How we automate our whole marketing without writing a single line of code?

Well hello everyone! First of all, let me introduce myself because this will be one of my first blog posts in quite a while and most of you don’t even know who I am. So this is Ali speaking, an ex-product marketer, a product manager, a productivity evangelist and now one of the co-founders of Nuvio. I will be mainly writing about product management, productivity and no-code apps in this blog. Shall we begin?

Nuvio is a startup company that aims to prove that there is a better way to manage business finances through automation and analytics but without writing complex codes or manipulating complex excel files. So, why not do the same this for ourselves? Since we have a core team that deals with basically everything everyday (like most of you ✌️) we should be automating as many processes as possible.

We started doing this by automating our whole marketing, CRM and lead generation processes. Let me say the last thing first. The automation is working around the clock and saving us at least 1000 USD/month. We do this by using no-code tools and no, none of them is actually a full-blown expensive CRM product.

Our whole CRM sits in Airtable. Before diving into our process, let me explain how we save tons of money through Airtable. Airtable is literally Google Sheets on steroids. It has “bases” that work like different Google Sheet files, “tables” as different sheets inside of the same file and it provides built-in automations and integrations with lots of different tools. So anyone can build their database of anything. We use it as our CRM, Social Media and HR tool. Imagine paying only one tool that replaces all the other tools. Here is how Nuvio CRM works on Airtable. We keep our Leads, Opportunities, Contacts and Companies in different tables. Our Leads table lets us track each lead’s email, source, status, originating campaign, created date etc. You can always create dashboards out of this data with just 2–3 simple clicks.

So, Airtable does all the magic, yes? No. It works as our database for anything but we need to take actions based on what our customers and leads do on our website and app. This is the job of Customer.io. It is another talented no-code tool that let’s you track your customer actions and updates their profile based on their actions and assigns them to specific segments automatically. By using those segments you can contact them via personal emails, newsletters or even with SMS. It works literally as a sales guy on 24/7 watch! Here is how our Early Access automated workflow works: A lead signs up on our website, automatically assigns to Early Access segment, waits for 2 minutes and Welcome email by our lovely co-founder Özge sends automatically. Even though she is sleeping. (Yes she does, sometimes)

Whoa, ok but how Customer.io knows the leads are “Early Access” leads? Now, my fellow automation enthusiasts, we will introduce 2 other incredible tools. Webflow and Make (formerly Integromat). Webflow is completely another topic, but it is basically a no-code website builder that lets anybody create a detailed and full functional website without writing a single line of code. You guessed right, Nuvio website is built with Webflow! We basically created different forms on our website and Webflow collects all the form responses on their databases for us, marking each response with the related form name.

And last but not least, Make joins the game as the “brain” off all the integrations and automations behind above 3 tools. Make is a no-code automation tool that enables us to track actions on one application and act on the other application based on the data we get on the first one. AutoMagically 🤖

So our whole CRM automation looks like this on Make.

Ok that looks adorable ❤️ Intimidated? Let me explain shortly:

• When somebody fills out any form on our website, Webflow stores it and Make catches the form response automatically.

• It checks whether the response came from “Early Access” form, “Newsletter Signup” form or “Contact” form.

• If it’s from Early access, it creates a lead in our CRM system in Airtable, marks it’s source as Website and campaign is “Early Access”. And then creates a new customer in Customer.io and assigns it to “Early Access” segment. Remember our customer.io workflow? When a new lead gets into the Early Access segment they will get welcome email from Özge, our co-founder.

• If response comes from Contact form or Newsletter form we still create a new lead on Airtable but make some different actions on Customer.io based on the information provided on the forms.

Let me remind you something, none of these steps requires human intervention after initial setup. It just works 24/7 without interruptions.

During the economic downturn, most of the companies postpone their digital transformation plans. I see an opportunity by not doing the same. Even a small proportion of what I explained above is dramatically increasing our team’s efficiency by 2x or 3x. And we can focus on more value added and quality work while automation does the heavy lifting for us. It does not matter you are a PM, HR or Sales person I suggest to start automating the small bits of your life, you will be seeing the results in no time.

Have an amazing automated day!