n8n Beginner Course (1/9) - Introduction to Automation

hello and welcome to the first video of the beginner course for Anan in this course we will be covering all of the basics that you need to know to get started with anidan in this video we'll be covering an introduction to automation my name is Maxim and I'm a marketing and data content creator as well as instructor for l a French training company I've been working with inen for over four years now built over 100 workflows and trained 500 students at improving their marketing and data automation today we're going to be talking about an introduction to automation why do we need automation what is it what are the Core Concepts what is a workflow as well as some best practices to help you get started first of all why do we need automation the whole reason we need automation is to make datadriven decisions when we take decisions based on feeling or intuition it is subject to interpretation it is subjective this makes it difficult to estimate estimate and justify the return on investment and often incurs wasted resources whether they be budgetary or time related however when we take a data driven approach this makes it much more logic driven and objective it'll improve your Capac capacity to report and increase your visibility on Roi as well as requiring fewer resources human resources budgetary and in terms of time automation is the key to being data driven when tasks are executed manually we have a lot of wasted time we have human error from repeated low value tasks as well as High human resource requirements this leads to low employee happiness and retention no one is happy to be doing low value tasks for example copying data from one spreadsheet to another however when we start to integrate automation we gain much more predictability and data availability increased employee efficiency because each employee can now Focus their efforts on much higher value tasks this leads to higher Roi and lower needs for human resources so what is automation let's start with the definition automation is a predictable set of predetermined actions that transfers data from one point to another so this is a very wordy definition instead of breaking it down like this I would like to show you an example here we can see an example of a workflow so we have a form submission when the form is submitted we check what kind of company is submitting the form if we cannot find a company we ignore if it's a low value company we can add the person submitting the form to an email sequence if it's a high value company we can add the information to a Google sheet and if it's an ideal customer then we can give this information to an account manager ASAP so as you can see here we have a predictable set of predetermined actions depending on which kind of company is submitting the form we have a very predictable set of actions that need to be executed and we have a data transfer from one point to another the starting point being the form submission and depending on what kind of company is submitting the the form we're going to be transferring the data to either an email tool a Google Sheets or for example slack to notify the account manager as you can imagine if we do not have a predictable set of predetermined actions and depending on the kind of company we weren't able to say if it's this kind of company we do this if it's that kind of company we do that then we wouldn't be able to create an automation because we would have to have some kind of human intervention again if we do not have any data transfer then we're not really automating anything um so the data transfer explains itself I'd like to cover some Core Concepts of automation that are important to understand before building your first workflows the first thing I'd like to talk about is a trigger a trigger is what starts an automation so from the example that we looked at earlier we can see that the trigger was the form of submission when we're going to be drawing out these automations we're going to see that the trigger is not going to have an entry Arrow only an exit Arrow there are many different kinds of triggers a trigger can be manual so executed manually it can be scheduled so every minute every day at 8: a. m. once a month at 400 p.

m. or it can be linked to applications that we can trigger workflow when we receive a Webb hook when a property is updated in the CRM or when for example a form is submitted under the form submission um block you can see an example of an n n node um here the nen form trigger this allows you to trigger a workflow when a form is submitted using the native Inn form trigger then we have filtering filtering is what allows us to allow or block certain types of data from following specific paths based on certain conditions so using the example from earlier here we can see depending on the kind of company whether there is no company a low value company a high value company or if the company is an ideal customer we're going to be sending that company down different paths underneath you can see the fil node in naden the filter node allows you to as its name indicates filter data based on predetermined conditions so here for example we could say if we had no company then we wouldn't continue the workflow because there is nothing to do if we have no company another important thing to understand is actions or apps actions allow you to interact with applications on the web this is what you're going to be using most of the time when building automation we can take a couple of examples so with Google Sheets you might want to update rows create a sheet or get a spreadsheet um if you're using Drpbox you can upload a file get a file create a folder move a file from one folder to another if we're using slack you can send a message get a message get a user get all of the messages from a specific Channel if we're using Salesforce which is a CRM we can get a company get a contact create a lead associate a lead to a company this is going to depend highly on which kinds of apps you're using every app is going to have a different set of actions that you can use for it so what is a workflow we looked at the example earlier with the form submission then the different paths depending on the kind of company and then different actions most workflows are going to follow a similar template they're going to start with a trigger so the trigger is what starts or launches the workflow it could be every day at 8:00 a. m.