As the leading automation and app orchestration platform around, Zapier is both user friendly and intuitive. With the amount of flexibility it offers, however — almost 8000 different apps at the time of writing – it can also come off as a bit overwhelming and even intimidating.

With unlimited freedom, it’s usually difficult to know where to start, or even what an individual use case could be for your needs.

For this reason, we decided to outline 5 different integration ideas between Rocketadmin and other apps through Zapier — to show you just how simple it can be to achieve unique and transformational results.

Please keep in mind that all these integrations have been meticulously tested and confirmed to work with Rocketadmin, but are only possible from third-party apps to Rocketadmin — for now. There are ways to do the reverse, but they are done in a slightly different way. We’ll cover that in a different article soon.

But before we move on, let’s answer an important question first.

What are the benefits of integrating with an admin panel?

The main utility of an admin panel is the management of one or more databases. But what if you want to take your data further?

Sure, you’re transferring it to the tool you prefer using, but that’s kind of a boring scenario on its own.

Why feed your Excel spreadsheets into Rocketadmin if it's just a 1:1 conversion?

There’s a few very good reasons.

Data is centralized

The most obvious, immediate reason is that your data would be centralized. Let’s take Google services for example. Say you want to collect data from Sheets, Forms, Calendar, and even Gmail. 

Sure, you can take what you need manually, but why not automate it?

Connecting any of Zapier’s apps to Rocketadmin allows you to pull in data from multiple distinct data points and orchestrate them together, gathering valuable insight in the process. That’s difficult when using them in isolation.

Internal + external data sources

Of course, data sources don’t need to just be external. There could be any number of different types of data you would like to add manually.

On top of this, you can use your internal and more sensitive data as well — employee names, positions, assigned projects, etc. With this combination of internal and external data, you can organize everything into a cohesive whole — now, you don’t have to choose or swap between platforms.

You can even self-host some admin panels if you’d like to keep full control over the flow of your information.

Better permissions

While many individual solutions allow you control over user permissions, the reality is that things like spreadsheets just get passed around most of the time, or you use invites to control who can view, change, or manage content or your work.

That’s a passable solution for one service, but if you want to oversee permissions for multiple services at the same time, only an admin panel can provide that level of granularity over the entirety of your team’s data.

Use your data in new ways

Aggregating your data is half the fun, but the most important part is what you do with it, right?

With a good admin panel, you can filter through your data, control it with additional automation options, and even create widgets that take your data to the next level.

Rocketadmin, for example, also features AI functionality, allowing you to ask simple, natural-language questions that drive powerful insight across your entire collection of different data.

With these points out of the way, let’s take a look at 5 diverse ideas for integrating an admin panel with Zapier.

Use case #1 — Google Forms

Google Forms is one of the most popular and easiest to grasp services for survey collection, but with that simplicity come limitations.

Let’s say, for example, that you’re running a restaurant and you need to collect feedback. This can include data points like customer name, email, location visited, and a 1–5 rating for your service.

You can get a bunch of great analytics directly in Google Forms, but that’s only per one individual survey. If you need an overall picture of many locations, for example, the only way to do it is to use an external service like Rocketadmin.

And if you’d like to combine this with more sensitive data like, say, the salaries or names of individual managers who oversee these locations, then you will need a way to aggregate them.

With an admin panel, this turns from a cumbersome task to something completely manageable.

If you’d like to see a simple, detailed guide on how to set this up, make sure you check out our knowledge base article here.

Use case #2 — Google Sheets

We’ve touched on Excel already, and really, this can work for any number of spreadsheet services available on Zapier. But for right now, we’re taking a look at Sheets — effectively the new standard for viewing and manipulating columns and rows. 

Now, what can you do with Sheets and Rocketadmin?

Similarly to other use cases we’ve outlined here, the main goal is to transfer information from an external service to your admin panel.

The obvious use case is to just move rows from one to the other, and use that as an aggregator of not just multiple spreadsheets, but other distinct data points as well.

This has many uses — archiving spreadsheets online is one, or just moving information in a way that allows many users to access it, with you controlling each user’s permissions.

Using this as a set-it-and-forget-it option can help you create a large database that you can neatly edit and manipulate as you see fit, too — solving one of the key downsides of individual spreadsheets.

Use case #3 — Calendly

If you’ve job hunted recently or otherwise had to interact with someone outside your company, you might’ve come across Calendly. The company itself describes its service as “Free Online Appointment Scheduling Software,” and they do just that — help you schedule online meetings.

Now, Calendly already syncs with different calendars, such as Google Calendar and Outlook, and that gives you some information on who it is you’re meeting with, which is great.

But let’s say — as an example — that you’re an HR for a company that’s currently hiring, and you want to keep track of who you’re talking to, what their salary expectations are, or whether they’re flagged for further interviews. Once all this information has been fed into Rocketadmin, maybe your higher-ups who are conducting technical interviews can change someone from “Pending interview” to “Approved for next stage” or “Underperformed.” That’s super useful on its own, and with Rocketadmin’s Automations, UI Widgets, and AI integration, you can take this even further, perhaps even easily seeing the best candidates among hundreds of options.

Zapier allows you to populate your Rocketadmin fields both when you invite someone to a meeting and when a meeting is canceled.

Pretty useful, right?

Use case #4 Mailchimp

Email campaigns were truly revolutionized when Mailchimp came about, creating a platform that was easy, intuitive, and even fun to use.

Another great use that Mailchimp has pioneered is the option to manage leads — who has subscribed, who has opened your emails, who has unsubscribed. This is all essential information for any email marketer.

But what if you could make even better use of those leads?

By integrating with an admin panel, you can combine all that information with different data points into the same dashboard.

As just one example, what if you’ve included a Google Forms survey in one of your emails, and you want to see the results and compare them to your leads? Or maybe you want to combine it with sales or technical support data. How about comparing that with data from e-Commerce or inventory systems?

What if someone opens an email pitching a specific product, but they haven’t bought anything — they’re clearly interested, but maybe it’s outside their price range or they’re unsure. You can use that information to decide on sending those users another email with a discount code. Or maybe someone has unsubscribed — you can reference that with recent support tickets for the same name or email and figure out what went wrong and why they may be unsatisfied with your service. That’s great insight to fix future problems, and it’s a fairly unique use case that only something like a connection with an admin panel can address.

Use case #5 — Gmail

If you use any email provider, you’re statistically probably using Gmail, and for good reason — it’s relatively secure, has a ton of features, and integrates well with Google’s other services like Drive or Meet.

But by connecting it with an admin panel, you can do so much more.

Let’s say your support team has recently resolved a ticket, and your customer has received an email informing them that their case is closed. If a user responds to that email, it could automatically reopen the ticket, changing its status from “Closed” to “In progress.”

Or say you’re listening for a specific number of keywords that you want to flag in a certain way and distribute them across different tables— as just a few examples, “defective” could open a new support ticket, “wrong address” could alert fulfillment, and “refund” can be visible for your sales team.

This is a very simple but very powerful use case that can automate a ton of communication and save you precious time from having to read through and redirect emails. And the more granular you get with your keywords, the more this integration can handle.

Use case #6 — Slack

While many companies are moving to Microsoft Teams and some are even opting for Discord, Slack still remains a popular option that has proven itself time and again across countless industries, for both large enterprises and lean startups.

One great way to make use of both Slack and your admin panel is to add an employee to your database whenever they join a specific channel or when they join your workspace in general.

What are the uses of that? Quite a lot!

If you’re a larger company, you can track new hires’ onboarding, performance, skills — this is even more useful the more people you’re overseeing.

Or if you’re managing a public Slack, like one for open-source software, then you can easily generate leads when someone joins your workspace, or see who is potentially interested in a webinar when they join a specific channel

So that’s useful. But what about even more use cases? How about sending a file to someone in Slack that gets added to a Rocketadmin field?

This can be super useful for keeping an archive of what’s being shared, staying on top of version control, as well as collecting marketing materials, presentations, proposals, leads, resumes, or anything else that may be relevant to keep in a different space.

Just make sure your memes are safe for work.

What does Rocketadmin offer?

As mentioned previously, a lot of the use cases outlined in this article can be achieved with other admin panels as well, and some of them even with software like Excel or Google Sheets.

We believe, however, that Rocketadmin is one of the best solutions for these — and more! — use cases.

From the very start, we knew we were building a platform that can grow more powerful with time and eventually play nice with thousands of other platforms. Zapier integration, in particular, was a goal.

Here’s why we think you’ll find your experience integrating with Rocketadmin worthwhile.

It’s free!

Rocketadmin includes a self-hosted version that you can use completely free of charge, so you can start plugging in your databases and then move onto integrating and automating with Zapier immediately. 

It’s easy to use

You can set up Rocketadmin in no time at all — it only takes a few minutes. We’ve made sure to lay everything out in an intuitive, natural way that should get you to grips with the ins and outs from the moment you fire it up.

Fully customizable

Automations allow you to set up custom buttons that let you do all sorts of crazy things, really making your databases your own. UI Widgets can help you to effortlessly visualize any part of your database you need, providing invaluable insight at a glance.

Analytics through AI

Analyzing tables is essential for any business, but what happens when you have 100 rows? Or 1000? Or 10,000? Our AI Insights functionality can quickly provide in-depth, measured, and comprehensive information on exactly what you need — all done through natural language.

Conclusion

Any piece of software can be more than the sum of its parts, but most big offerings can be endlessly expanded with additional, external functionality.

When the sky’s the limit, it can be somewhat overwhelming to even set one foot out the door, so we wanted to outline a diverse variety of use cases — to show you that with a little bit of patience and creativity, you can achieve incredible results that can take your efforts much, much further, perhaps even freeing you or your team to focus on more inspired and time-sensitive work.

While there is absolutely a learning curve to Zapier, the interface is still very intuitive, and once things click, it’s very straightforward to set up new automations. Plus, there’s a ton of free resources out there.

Try it out for yourself — you never know what cool stuff you can come up with. Transformation is just around the corner.

Even better — Zapier integration is available for our free tier as well, so it’s never been easier to start. We hope you’ll try it out. And if you ever need any help setting this up, you can always contact our support team here.