It’s not exactly a trade secret that I love me some Airtable. And heavens knows I can appreciate a great automation. But a love child of the two of them? Ooooh, boss, that’s the ish right there!As always, if there’s something making my life easier – I’m down to share! While Airtable doesn’t have a ton of native integrations, automation platforms like IFTTT and Zapier come to the rescue. Here are some of my favorites to use with Airtable and how you can use them in your own day-to-day operations ::

EMAIL NOTIFICATION

HOW IT WORKS ::When a new record is created within a specific Airtable base, you will receive an email notification.

This automation is especially useful with the use of forms. For instance, if you’re using Airtable to manage clients and you have an application or questionnaire as part of your process. It would make sense to create an Airtable form to collect and organize that information using its Form View.

But what if you don’t check that base every day? You still want to be in-the-know when something comes through that you have to take action on. This is the bee’s knees automation to use in that situation.

ALTERNATE AUTOMATIONS TO BE ALERTED OF FORM SUBMISSIONS :: Instead of cluttering your inbox, you could choose to receive a text message alerting you as to when someone submits a form.

SLACK

HOW IT WORKS ::When a new record is added to a selected Airtable view, you receive a new message in Slack.

Instead of receiving emails or text messages, maybe you want your team to handle this new inquiry. That’s when you would have the alert sent to Slack for someone on your team to handle.

With a little creative thinking, you can start seeing the other potential uses here. For instance, you can create a support ticket form in Airtable that gets sent to Slack for one of your team members. This way, it can be handled as a priority instead of having it sit in your inbox among a number of other not-so-urgent inquiries. (And you KNOW I’m a sucker for anything that will minimize the inbox chaos!)

LIST-BUILDING

HOW IT WORKS: When a new record with an email address is added to an Airtable base, your email marketing service will automatically add this contact as a new subscriber to its records.

Aight so here’s where I get “mamma bear” on you :: this automation is not meant to replace your email marketing service and you still have to heed caution to legislation like GDPR.

Having said that, we’re going to look to the Forms view again when using this. Let’s say you have someone who is applying to work with you – clearly, they are agreeing to receive correspondence from you.

The process for your prospective clients is this :: after they’ve applied to work with you, they’re automatically added to Prospective Clients list in your email marketing service. Every time someone is added to your list, it triggers an email to be sent with your Welcome Package, detailing everything they need to know to start working with you.

“But Lanie!”, you’re saying. “Why wouldn’t I just use the MailChimp/ConvertKit/Mailerlite/ActiveCampaign/whatevs form in the first place?”

Of course, that’s the right choice if contact information is all you need to get started. But if you have application or qualification process, or should you need to collect questionnaire-style information first, or even if you simply want to organize your projects in one place at the jump – you can use Airtable Forms to collect everything you need for the project while your automated email sequence does its magic in the background with this integration.

GOOGLE CALENDAR

HOW IT WORKS :: When a new record is added to a selected Airtable view, your Google Calendar will populate with a new detailed event.

Picture the above situation :: your Welcome Package is automatically sent after someone applies to work with you. Meanwhile, you also want to be reminded to follow-up with that potential client a week later. This automation gets gold stars in that case because it’ll auto-populate your calendar with that reminder.

PAYPAL/STRIPE

HOW IT WORKS ::When a new payment is received/sale is made, a new record is created in Airtable.

If you don’t want to have to import the information from one platform to another via .csv files, this automation can help you skip that step. This would be especially useful in the cases of the fulfillment of physical products, because you could turn this into a daily check-in of the goods that need to be packaged and sent.

NOTE :: Like most financial-related automations, this is only available with a Premium Zapier account.

FITBIT

HOW IT WORKS ::When FitBit created your daily activity summary, a new record of this information is created in Airtable.

For fun-sies – but also for peeps who are super-serious about the adage of what gets tracked, gets improved – you can analyze the holy heck out of what your activity levels are. While this isn’t super-biz-related, the importance of your wellness to your overall goals may be something you want to monitor. I mean, I’ve put waaaaaaay less useful data into spreadsheets – just saying!