What can you automate with n8n? 10 workflow ideas

As your digital operations become more complex, automation can help you to manage mundane or repetitive tasks more efficiently. n8n is an automation platform that allows you to design workflows to perform predefined tasks with multiple apps. This can free up your time and allow you to be more productive.

The first challenge you’ll likely face with automation is: where to start? With virtually endless possibilities, identifying the most impactful use case will help you get the most value from n8n.

In this article, we’ll explore 10 automation ideas, providing insights into how n8n can help you automate common tasks and optimize your daily workload.

10 n8n automation ideas to improve efficiency

1. Social media management

Managing your social media activity takes time and effort. Automation can help with posting, tracking engagement, and responding to messages, enabling you to focus your time on the tasks that actually require your input. Here are some ideas to help improve your social media processes.

• Automated content posting. Instead of manually posting content across multiple platforms, a n8n workflow could pull content from a Google Sheet or a content management system (CMS), format it for each platform, and publish it automatically. This can be set up with direct API connections to social media platforms.
• Engagement tracking. A company running ads on Facebook can use automation to fetch likes, shares, and comments at scheduled intervals. This data could be stored in a Google Sheet or Notion database, or sent via email for easy review.
• Automated message responses. A local store can set up a workflow using a Facebook Messenger bot to reply to common questions like store hours, return policies, or order tracking. For more complex inquiries, it could flag messages and forward them to a team member.

Here’s a simple workflow example for posting scheduled content to Facebook:

2. Data synchronization

Keeping multiple data sources updated manually can be very time-consuming. Automating data synchronization ensures your data remains up to date across all of your records and in the apps that use it. Some real-life implementations of this could be:

• Your finance team records transactions in Google Sheets but also needs them reflected in their accounting software. You can set up a workflow to detect new entries in Google Sheets, extract relevant details, and send them to your accounting software’s database.
• Your company is using Salesforce for sales tracking and an internal database for contact information, and you need customer details to sync automatically. You can configure a workflow to monitor Salesforce for new or updated contacts or leads and synchronize them with your database.
• A sales team uses Google Sheets to record data about sales, but the data team uses SQL to build reports and get insights into how your sales are trending. You could build an automation to connect the two, synchronizing inputted data from Google Sheets into a SQL database for your data team to process.

Here is an example workflow for synchronizing Google Sheets with MySQL:

3. Customer relationship management (CRM)

A well-organized CRM helps you track leads, manage interactions with customers, and speed up follow-ups. Automating CRMs can help your team keep customer records up to date while avoiding manual data management. Here are some ideas for optimizing your CRM.

• Automatic client demos. When a potential client books a demo, this triggers the creation of a new contact, assigns that contact to a user, and schedules a follow-up reminder. Optionally, it could also set up a meeting with the potential client.
• Tracking customer interactions. Whenever a customer submits a support ticket, a notification is sent to the next support agent in a rotation, and the customer’s CRM profile is updated at the same time. This ensures that all support agents have access to the latest data available should the ticket be passed on.
• Subscription or membership tracking. Instead of manually tracking renewal dates, an automation can track them for you. If a customer fails a payment or a subscription renewal is due, the workflow can update their status, send a reminder, and notify the relevant users in your organization.

Here is an example workflow for tracking subscription renewal dates and reminders:

4. Ecommerce workflows

Running an online store often involves repetitive tasks like processing orders, sending invoices, and handling customer notifications. Automating these processes can help keep your operations running smoothly. For example:

• Automated invoices. When a new order is placed, this can trigger a workflow to extract the order details, generate an invoice, and email it to the customer, eliminating the need to do this manually.
• Loyalty program. Apply loyalty rewards automatically for your most loyal customers. For example, if an order meets a set value, the workflow can generate a discount code and send it out to the customer via SMS, encouraging repeat purchases.
• Inventory management. Automation can also be useful when managing inventory. When you run low on a certain product, a workflow can send a request to your supplier and temporarily mark the item as out of stock on your website.

Here is a simple n8n workflow example that tracks inventory from a Google Sheet and automatically sends emails to suppliers if it is below a set amount:

5. Project management

If you’re managing multiple complex projects at the same time, the chances of making an administrative mistake are higher – but some of these routine admin tasks can be automated. Here are some suggestions:

• Task creation. When a client submits a request, the workflow can pick it up, format it, create a task in your project management dashboard, assign it to the right team, and notify relevant stakeholders.
• Deadline management. To ensure deadlines are met, an automation can monitor your tasks for upcoming due dates and trigger reminders to you and your team members.
• Approval notifications. If a change to a task, a document, or source code is approved, a workflow can update the status in your tracker, send notifications to relevant users, and move the task to the next phase.

Here’s an example of a simple workflow to create tasks based on Typeform submissions automatically:

6. Replying to repetitive emails

Depending on the nature of your business, you may receive many similar customer inquiries and product information requests daily. Automating replies to these emails can allow you to reply to customers promptly and free up staff for more involved requests. Below are some ways you can set up automated email replies.

• Respond to support email. Most customer support emails fall under two categories:
  • The first is common issues, where you can set up a workflow to look for keywords and direct the user to help articles from a knowledge base.
  • The second is unclear requests, where there isn’t enough information to work with. Your workflow can review the email, check if the required information is present, and respond to the client to ask for more detailed information.

For any issue that does not fall under either of these categories, your n8n workflow can identify that it requires human review, send an acknowledgment to the user, and notify your support team.

• Managing data requests. A user may request data from you, such as an invoice copy, an order copy, or an instruction manual. A workflow can identify the requested data, procure it in the appropriate system, and send an answer with the requested data.

Here is an example workflow that checks incoming emails for predetermined keywords and provides automatic responses if found:

7. Adding Google Calendar events

Managing calendars can be a tedious chore, especially for larger teams. Luckily, you can make use of automation to increase the efficiency of your team’s calendar software. Here are some options:

• Support ticket deadlines. To help your support team ensure tickets get resolved on time, a workflow can create follow-up calendar events based on ticket resolution deadlines. This can then notify a specific support team member when a ticket is nearing its due date. This helps with upholding deadlines, prioritizing tickets, and generating an overview of outstanding requests.
• Scheduling meetings. You can configure a workflow to schedule meetings based on a project’s progress. For example, you could set up a trigger connected to Jira that will book meetings in a calendar when predetermined milestones, such as changing an issue’s status, are reached.

  You can also book meetings based on events. Let’s say you release frequent updates to a digital product – you could set up a workflow to monitor your release pipelines, then schedule meetings for reviews and retrospectives, and set up timelines for the next update.

Here’s a very easy automation example for booking reminders to track ticket deadlines:

8. Event registration

Managing registrations manually for a large event can be a hassle. It’s easy to miss sign-ups or lose track of follow-ups, but automating the process makes things simpler. Attendees can get instant confirmations, timely reminders, and follow-up emails without organizers having to do everything by hand. Here are some options to help with event registration:

• Registration processing. When a user registers for a live event by filling out an online form, this can trigger an automation to extract their details, add them to a Google Sheet or CRM, generate a unique ticket number, and send a confirmation email with the relevant details.
• Attendance reminders. Reminders are important to build up hype for your event and ensure prospective attendees are aware of the date. You can automate reminders by using a Google Sheet to track events and event dates, linking it up with another sheet that has registered user details, and sending personalized reminders at a scheduled time.
• Feedback collection. After the event, you can use the same data sources to build a workflow for sending follow-up emails to attendees. This could be a thank-you email with a feedback form, and it could include certificates of participation.

Here’s how you could configure a registration processing workflow:

9. Employee recruitment

Recruitment involves a lot of time-consuming tasks, from sorting through resumes to confirming interview invitations. Automating some of these processes lessens the chances of missing a follow-up. Here are some options:

• Job applicant filtering. When a candidate fills out an online job application, automation can extract key details, filter applicants based on selected keywords for the position, and store relevant profiles in a database, optionally categorizing candidates based on how well they fit the job posting.
• Automated interview scheduling. Once you find a candidate you are happy with and want to schedule an interview, you can automate this process by setting up a workflow that sends an email with an interview scheduling link, such as Calendly, generates a Zoom meeting invitation with the required attendees, and monitors for confirmation from all parties.
• Post-interview processes. The closing of an interview process could trigger the sending of a questionnaire to your candidate to collect feedback about the recruitment process. You can then sort and compile responses to specific answers and forward them to appropriate members of your HR team for review.

  For a successful applicant, an onboarding workflow could automatically compile and send out an offer letter and an employment contract, and monitor for a response. For a confirmed hire it can then automate ticket creation for access to company IT systems.

This is how you could set up a basic new-joiner onboarding workflow:

10. Creating a database backup

Regular database backups are one of the most common and crucial tasks for an IT team to handle. It is important to have a failsafe in case of a critical failure and to ensure you stay compliant with any regulatory requirements that affect your industry. Manual backups can be both time-consuming and error-prone, though, so automating the backup process can help with these issues. Below are some ways you can improve your database backup process.

• Automated backup scheduling. If you are self-hosting a database on your own infrastructure, you can set up a workflow to export the database at set intervals. The backup file can then be compressed and uploaded to your preferred storage solution.
• Google Sheets backups. Some companies use Google Sheets to store data. In that case, a workflow can be set up to periodically export the latest data as a .csv file and securely transfer it to a designated folder on an offsite server.
• Successful backup notifications. Alerts can be configured in n8n so that after every successful backup, a notification or email is sent to the relevant users, letting them know that it was successful. If a backup fails, it can trigger an alert with any relevant error output so that your IT team can act fast to resolve the issue.

Here’s a quick way to set up automatic database backups for a self-hosted MySQL instance, uploading them to Google Drive:

Best practices for n8n automation

Adhering to best practices helps prevent failures, reduces complexity, and improves the scalability of your automation platform.

• Keep workflows small. Automations that try to do too much in a single workflow become harder to troubleshoot and control. Splitting complex processes into smaller workflows makes debugging and maintenance easier, and prevents failures from affecting unrelated tasks. A general suggestion is to have one workflow for each use case.
• Implement error handling and retries. Add retry logic and error-handling nodes to ensure that a temporary blip doesn’t break the entire automation. This is especially important for workflows relying on external services that you have no control over.
• Secure sensitive data. You can use n8n’s built-in credential manager or environment variables to protect sensitive information, such as passwords or internal resource names.
• Don’t run it more than necessary. Running a workflow too often can slow down your systems. Where possible, configure your event-based triggers to ensure your automations run only when necessary. If repeated checks are necessary for your use case, use the lowest frequency possible.
• Monitor your workflows. Automations in n8n can be prone to bugs and issues that you might not have foreseen when creating them. Don’t just “set it and forget it.” Periodically check execution logs and performance trends to identify potential problems.
• Use pre-built, battle-tested workflows. Sometimes you don’t need to solve a problem that’s already been solved by the community. The n8n workflow repository has plenty of available pre-built templates to choose from that may fit your use case.

Check out some of our curated n8n template suggestions for various use cases that you can easily import, modify, and use.

Following the above recommendations will allow you can create a reliable, scalable, and efficient automation ecosystem that makes your processes more efficient and less error-prone.

Conclusion

Automation helps save time by handling repetitive tasks so you can focus on more important things. Whether it’s posting on social media, organizing data, managing emails, or tracking projects, n8n makes it easy to set up workflows to do tedious or repetitive work for you.

The best way to start is to automate one small task. With practice, you’ll be able to expand and improve your workflows to make them even more useful. If you’re struggling, you can always refer to existing examples for help.

Keep in mind that the more menial tasks you automate, the more time you’ll have for skilled tasks that require human attention and interaction.

What can you automate with n8n FAQ