Your inbox used to get all the attention. Now it’s Slack, your team’s instant messaging app.
Instead of saying “email it to me,” you ask co-workers to “slack it to me.” You customize your Slack theme, liven up the day with Slack’s (unpredictable)Â Giphy integration, and use “/appear” for all your video-chatting needs.
But there’s more you can do to make Slack—or whatever team instant messaging app you use—a vital tool to your team’s workflow. The key is integrating Slack with the other apps you use for work.
Out of the gate, Slack supplies quick integrations with more than 100 services, including Asana, Dropbox and MailChimp.
For everything else, there’s Zapier, an app integration tool that can connect Slack with more than 400 complementary apps, such as Gmail, Basecamp and Evernote. This post focuses on the services that Slack doesn’t yet support, complete with walkthroughs of how to use Slack and Zapier to set up more than 40 integrations.
Slack Integrations for:
- Email Management
- Calendar Notifications
- Company Culture
- Marketing Assistance
- Brand Monitoring
- Project Management
- Customer and Sales Notifications
- More Integrations
- Even More Integrations
How to Set Up a Slack Integration with Zapier
This post offers more than 40 ways to use Zapier for integrating Slack with the services you use. To help you get these integrations up-and-running, each use case is accompanied by quick set up links. Click “Use this Zap,” and you’ll be guided through a series of steps, starting with authenticating your apps. (In order for Zapier to send data to and from apps, it needs to first receive permission from the apps involved).
Let’s use this Google Calendar to Slack Zap as an example. After authenticating, you’ll be prompted to select an event that you want to watch for in your Trigger app, such as a new Google Calendar appointment. You might need to be specific about what you’re looking for, too—in this case, you’d need to choose which Google Calendar Zapier should watch for new events.
Once you’ve selected the calendar from Google Calendar, specify what you’d like your Slack message to say, using parts of the new event—such as “summary” and “event begins” time.
Zapier lets you customize more than just the Slack channel and message contents, too. Click “Show advanced options” to see more possibilities, like setting custom usernames and icons, and choosing whether or not you want links to expand—called “unfurl” by Slack—when a message is posted.
