Hello and welcome to the first video of the beginner course for n8n. In this course, we will be covering all of the basics that you need to know to get started with n8n.

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 a French training company.

I've been working with n8n 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 data-driven decisions. When we take decisions based on feeling or intuition, it is subject to interpretation, it is subjective.

This makes it difficult to 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 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 it. 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 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 8:00 a.

m., once a month at 4:00 p.m., or it can be linked to applications that we can trigger workflow when we receive a web 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 n8n node.

Um here, the n8n form trigger. This allows you to trigger a workflow when a form is submitted using the native n8n 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.

In n8n, 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 Dropbox, 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. or when this happens or when launched manually.

Then we're going to be either sorting, filtering, formatting, transforming, or segmenting the data. Um, so this could be if this then that, only if this then that or change this to that.

This is when we're going to be able to look at all of the filters that we created earlier or make modifications to the data to then send to the actions, which are going to be usually the last parts of your workflow, either updating, for example, a Google Sheet, sending an email, or notifying a person, let's say through a Slack message.

I'd like to quickly cover some automation best practices.

Before starting any automation, you need to make sure that you are mapping it out. So when someone is going to come to you and ask, "I would like to automate this task," or if you have an idea, "I would like to automate this task," the first step that you're going to want to do is map it out correctly.

Mapping out a process before building it is going to ensure that you have visibility on one, do you have an understanding of the task of the predictable set of actions that the task represents?

Two, it's going to give you more visibility on the different tools, apps, or actions that are going to be used.

Three, it's going to give you more visibility on the feasibility. Um, nothing is worse than spending half an hour, an hour, or two hours building an automation to then realize at the end that it actually isn't possible.

Mapping out the workflow is also going to help you estimate the workload.

How long is it going to take me to automate this task? And finally, sometimes mapping out the workflow is going to show you where you might need some human intervention.

If the task you want to automate cannot be mapped out into a predetermined set of actions, then you might need some human intervention in that workflow.

Um, in the advanced course, we'll cover how you can use AI to sometimes relieve the need for human intervention.

So how do you map an automation? The first thing you want to do is create a flowchart, and there are many different ways you can create this flowchart.

You can use Miro, FigJam, or any other tool. And when you want to do is you want to list every different part of the process as an individual block.

Then, working left to right, you're going to want to link these different blocks with arrows depending on how they interact. So if we take the example from earlier.

We start the workflow with a form submission, so we're going to create a first block, call it form submission. Then the next step in the automation is we need to filter depending on which kind of company.

So here we create a block, what kind of company, and from that block we create all of these different arrows depending on what kind of company and what the different options are.

Then we're going to link this question to the final actions, so adding an email to a sequence or adding the data to a Google sheet or sending the information to an account manager.

These maps can be a lot more complicated than the given example.

And especially for those much more complicated examples, it is very much worth taking the time to map it out. If while mapping it out you realize that something is unclear, then this is something that you need to make sure that you understand before starting building the workflow because again it would be a shame to get to the end and realize that it actually isn't feasible.

This was the first video for the n8n beginner course.

In the next video, we will be covering web hooks and APIs, two very important notions that you need to understand before building your first n8n workflows.

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

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