapier blog. Now, go ahead and build this Zap yourself!