Wing Assistant automates newsletter and data sync with Make
Learn how Wing Assistant saved 4 days of work for every email created and 6 hours per month by automating data sync.
Wing Assistant describes itself as a virtual assistant for startups and enterprise teams. Core to their B2B service is a focus on streamlining operations and enhancing productivity. Kazi Hassan, Wing Assistant’s Growth Marketer, explains that this focus is not solely applied to clients. Looking internally, he identified the need to optimize a range of processes to reduce manual work and improve efficiency. And so he turned to Make.
“We've been leveraging Make’s automation and integration services, and it has truly streamlined our workflows at Wing Assistant. Since adopting Make, our processes have become more efficient and we've cut down on manual tasks, leading to improved productivity”. Kazi Hassan, Growth Marketer, Wing Assistant
The challenges
Wing Assistant faced two significant challenges:
1. Time-consuming newsletter creation
The company relies heavily on newsletters as part of its marketing strategy. The process of gathering and curating news stories from a range of sources could take up to four days.
2. Data synchronization across platforms
Wing Assistant used multiple platforms for customer relationship management (CRM), email marketing, and billing, including Pipedrive, Customer.io, and Paddle. The manual process of syncing data between these platforms was labor-intensive and prone to formatting errors.
The solutions
Kazi and his team turned to Make to build automations that would address both challenges.
1. Automating newsletter creation
By using Make, Wing Assistant automated the entire newsletter process, drastically reducing the time spent on gathering and curating news.
Mailbox integration: Make was used to set up a mailbox that collected newsletters from different sources.
Content extraction and analysis: The news links were then fed into ChatGPT via Make, which summarized the articles. The summaries were then automatically populated into an Airtable base, where ChatGPT scored them for relevance.
Final selection and formatting: News items that scored above seven out of 10 were shortlisted, and the top 10 stories were selected for the newsletter. A webhook triggered by Make automatically generated a more detailed summary for each article, which was then used in the newsletter.
This automation reduced the time spent on newsletters from four days down to just a few hours.
2. Streamlining data syncing across platforms
Make also helped automate the process of syncing customer data across Pipedrive, Customer.io, and Wing Assistant’s billing platform.
Customer data sync: Prior to using Make, Wing Assistant exported customer data from Pipedrive manually and uploaded it to Customer.io — a process fraught with formatting challenges. Make simplified this by automating the data transfer, ensuring that only valid email addresses were synced with Customer.io.
Subscription management: Another automation allowed Wing Assistant to handle unsubscribe requests more efficiently. Previously, unsubscribes were handled manually via email, but with Make, a mail hook reads incoming unsubscribe requests, verifies them with ChatGPT, and automatically updates the customer’s status in Customer.io.
The impact
The implementation of Make led to huge increases in team productivity, and significant time savings across multiple facets of Wing Assistant's operations.
Time savings: The newsletter creation process now takes a fraction of the time, allowing the team to send out newsletters more frequently. "We’ve been able to send newsletters more frequently, increasing our sales opportunities by embedding promotional content in each one", says Kazi.
Efficiency and accuracy: The automation of data synchronization eliminated manual errors and reduced the time spent updating customer information across platforms. Kazi shared that before using Make, syncing customer data manually took about two hours and needed to be done two or three times per month. Now, this process is entirely automated.
Why Wing Assistant chose Make
Kazi highlighted several key reasons why Wing Assistant chose Make over competitors like Zapier:
Cost-effective: Make provided more robust functionalities at a significantly lower cost than Zapier.
Flexibility: Make's router and filter systems allowed Kazi and his team to build more complex workflows, expanding their use cases beyond what Zapier could offer.
Ease of use: The HTTP modules and API capabilities of Make were critical for Wing Assistant, allowing them to handle processes such as the synchronization of customer billing information when native APIs from other platforms failed.
Ready to automate your workflows like Wing Assistant? Get started with Make for free.
