How to create custom notifications for critical business information

Staying on top of critical business information is no easy feat, particularly if you're managing multiple projects or teams where the action takes place inside different apps. And while team chat apps aggregate a lot of communication, your feeds can get so busy that it's often hard to know what to prioritize or where to find information. 

Fortunately, Zapier can help you set up alerts and notifications you care about from important apps in one place. We've collected a few Zaps—what we call our automatic workflows—so you can quickly take control of the alerts you want to see on a recurring basis. 

Table of contents

• Create a company activity feed

• Get notified of new sales

• Stay on top of customer support

• Track customer activity

• Monitor your email marketing lists

• Keep up to date on your site monitoring and performance

Create a company activity feed

If you're in charge of a company, a department, or a team, then odds are you like to know what's going on. What did people work on today? What did they accomplish? Zapier makes it easy to keep you up-to-date on these things by letting you create an activity stream in team chat apps like Slack or Microsoft Teams.  

These Zaps will create a feed for you that lays out certain team activity (like when code is deployed) or project statuses (like when tickets are closed) to keep you—and everyone else—in the loop. 

Get notified about new sales 

Whether your company is relatively young or growing fast, it's important to have a way to oversee and get notified about sales as soon as they come in. You might want to simply celebrate each new sale with your team, or maybe you want to notify the relevant folks so they can add them to nurture streams in marketing. Whatever the reason, with Zapier, you can see new sales activity in whichever chat app you use the most. 

These Zaps will send notifications to a specific channel, send you an email, or notify you every time there's a new sale via a scheduled digest.  

Stay on top of customer support

Making sure your customers are happy is one of the best ways to foster word-of-mouth about your product or service. But sometimes answering quickly and in real time whenever customers face a problem is easier said than done. This is particularly true if your support team is dealing with hundreds of customers a day. 

These Zaps will alert you in your preferred communication app the moment a customer submits a ticket or asks for help. That way, you can easily assign the right team members to the task or get moving quickly on responding to the customer yourself.  

Track customer activity

Closing a sale is all about understanding where your lead is in the purchasing lifecycle. If you can magically reach out at the right time through the right medium and with the right message, you'll close a lot more sales.

An easy way to do this is to get notified the moment your prospect is recorded in your CMS or when they move through a different stage (like they've just downloaded your eBook, for example).  

These Zaps will let you know right away when a lead makes an important move, so you know when they're warm or ready to close. 

Monitor your email marketing lists

As you grow your email list, it's good to keep track of how many people are subscribing and who they are. It's especially exciting to see an email address you recognize join your list or an email from someone famous in your industry. 

Use these Zaps to keep a close watch on how quickly your email list is growing and who exactly is on it: 

The same rule should also apply to those who unsubscribe from your newsletter. Knowing who and how many people unsubscribe from your newsletter can help you gauge what might be going wrong or if there's anything you can do to boost engagement. 

Keep up to date on site monitoring and performance

Every site owner and web developer's worst nightmare is having their site go down and not knowing about it until annoyed users take to social media to complain. 

Luckily, there are lots of great tools for site monitoring that work with Zapier. You—and your team—can get notified instantly any time your site undergoes an update or runs into an issue. 

That way, you and your team can quickly get to work on a fix while reassuring your users you're aware of the problem. Communication is always key. 

Streamline your notifications for better business

These are just a few examples of how you can use Zapier to get notifications for your most important business transactions. If you work with tools we didn't list out here, fear not. Zapier works with thousands of apps, so head to our App Directory and see what else you can do. 

This article was originally published in October 2018 and was updated in April 2022 by Elena Alston.