In one of my previous posts, I explored the many benefits of incorporating no-code automation tools into your business operations. Today, I’m excited to delve deeper into some of the most practical and impactful processes that any business can implement using these platforms. From streamlining marketing efforts to facilitating data transfers, these automations can lead to rapid development and quick solutions for various business challenges.

Based on my experience working with various businesses, I’ve identified five key automations that have proven incredibly useful. Let’s explore how these can benefit your organization.

1. Audience List Synchronization

Keeping your audience lists current and consistent across multiple platforms is crucial for effective marketing. This automation can help you sync leads from various sources, including Meta/Facebook Lead Generation forms, Typeform submissions, and Google lead forms.

Once collected, these leads can be automatically ingested into your back-office, ensuring that your sales team always has access to the latest prospects. This process can also work in reverse—we can update audiences generated offline back to other platforms, such as a Google Ads audience list or your CRM.

Real-life examples:

• Instead of learning and developing a designated API for each lead generation source, my company used Make to integrate with all sources and employ a global scenario that ingested leads into our back-office, regardless of their origin.
• Once a lead was generated, we ensured its details were added across all our platforms, including HubSpot CRM, ActiveCampaign, Zendesk, and a webinar platform.

2. Syncing Offline Events Across Platforms

After generating leads, it’s important to track their activities and identify crucial situations where we should offer something or exclude them from our marketing efforts (such as when they become customers and are no longer part of the acquisition funnel).

A good implementation ensures that your team always has access to the most up-to-date information, regardless of which platform they’re using. This makes it easier than ever to serve the right message to the right user at the right time.

Real-life examples:

• We used a webhook triggered by offline events (like phone communication, a telephone sale, or a cancellation request). Once the webhook was received, a Make scenario automatically updated audience lists across all marketing platforms. This involved removing the user from one list and adding them to another (for example, reclassifying a user from “interested” to “not interested”).
• After gathering user segments, we leveraged ad platforms’ sophisticated tools like audience matching (Lookalikes) to find similar desirable users. This approach also works for negative segments—for all our cancelled users, we created a dedicated list and a lookalike one, both excluded from campaign targeting.

3. Email Automation

Streamlining your email processes can save countless hours and improve communication efficiency. Whether it’s sending welcome emails, follow-ups, or targeted campaigns, automation helps maintain consistent and timely communication with your audience. After syncing events between platforms using third-party automation, we can create triggers based on them, especially in our email marketing tool.

Real-life examples:

• To congratulate affiliates who reached certain benchmarks, we used both Airtable and SendGrid. In Airtable, we kept records of affiliate performance over time. With Make, each time an affiliate drove a new conversion, the scenario checked whether that conversion hit a benchmark. If so, an email trigger was activated.
• ActiveCampaign automations make it easy to create triggers based on any property in the contact asset or deal. Your task is simply to update those properties and let the automations work their magic. For instance, if a lead’s status changes to “not interested” due to high price after a phone call, we can set up an automation to offer a discount a specified time after the status update.

4. ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) for Business Intelligence

Data is the lifeblood of modern businesses, and automating your ETL processes can provide invaluable insights. This automation focuses on retrieving data from various APIs (without needing to learn any documentation) and ingesting this data into your data warehouse.

By automating these processes, you ensure that your business intelligence tools always have access to the most current and relevant data for analysis and decision-making. Crucially, it allows for rapid development of any new source added to the marketing operation.

Real-life examples:

• With Make, retrieving campaign data from Google and Meta/Facebook Ads is straightforward. I used one scenario, scheduled to run daily, to get the previous day’s data from both platforms. Then, using Snowflake’s module in Make, I ingested the data into the warehouse—all in one scenario.
• Make also allows data retrieval from any API using HTTP requests. For a company I worked with, I helped develop a scenario that retrieved data from PayPal’s API using an HTTP request. After parsing the JSON output, some transformation was required before ingesting it into the data warehouse. Again, all development took place in one convenient location.

5. Supporting R&D Efforts

Lastly, automation can play a crucial role in supporting your Research and Development initiatives. While specific applications may vary depending on your industry, automating certain R&D processes can accelerate innovation and reduce time-to-market for new products or services.

Real-life examples:

• At one point, the company I worked for needed to implement a complete affiliate marketing operation from A to Z. Since no one in the R&D team was familiar with marketing tools, developing the entire system in-house was challenging. Instead, I acted as a developer using no-code tools like Airtable and Make. With these tools, I created a backend to gather all data. Using Make, I developed logic that attributed conversions to affiliates based on their contracts. This approach saved the company dozens of development hours.

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In conclusion, these five automation processes represent just a fraction of what’s possible with no-code platforms like Make. By implementing these automations, businesses can significantly improve their efficiency, data accuracy, and overall operational effectiveness. As you explore these possibilities, consider how they might be tailored to meet your specific business needs and goals.

Have you implemented any of these automations in your business? I’d love to hear about your experiences and the impact they’ve had on your operations. Feel free to share in the comments below!