Vocal's Triple Productivity Boost with Zapier Automation

Vocal is a publishing platform that provides an online home base for all types of creatives—writers, musicians, filmmakers, and artists. The platform connects creators with storytelling tools and engaged communities, helping them get discovered and rewarded for good content. Since its inception in 2016, Vocal has scaled to over 1.2 million creators and roughly 11 million monthly readers. The company's growth, however, brought with it scaling challenges, particularly in managing the increasing volume of story submissions and the need for targeted nurture campaigns for creators.

Vocal, a publishing platform that connects creators with storytelling tools and engaged communities, faced significant scaling challenges as it grew. With over 1.2 million creators and roughly 11 million monthly readers, the company was struggling to manage the increasing volume of story submissions and the need for targeted nurture campaigns for creators. The manual process of updating story status in PostgreSQL and sending it to the moderation team for review was tedious and time-consuming. Additionally, the Business Intelligence team wanted to enrich their creator data to send the right nurture content at the right time. They had valuable data in PostgreSQL and Stripe but lacked the time to aggregate the data and assign email campaigns manually.

Vocal turned to Zapier, a platform that allows automation of workflows between different applications, to address their challenges. To streamline the story submission process, Vocal used Zapier to automate the creation of a record in their PostgreSQL stories table every time a story was submitted. A Zap was used to automatically set the status to 'needs review', and the same Zap notified the next person in the round-robin queue on the Vocal moderation team via SendGrid for immediate action. For targeted nurture campaigns, Vocal set up a streamlined process using a Zap that queried PostgreSQL and Stripe using custom SQL. Based on the data, they sent out over 20+ variations of behavioral and action-based emails via SendGrid and Iterable. This workflow allowed them to automate more than 1 million tasks with Zapier each month.

• By automating their workflows with Zapier, Vocal was able to significantly increase their productivity, effectively doing three times the work in less time. The automation of the story submission process not only reduced the time between submission and publication but also ensured immediate action by the moderation team. The automation of targeted nurture campaigns allowed the Business Intelligence team to send the right content at the right time, enhancing the experience for their creators. The success of these solutions has led to a culture shift within the company, with the team now looking to Zapier as a potential solution when faced with obstacles.

• Automated over 1 million tasks each month with Zapier

• Streamlined the story submission process, reducing the time between submission and publication

• Sent out over 20+ variations of behavioral and action-based emails for targeted marketing campaigns