If you're throwing a party at your house, you don't want to leave your guests out on the porch. Contact lists work the same way. When someone fills out a form on your website or signs up to hear from you, it's important to welcome them into your CRM or email platform quickly instead of leaving them confused out in the cold. 

Doing repetitive lead management work—like manually downloading and uploading spreadsheets or typing in contact info—is frustrating for you. And the mistakes they can cause are frustrating for your customers. Be a better lead party host by moving contact information from one location to another with automation.

Automatically add new contacts to your email platform or CRM with Zapier

With Zapier, you can automate recurring tasks, giving you back valuable time to focus on higher priority items. The workflows you build in Zapier—we call them Zaps—can automate many common tasks, such as creating new contact records for new leads that fill out your forms.

A Zap always consists of two parts:

• The trigger: an event that starts a Zap, like when a new lead fills out a form on your website or when you star or label a certain email.

• The action: an event a Zap performs after it's triggered, like sending that contact data to your CRM. A single Zap can perform one or more actions.

To help you get started, we collected a few popular Zaps that send new contacts to a CRM or email marketing platform. Just click on the button below to get started.

Add leads to your CRM

Add leads to your email marketing platform

If you want to create contacts but need a slightly different approach—maybe you use other apps or want to have your Zap complete more than one action—you can build one yourself! It takes five steps:

1. Create a new Zap in your Zapier account. From your dashboard, click the Create Zap button.

2. For your trigger app, select the platform you use for forms, like Typeform or Squarespace forms, or your email program, like Gmail or Outlook. Then, choose the Trigger Event that corresponds with a new form submission or new email received. Look for phrases like "new submission," "new entry," or "new email."

3. Select your email marketing platform or CRM and choose the action event you need, like "create subscriber" or "create lead."

4. At this point, you'll need to complete the action fields, mapping information from the form or email into the new contact you're creating. You'll use these fields to send applicable information between your apps so that the data you capture in forms or that's sent to you in email is automatically added to your email platform or CRM.

5. Test your Zap, and if all looks good, turn it on and relax as your new form submissions automatically get sent to your email platform every time without lifting a finger.

To add more action steps, repeat steps three and four, and test when you've finished.

Use automation for easier contact creation

Sending emails at the right time to your audience is already a lot of work. With Zaps sending your new contacts to the right platforms quickly and painlessly, you can spend more time writing your next perfect email, and not worrying about whether it's going out to the right people.

Related reading

• How to schedule an email in Gmail

• 4 ways to automate your email marketing for better communication

• How to keep your email list updated and relevant

• Yes, you can tame your email with automation. Here's how.