Automate Your Business Workflows with Gravity Forms and Zapier

Forms are the cornerstones of many business workflows – from lead generation to customer support and more. Gravity Forms makes it easy to build all kinds of web forms for WordPress sites. But to truly unlock their power, you need a way to automatically handle form submissions…

Why Automate Gravity Forms?

Before we dive in, let‘s briefly go over why automation can be so valuable:

Save time – Manual import/export of data is tedious. Automation handles it instantly behind the scenes so you can focus on more important work.

Reduce human error – People make mistakes. Automated handoffs are reliable, accurate, and consistent.

Improve productivity – Your team no longer has to constantly check forms for new entries. Notifications and assigned tasks keep operations running smoothly.

Enrich data – Submission details can be automatically enhanced with linked customer profiles from your CRM before they hit your spreadsheet.

Scale growth – Workflows handle processes predictably no matter if you get 10 or 10,000 form entries per day.

Quantifying the Benefits

To demonstrate the magnitude automation can provide, let‘s analyze some projections:

• Daily form submissions: 100
• Time per manual data entry: 2 mins
• Value per employee hour: $30

As shown, even at only 100 submissions daily, over $18k/year can be saved on just form data entry alone after automation. And for companies with higher submission volumes or more valuable employee time, the compounding benefits grow exponentially.

Now let‘s explore some specific ways we can leverage the integration power of Zapier for Gravity Forms…

1. Track Form Submissions in a Spreadsheet

The best way to view, analyze and share form data is with a spreadsheet. Zapier can automatically insert submission details from Gravity Forms into a Google Sheet or Excel workbook as new rows…

For those new to automation, start by tracking submissions in Sheets/Excel to monitor form performance. Then expand to more advanced workflows over time.

Google Sheets for Easy Sharing

With Google Sheets, you can:

• Quickly centralize entries from multiple forms into unified data sets
• Run pivot reports to uncover insights from submission trends
• Share real-time data with staff instead of static excel exports

The built-in pivot tables, formulas, and charts make analyzing submission data easy. For example, you can quickly segment contacts by information provided, then visualize trends with graphs.

For teams, the collaborative benefits like commenting and editing access controls streamline internal processes.

Zapier Integration Instructions

1. Set up Zapier Gmail integration
2. Connect Google Sheets account
3. Select desired Sheets destination
4. Pick Google Form trigger
5. Test and confirm mappings
6. Go live and watch automation handle submissions!

For step-by-step details, see the guided walkthrough here.

Excel for Robust Data Modeling

For more advanced analysis, Excel provides enterprise-grade capabilities like:

• Automated historical archival of all entries for auditing
• Support for large complex data sets and custom modeling
• Power Pivot augmenting big data analytics in the MS stack

With over 500 functions, powerful tools like macro scripts and VBA, robust data transformation and visualization, longstanding Excel expertise at manipulating grid data, and interoperability with database platforms via Power Query transformations, form analytics can be taken to new heights.

For example, regression analysis provides predictive modeling capabilities:

Now let‘s connect our forms to marketing and sales software to increase conversions…

2. Add Contacts to Your Mailing List or CRM

Who doesn‘t love a good lead magnet opt-in form? When paired with CRMs, they become even more powerful for building your subscriber list.

With Zapier, new contacts from your Gravity Forms can automatically sync to popular platforms like:

• Mailchimp – Launch targeted email campaigns
• HubSpot – Track deal outreach sequences
• Salesforce – Notify reps to prompt follow-up
• ActiveCampaign – Trigger customized onboarding drip campaigns

But simply passing form data into these systems isn‘t enough. To maximize value, we need to learn from the data to optimize our marketing and sales processes.

Subscription Analytics

By tracking detailed subscription metrics over time, we can fine-tune our lead capture and onboarding performance. Key metrics to monitor include:

• Sign-up rates – percentage of site visitors converting as newsletter subscribers
• Growth rates – pace of total subscriber gain/loss month over month
• Segmentation trends – analyize differences across customer cohorts
• Channel referrers – quantify which pages/campaigns drive most sign-ups
• Lifecycles – from initial subscription to eventual unsubscription, assess engagement pathways

For example, pulling this high-level dashboard analysis can help optimize subscriber relationships:

Examining correlating factors like referrers and IP locations can uncover optimization opportunities:

Tools like Google Analytics make this data readily available automatically.

Now let‘s learn how to keep staff notified of these key submissions…

3. Send Notifications for Form Submissions

Getting alerts about important form entries is critical for prompt follow-up.

Zapier enables you to instantly notify staff through their preferred channels.

Here are some notification Zap ideas:

Email – Simple yet effective for general updates.

Slack – Great for teams. Can include parsed submission details right in messages.

SMS/Text – For urgent alerts. Short sumamries go directly to mobile phones.

Webhooks – Push payload data to other apps for further processing.

Configure notifications selectively rather than bombarding with everything. Use segmentation techniques to target based on key submission criteria.

For instance, create a Zap that texts sales reps specifically when a "Request Consultation" form contains a multi-thousand deal size estimate.

Now we‘ll look at managing follow-up tasks…

4. Create Follow-Up Tasks

Notification Zaps alert your team about notable entries. Task Zaps take it a step further by automatically assigning follow-up activities.

For example, you can:

• Create Trello cards to fulfill requests/questions.
• Log support tickets as Asana tasks pre-filled with submission specifics.
• Build intake queues for services teams with new client work.

Task Zaps promote efficiency by funneling forms into assignable workflows within everyday operations tools already used by staff.

To optimize, implement sound queue management fundamentals:

• Categorize – Tag and group tasks smartly
• Prioritize – Mark importance and start dates
• Standarize – Establish consistent processes
• Limit Work In Progress (WIP) – Reduce task overload
• Eliminate Backflows – Don‘t reintroduce old tasks
• Measure Cycle Times – Quantify throughput

For example, determine your lead follow-up cadence:

• Priority 1 Leads – 15 min SLA
• Priority 2 Leads – 60 min SLA
• Priority 3 Leads – Daily Batch

Continuous process improvement is key. We‘ll cover more methods for that next.

Advanced Analytics to Optimize Workflows

Now that we‘ve built foundation workflows, let‘s explore tactics to refine form and automation performance at scale.

Built-in Form Analytics

Gravity Forms packs robust reporting with visualization plus drilling down into granular metrics.

CRMs also provide dashboarding to assess subscriber engagement, campaign effectiveness, and sales pipeline health.

Together, these tools indicate automation success and areas needing improvement. If certain forms have low submission rates, that workflow may need reexamining.

A/B Testing Forms

To drill down further, use A/B testing – an experimentation technique for comparing two versions of something.

For example, we could test how form button text impacts sign up rates:

• Version A button = "Subscribe"
• Version B button = "Join our List"

We drive 50% of traffic to each version, then look at the data:

Version	Sessions	Sign Ups	Conversion Rate
A (Subscribe)	600	110	18.3%
B (Join our List)	650	125	19.2%

Here Version B performed better. We could now fully launch that as the final design.

This method is extremely effective for incremental optimization. Tests can involve page layouts, input types, required fields and more. Each new winner becomes the next control for subsequent rounds testing.

Correlation Analysis across Datasets

We can also uncover insights by assessing correlations between various submission attributes, CRM traits, and behavioral indicators from other tools:

This reveals relationships to inform content recommendations, predictive lead scoring, list segmentation, and more. Again, adding experimentation validates what factors actually impact conversions rather than just speculating .

For additional ideas, let‘s explore other popular automation workflows…

5. Connect Your Forms to Your Calendar Apps

Scheduling is a perfect use case to allow customers to book time slots themselves via forms.

Using appointment field plugins, users can select available times right from your website submission forms.

The selected details can then automatically sync as calendar events with supporting apps like:

• Google Calendar – Sync meeting details into your schedule
• Calendly – Automate visitor scheduling workflows
• Office 365 Calendar – Display booking visibility across your team
• G Suite Calendar – Centralize multiple employee calendars

Enabling customer self-service bookings via forms alleviates manual back-and-forths for you while retaining calendar accuracy.

Next let‘s explore backing up submission files…

6. Back Up Submissions and Files

Beyond just entry data, also automatically store any associated files like:

• Documents – Forms often allow file uploads to share pdfs, docs
• Images – Great for photo submission contests
• Videos – After event recording submission
• Audio – Podcast contest entry gathering

You can auto-backup these to unlimited and secure cloud storage apps like:

• Google Drive – Maintain availability plus share access
• Dropbox – Sync locally and retrieve previous versions
• Box – Control permissions and access levels
• OneDrive – Interface with MS Office apps

Just insert the Gravity Forms file upload field(s) directly into your desired cloud app with Zapier.

Additional Tips for Advanced Workflows

Here are further recommendations for complex use cases:

• Clean data early – Use Zaps to normalize, reformat, validate
• Enforce data discipline – Develop codes of conduct, standards
• Store data appropriately – Warehouse vs lake vs mart vs ops
• Build data pipeline foundations – ETL, schema, architecture
• Enable reporting agility – Blend SQL, BI, spreadsheet analysis
• Mask/tokenize sensitive elements – Protect PII and credentials
• Have a backup plan – Validate redundancy for availability

And alternative form + automation solutions:

• Forms – Wufoo, JotForm, Formidable
• Automation – IFTTT, Microsoft Flow, Workato

Evaluate multiple solutions to determine what aligns best with infrastructure and use cases.

Conclusion

With the right approach, Gravity Forms and Zapier together can drive significant business process improvements. Replacing manual work with automated handoffs will enable you, your team, and your customers to focus efforts on high-value activities instead.

The analytics explored provide actionable insights for continual optimization. Start with basic workflows, then expand while letting data guide enhancements.

What ideas are you looking to automate? What metrics matter most? Let me know in the comments!