Leen Penders, CMO of Dropsolid, shares the low-code workflows that power up internal processes.
Leen Penders is the CMO of Dropsolid, a digital agency in Belgium. Over the years, Dropsolid has evolved into an open digital experience platform, built on top of open-source solutions:
- Drupal as a digital experience platform and CMS.
- Mautic as a solution for marketing automation.
- Apache Unomi as a customer data platform.
Open source is at the core of Dropsolid, it's in our DNA.
Dropsolid's clients (including government, non-profits, and manufacturing & services companies) are also adept at open source and appreciate the ownership, flexibility, and freedom that come with it. Dropsolid was looking for a workflow automation tool that shared their values of community collaboration and code transparency––and found n8n.
Leen shared with us why the Dropsolid team chose n8n, how they use n8n to automate internal and client processes, and what low-code workflows power up their business.
The use case
Dropsolid needed an automated, efficient way to integrate data from different sources, across platforms. For a start, they had two specific use cases:
1. Integrating and syncing data from their CRM into their marketing automation solution, so that they have the right data for personalized email marketing campaigns.
2. Bringing marketing automation campaign results into Google DataStudio for creating analytics dashboards.
Another foreseeable use case is bringing all kinds of data into the customer data platform, to create a centralized data hub.
The challenge
When thinking about the implementation of their use cases, the Dropsolid team encountered two main challenges: integrating data from different sources and managing integrations for the various apps and services they use. If not automated to some extent, these tasks involve a lot of work to set up and maintain, are error-prone and not scalable.
The ideal solution for the team was a low-code workflow automation tool that was powerful enough to automate their processes, but also accessible enough to allow both technical and non-technical team members to design and build those processes.
If you're not using such a workflow automation tool, you're losing time and money building and maintaining all those integrations. It doesn't pay off.
The team had tried out Zapier, but the workflow limitations and high costs pushed them to look for an alternative, and ideally a source-available one.
The low-code solution
n8n proved to be the solution Dropsolid was looking for, as it provided the needed core nodes for workflow logic, hundreds of popular app and service nodes, as well as the option of building custom integrations.
The team leveraged the capabilities of n8n and automated their use cases with low-code workflows. One of them is used to create/update Google DataStudio dashboards. This workflow writes data from a Mautic report into a Google sheet, which makes it accessible to consume as a data source by Google DataStudio. The dashboard is also scheduled to be automatically updated once per day.
I really believe in a tool like n8n.
The results
n8n quickly became a popular, even indispensable tool within the Dropsolid team.
The technical people in our team are big fans of n8n, it makes their work easier and offers a lot of flexibility. But also less technical people manage to use it.
Overall, the n8n workflows made it possible to connect different apps in the Dropsolid's team and sync their data, thus solving their initial challenges. More specifically, these automation translated into:
- Increased productivity, by automating away tedious tasks and reducing human errors.
- More collaboration across teams, by making it possible for anyone to learn to build and tweak workflows.
- Lower costs, since n8n is the most cost-effective workflow automation tool on the market at the moment.
- Clear conscience, by adding an open, fair-code tool to the other open-source solutions used by the company.
Looking to discover the power of low-code automation for your business? n8n is source-available, free to use, and with the ability to host it yourself or run it the cloud, you can test it out for your automation needs with no risk.
