There’s no getting around it – businesses are increasingly using many different apps to handle specific tasks. Accounting, marketing, order fulfillment, sales, project management, the list goes on. Each application chosen by a business performs important tasks very well, but adds to the complexity of the business operations, particularly when information needs to be shared between the applications. Manually moving data between the applications takes precious time and is mundane work, and therefore runs the risk of not being done or being done poorly (with errors) or late.
For many years, we have assisted our clients to solve these problems by implementing integrations between their websites / web applications / SaaS products and other business applications. The upfront cost of the integration has paid for itself many times over in time saving for the business, however, when the 3rd party application changes functionality or changes the API exposed to the public to allow the integration, then the integration can break and requiring rework.
Enudge email and SMS marketing app, designed and built by Contactpoint in 2006, has been enhanced to integrate with many different applications over the years. Enudge is presently integrated with Pipedrive (a deal management app), Gmail, Outlook, Xero and Salesforce, making it easy for people using these apps to send contact data to and from their Enudge account. These integrations can be costly to build and maintain, and there is always another app on our list, waiting for our team to integrate with!
We are always looking for ways to help our clients grow using technology, and doing that in ways that are cost effective, robust, secure and scalable.
A better solution to Integration.
The maturity of cloud-based middleware services that support application integration has led us to recently explore how these can be employed for our clients, to solve the problems I’ve described and support the following 3 Use Cases / business goals:
- Automating routine business tasks to save time e.g. creating an invoice in your online accounting system whenever a sale is made in your online store, adding a new customer of your online store into your email marketing platform.
- Ensuring integrations keep running, and are easy to maintain.
- Enabling other applications to integrate with your application in a cost-effective way, providing greater marketing reach for your application, and making it easier for your customers to use your solution.
Cloud-based middleware services, such as Zapier and Automate.io, act like the glue between applications or a marketplace where any app can connect with any app.
For the 1st goal – automating routine tasks – the ability to shift data around is significantly easier when your apps are supported by a middleware service. As a very simple example, you can set up the task of adding a new customer (in your online store) into your marketing platform, which then sends out a welcome email and ensures future email campaigns are sent to that new customer as well, all without you needing to do anything.
For the 2nd goal – easy to maintain integrations – the applications who enabled the middleware platform to integrate with their application are motivated to ensure the integration keeps running, and will ensure that it does, or give you plenty of warning that you need to update your integration.
For the 3rd goal – making it easy for others to integrate with your application, and all the advantages that brings – the middleware solves the huge problem of how to have enough resources (time & money) to enable integration with the vast array of applications that logically have a need to integrate with your application. Enudge, for example, should logically integrate with every CRM and ecommerce platform, as well as every lead generation solution. Using a middleware means that the effort to implement the integration can be carried out once, and support potentially thousands of applications. In addition, there will be automations required by our clients that can be supported by the middleware service, that we would never have thought of and therefore never supported. For example, what if an Enudge user needs to print name tags for every customer who indicated they would attend an event by clicking on the “I will attend” link in their Enudge Action Responder email campaign, and that name tag is created by a special name tag app? If the name tag app is available in the middleware service, receiving contact names, and Enudge has a trigger of “Clicked Yes” exposed in the middleware service, then suddenly integrating the two applications is available, without either application needing to know about the other.
It is perhaps the “marketplace” nature of the cloud-based middleware that is the most exciting aspect. It gives you the ability to quickly integrate two or more apps together to mimic your workflow, saving you time and money, and freeing up your time to get on with your core business.
So what is the downside; there’s always a catch, right?
Well, you need to have and pay for the account with the middleware service. The cost usually depends on the number of integrations you have in place, and how many times these are used on a monthly basis. These services aren’t prohibitively expensive compared to building and maintaining individual integrations yourself. It is not hard to calculate the return on investment provided by a service, based on the time it saves you.
The other issue you need to address is whether the business apps you have selected are available on your choice of middleware service.
Ideas worth Exploring?
If there are aspects of your business operations that are impacting on your time, feel free to get in touch so that we can explore together how they might be cost effectively solved using integrations.
If you are using Enudge and would like to integrate your account with another application, please get in touch. We are currently building integrations into the Zapier platform for Enudge, preparing for public launch, and would love to talk with you about being part of the beta testing phase.