Common mistakes, and how to fix them

Every automation you build, in this course or after it, tends to hit the same handful of snags the first time. None of them are complicated once you know what to look for. This lesson is the list, so you spot the cause in seconds instead of losing an afternoon to it.

“It didn’t send anything”

The most common cause by far: the Zap is still switched off. Go back and check the toggle from lesson six, it is easy to test every step individually, feel like you are done, and forget the one flip that actually makes it live. The second most common cause is a field mapped to the wrong place, check Zap History (from the last lesson) and look at exactly what data arrived at each step, it will usually be obvious from there.

“The email went to spam”

This is almost always about trust, not content. An email sending from a generic, unfamiliar address looks automated to the recipient’s inbox provider and gets filtered accordingly. Sending from a real connected inbox, your actual Gmail rather than a generic “Email by Zapier” address, fixes most of this on its own, because it is a real address that can build a sending reputation over time. If it keeps happening, check your reply is not stuffed with the kind of words spam filters flag (FREE, ACT NOW, excessive exclamation marks), and keep the tone as plain as the example in lesson four.

“The follow-up list has junk in it”

This means the filter is not catching what you intended. Go back into the filter step and read your condition out loud, exactly as written. A common trip-up is choosing “Contains” versus “Exactly matches”, if your dropdown option is literally “Get a quote” but your filter checks for “quote” in lowercase, most tools are not case-sensitive so that is usually fine, but double check the field it is reading from is the one you think it is, not a similarly named one.

“It’s using up all my free tasks”

Zapier’s free plan gives you a limited number of tasks a month, each step in a run counts as one. A single enquiry going through trigger, email, filter, and sheet uses several tasks in one go. If you are testing repeatedly, which you should be, you will burn through some of that allowance on purpose. It is not something to panic about while building, but once this is genuinely live, keep an eye on your usage in Zapier’s dashboard so a busy month does not quietly hit the ceiling and stop the automation dead without you noticing.

“It worked in testing, then stopped a week later”

The most likely cause is a disconnected account, an app you connected asked you to re-confirm access (Google periodically does this for security) and the automation has been quietly failing ever since. Zapier normally emails you when a Zap fails repeatedly, so if that email arrives, do not ignore it, click through and reconnect the account it flags.

The habit that prevents most of this

Check Zap History every so often, especially in the first couple of weeks after switching something on. It takes thirty seconds and tells you plainly whether every run succeeded or where one went wrong. An automation you never look at is not more automated, it is just a mistake you have not found yet. Next, the last lesson: what to build once this one is bedded in.