Zapier is a tool that allows you to connect apps on the web together. With a Zapier account, you can create Zaps that can automate commonly performed or repetitive tasks. Curated has full support for Zapier.

All you need to get started is a free Zapier account and an API key which can be found in Curated under Settings > Integrations > API Key.

Preconfigured Zaps for Curated

The easiest way to get started with Zapier is to use one of the preconfigured Zaps that we’ve set up. These Zaps are focused on the most common tasks that you might want to automate. For example, Tweeting a link to your latest issue every time you publish.

Check out our full list of preconfigured Zaps here.

Custom Zaps

If the automation you want is not listed in the preconfigured Zaps above, you can easily create a custom Zap to integrate with any of the services that Zapier supports.

Zapier works by allowing apps to expose what it calls triggers and actions. A trigger is an event that happens inside an app that can set in process a Zap. For example, you could use the “New published issue” trigger in Curated to automate the posting of the URL of that issue to your favorite social network. Actions in Zapier are the flip side of that, making Curated perform a task as a result of a trigger from another app. For example, you could use a trigger in an app such as Pocket to trigger the “Add new collected link” action in Curated when an article in your Pocket account is favorited.

Curated has 4 triggers and 3 actions for you to use, they are:

Triggers

  • New subscriber - Someone subscribed via email to one of your Curated publications.
  • New unsubscriber - Someone unsubscribed an email address from one of your Curated publications.
  • New published issue - An issue was published for one of your publications on Curated.
  • New link collected - A new link was collected into the collected items for one of your Curated publications.

Actions

  • Add new subscriber - Add an email subscriber to one of your publications on Curated.
  • Remove subscriber - Remove an email subscriber from one of your publications on Curated.
  • Add a new collected link - Add a collected link to one of your publication’s list of collected items.

So, with combinations of these, it is possible to set up all sorts of useful Zaps. For example:

  • Collecting links into Curated from other sources - If you’d like to collect a link automatically when something is published to an RSS feed, or any other trigger that Zapier supports, you should configure a Zap to use the “Add new collected link” action.
  • Post to a social network when an issue is published - If you’d like to automatically share your issues on any of the social media services that Zapier supports, configure a Zap to use the “New published issue” trigger.
  • Get notified when new links are collected - If you’d like to post a notification somewhere when a member of your Curated team adds a new link, you should use the “New link collected” trigger.
  • Full list synchronization with other ESPs - Using a combination of the subscribe and unsubscribe triggers and the new and remove subscriber actions, you can fully synchronize a Curated subscriber list with any other ESP supported by Zapier. Note that full synchronization requires 4 separate zaps to be active. Configuring this is a little more involved than for other Zaps so you’ll want to read our step-by-step guide on this.

For detailed instructions on how to create a custom Zap, see the guide on the Zapier support site.