Using Looping and Digest in one Zap

  • 23 March 2021
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I love the new Looping functionality and for me, its usefulness is really amplified if you combine it with the Digest functionality. Here is how I used them together in one Zap with some tips & tricks along the way!

The use case:

Our Sales team wanted to be able to quickly see which users had either activated their account or logged into their account over the past X days on a client-level. Unfortunately, we didn’t have this data in our CRM (Hubspot) so that’s why I used Zapier.

 

Steps:

As my trigger, I used a Webhook which my Sales team could send themselves through Hubspot or Slack, and I would find all Associations with that client (unique identifiers of the users).

The output of Step 2 are the ID’s of the users as line items which I would use for my Loop:

All actions after this would loop and take only one of the line item values (ID’s).

I then use this ID to lookup the user in our platform database, check if they have an account, and put them through two different paths:

In the No-account path, I append the user to my manually released Digest - this would become both a Hubspot note and a Slack message with the email addresses and user info as the answer to the Sales Rep.

It’s important to manually release it so you can trigger that on the last iteration.

After this action I want to add more steps to automate things further; think about an email to the user depending on the path.

After you’re done with all Actions, you want to release the Digest on the last iteration to post the notes (in this case everyone who does not have an account yet). You can achieve this with a simple filter - in both paths since you never know in which of the two paths the last iteration will end up!

All that’s left is to take the output of the Digest and feed it back to Hubspot and post it to Slack.


Problems, solutions, and possible improvements

  • One of the problems I had was that the loop would go to quickly and iterations would run “simultaneous”. To avoid this, I used a “Delay after Queue” to make sure the last iteration was indeed the last one to complete.
    For speed, I used a 0.1 minute delay being inspired by @Troy Tessalone:

     

  • Ideally, I would improve this Zap to be less task-intesive. On average, one execution costs me 4 tasks per user due to the looping, delay, and paths. If anyone has a suggestion how to improve this, let me know!
     
  • One other improvement I want to automate this Zap (run X days after the client went live) and to add more actions to both paths such as chat messages on the platform and emails to nudge the No-account users to the platform. 

1 reply

Userlevel 7
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This is great! Thanks for sharing @MarijnVerdult ! :clap_tone3:

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