Calendly Tutorial: Book Yourself Solid on Autopilot

if you want to use calendly to automate your booking and appointments on your website I'm going to show you how starting right now if you want to transform your website into a customer or lead generation machine I'll show you all my best tips tactics and secrets to get their best let's dive in hey guys I'm West McDowell web strategist at the deep end and if you're not subscribed to our channel yet you're definitely going to want to click the subscribe button and the little bell icon next to it so you never miss another video like this you need to succeed online if your business uses appointments or bookings or consultations as part of your sales funnel you're definitely going to want an easy way to automate that process using your website now in the past this one to several ways one of which people will just fill out an online form giving you their information you'd call them they may not pick up because there was no scheduled time for it or you go back and forth over email trying to determine what's a good time for you I don't know what's a good time for you and then if there is any kind of a time difference thrown in there it makes things even more difficult but now online scheduler is like calendly make it super easy because it allows you to specify what times you're available then people just simply pick a time that works for them from those times and I love calendly for this purpose and I should say I'm in no way affiliated with them I just happen to use it on my own site because I like how streamlined it is how it integrates with my Google Calendar and just how nice it looks on my site so today I'm going to show you how to set it up how to embed it on your website as well as a few pro tips to really increase those show-up rates for people that schedule the appointments so let's get started and head on over to the computer ok so here we are on Kalin Lee's home screen so basically the first thing you're obviously going to do is just click this button to go ahead and sign up and that's a pretty easy process I'm not going to show you how to do that and you have heard of saving time but I will see you on the next screen where we will be logged in okay so once you're logged in and you have verified your email address it's just gonna ask you to set your link this is where you would send people to in an email link or an email signature but in most case actually recommend you just embed this right on your site which I am gonna show you how to do a little later in the video so just give this an easy name you can remember and the next it's gonna ask you to set your time zone it's already going to detect it I'm here in Chicago so it's already set to that so just click Next okay now here is where you are going to connect your calendly to your online calendar and this helps you in two ways the first way is it actually checks against your calendar to make sure that it's not booking any appointments when you're already busy and the second way it helps is when someone does book an appointment using calendly it automatically puts that on your online calendar so it's super automated and that's one of the things I like most about it so let's go ahead they basically support Google Calendar Outlook iCloud calendar a few others I is Gmail so I'm going to go ahead and use that and connect it there and it's basically going to then access your Google account so it you're basically giving it permission to access your calendars to be able to put stuff on there and to read it so just click allow all right now it's connected and you're ready to go so now and the first thing you're going to want to do is set up an event so with the free account you're allowed one event with paid account you're allowed unlimited events it really just depends on if you have a need for more than one thing it may be you have consultations and then maybe you have a kickoff meeting or something like that so if you just have one event type free will be fine so make sure you're on the event types tab at the top and the first thing you're gonna want to do is just click new event type now it's gonna ask you one on one or a group so one on one just means you with one one customer a client group means you and multiple clients at a time they say it's good for you know webinars or classes workshops that kind of thing I do believe group option is only a pro feature though so let's go ahead and click one on one and you're just gonna want to give it a name that's the first thing you're gonna do so I might call it web strategy consultation for my business so just give it a descriptive name for you and location and I would imagine in most cases for most of you this is going to be either a phone meeting or possibly Skype meeting so just go ahead and clarify that here so I just said Wes will call you so they know it's a phone meeting and they don't have to call me I'll be calling them and you've got a choice here whether you want that to display while the while the customer is booking it or if you just want that to display after they've already booked it I'm just gonna keep it on display location while booking and for description just give it a few more details so they know exactly what they are signing up for so something as simple as that will work just fine and then it's gonna have you set the link for this so basically you're just you can set the exact URL for that I'm just gonna keep it as is you probably don't want it to be too long or people will get confused when they type it in so make it something simple short and descriptive so for event color you know this really makes more of a difference if you have multiple events and you want to color code them to maybe group that like ones together otherwise I would just go ahead and pick one that will look complementary to the the colors on your site so for me let's just go ahead and pick this blue color and then click on next okay so now here's where you're gonna set all of the different options for your event so the first thing you want to do is decide on how long you want it to be they've got some options here or you can make it any kind of a custom length you want to but I'm just gonna say for my website consultations it's usually about 15 minutes that's usually enough time to make sure if we have a good fit and to answer any questions that come up during that so and then this one is really important date range so basically what it's asking you is how far out and what days do you want people to be able to schedule this for so you've got several options it can be over a period of rolling days meaning you know if it's 60 rolling days that 60 days starting from today whenever today is and then tomorrow it'll be 60 days out from there so you can choose that or over a date range you know specifically the month of September or September 20th through 27th or indefinitely that just means they can schedule any time they want so let's go ahead over a period of rolling days and what I like to do is I like to limit this and I'll tell you why because when most people schedule an appointment for too far out let's say they scheduled a meeting with me for three weeks from today what I find can happen a lot is in those three weeks their focus shifts to something else they're excited to schedule this appointment today but three weeks from now they're a little less excited it's a little less important to them in three weeks so what I like to do is limit this to a maximum of ten days so you can't schedule it for more than ten days out it just won't let you do it and this is going to depend on you and your type of business and what you find to be the case for your clients but anyway choose what works for you and click apply and time zone so it's automatically going to detect your time zone and the cool thing about this is when people schedule something on your calendar they will always see it as their own time zone so that you get rid of that confusion of is that 10:00 a.m. your time or my time it's always going to be pinpointed to where the person is so that's great and now you're going to set your availability so basically what days and times do you want to be available to to field these calls and schedule these meetings and that really depends on how big your team is right you know if you have a sales team that's their job just to take these calls and make these calls all day it gives people all the options they need in order to make them but let's say you are a smaller business or even a one-person operation you're definitely going to want to block off certain times that work best for you because what I've found at least for me is productivity can really suffer if you're having to make a phone call it random times throughout the day what I would definitely prefer is to come up with a few time blocks either once a day or maybe even every other day that I've set aside just for these phone calls so let's go ahead and see this in action so let's go ahead and click on Monday it's it pre-populates with 9:00 to 5:00 but let's say I only want to go from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. so that's gonna say I'm only available at 9:00 a.m. 9:15 9:30 because remember we added them in 15-minute increments all the way till 11:00 but you also can add a new interval so let's say you wanted to go from 9:00 to 11:00 and then you wanted to have another time block in the afternoon so you can absolutely do that you could do 2:30 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. and then you can say apply to this specific Monday only or apply to all Monday's or apply to multiple and you could say Mondays Tuesdays and Wednesdays or Mondays Wednesdays and Fridays let's say so let's do that I'm happy with that so let's click apply and then for Tuesdays and Thursdays let's say you want those off just click I'm unavailable and then Tuesdays and Thursdays so you've got these time blocks on Monday Wednesday Friday and you're unavailable Tuesdays and Thursdays but now I'm going to show you another pro tip something I've learned so go up to advanced and since we said 15-minute increments I'm going to go ahead and choose that here and then you can choose an event max per day so maybe you know that if you have four meetings a day that's gonna kind of wipe you out there may be a different reason for it but you can click you can check that if you want to minimum scheduling notice I like this one it prevents people from scheduling an event at the last minute so what I always like is always 24 hours notice for any of these meetings and that's of course up to you another thing that I have definitely discovered that's important our Event buffers because what happens is sometimes if I have a couple of those 15 minute meetings back-to-back and one of them goes long I find myself having to jump off that call before we've accomplished anything so you definitely don't want that to happen I like to have 15-minute meetings with the option of going longer if I need to so what I would rather do is have a 15-minute buffer you know before and after all of those meetings so go ahead and choose that if it makes sense for you I definitely recommend that and then it's gonna ask you if you want it to be a secret event what this means is it wouldn't be displayed on your main calendly page so if you had an event that was kind of more invite-only like for me we'll have a kickoff meeting but that only happens after you've become a client so I wouldn't want people just to schedule a kickoff meeting before we've had the consultation and they've paid their deposit and all that stuff so but for this for just a consultation I'm going to click no we don't want that hidden okay so next we've got a few more options so invite T questions so once I'm gonna schedule an event it's going to ask a certain number of questions some of them are just completely utilitarian like their name email address possibly phone number and there are a few additional questions you might want to put as well for several reasons the first reason would be to prequalify prospects so you're not you know wasting time calling people who aren't really qualified to work with you or aren't going to be a good fit for you and the other type of question you might want to ask involves getting prepared for the meeting you might have a few questions so you can do some research ahead of time so let's take a look at what I mean here let's go ahead and click the add a new question button and you are allowed up to four questions so use them carefully and here's another pro tip don't ask more questions than you need to unless a question is going to give you information you need to prepare or to prequalify or to actually get in touch with them any additional questions are just going to get in the way of people actually scheduling these things so only ask the bare minimum that gives you the information you need in order to make the appointment so let's talk about a pre-qualification question this is one that I like to ask pretty simple what's your budget because I want to make sure that if I'm taking the time for my schedule to call a new prospect they can afford the services that we provide so and I'm going to make this required and now you can just decide on the answer type so one line would be a short fill in themselves question multiple lines is kind of reform answer radio buttons would be a think of multiple choice where you can click one of the choices or checkboxes they can select multiple of the choices so I'm gonna go ahead and click radio buttons so that I can fill in pre-populated choices they can choose from so now I've come up with four different answers that they can choose between and the reason I started right here at two to five thousand is because anything below two thousand is going to qualify someone out of being a good fit of working with the deep end so what I don't want to do is even offer less than that as an option because a certain percentage of people would click that lesser option and I would rather not have to follow up with those people and cancel the meeting I would rather them qualify themselves out by seeing these options seeing none of them aligns with their budget and then they don't even schedule the appointment which saves time for everybody so then it also gives you an option to include other so if you wanted to do that and they could write in their own answer that would be fine we're not going to do that here I'm gonna click apply and then add a new question and this one's going to be more for the purposes of preparation so I might ask what's your current website address and I'm also going to make that required this way I can go ahead and check their website out before our call so I'm better prepared with things to talk about and a one-line answer is perfect for that question I'm going to click apply and I'm also gonna ask for their phone number and required one lines fine apply and then I'm going to actually move that right up here so it's in a different order and I'm pretty happy with this so I'm just gonna go ahead and click Save and close all right next we're going to go to the notifications and cancellation policy so basically what this does is when someone schedules the appointment with you they get a calendar invitation so it's automatically added to their calendar as well as yours and you can click this to personalize that message if you'd like to and you also have the option of remind of sending reminders as well text reminders I do believe while that's a cool feature I do think that's a paid feature so we're gonna go ahead and skip that for now but if you do get a profusion I think you can use that so basically that would send them a text message at a certain specified time before the meeting like say 24 hours or an hour before or you can do email reminders which I do believe is a free feature so let's go ahead and turn that on and I would click personalize and you can change these things if you want to I might recommend that you make it a little more personal I'm not going to go into that but basically what you can do what I would definitely do is send a reminder out 24 hours before and then I'm going to add another one for one hour before now what this is gonna do is it's really going to increase the probability that the people who scheduled the consultation are actually going to remember the appointment time and they're actually gonna pick up the phone when you call they're going down cancellation policy you can add that if you want to generally for free consultations it's not that big a deal so I'm just gonna click Save and close ok next is the confirmation page so this is going to be the page once someone has set up an appointment with you it's going to open it up and say congratulations you're confirmed for this appointment on this date so there's only a few things to do here so basically the first thing would be display that calamy confirmation page that i just described the other thing could be redirect to an external site so that might be a certain page on your website or if you have a youtube channel it might redirect to there or your facebook group or anything like that anywhere you would like people to go next once they've already taken the desired action might be a really great thing to do one pro tip I would have for you here is maybe you have a page on your site with this with a really short video on it that basically welcomes them to your process and says congratulations you've made a great choice by scheduling this appointment here's what you need to know to get ready for it and a page like this is really going to help you retain a lot more of these appointments because what can happen is someone can make the appointment and again like we were talking about earlier they can kind of get distracted over the next few days and they might forget why they really this appointment to begin with so to include that video or it could even be written text but I would recommend a video if you can do that it's just gonna keep that excitement level up a little bit and it's gonna really keep them interested in keeping that appointment a little bit more than if they never saw it so just a little pro tip for you if you want to make that video and then go ahead and click Save and close and there is an extra option here to collect payments we're not gonna go over that that's more if you're charging for appointments let's say you're an online therapist or acting coach of some kind and you're you're actually charging for these appointments but we're not gonna get into that here I mean make a future video about that next I'm gonna show you how to embed this on your WordPress site so it's all on your site and then we can finally see it in action from what the customer sees so we're just gonna scroll all the way up and we're gonna go back to event types and then find the one we just set up click the little gear icon and go down to embed and it's going to give you an embed code so there's a few choices here there we have inline which would just be basically displayed on a page as is a or a pop-up widget which of course you someone would click a button and it would pop up covering the screen but for now I'm just gonna we're just gonna do inline so here they've supplied the embed code just super easy just click copy code and it's copied to your clipboard now we just have to go to the WordPress site we want to embed this on and we're ready to go okay so here we are on my wordpress dashboard for the deep-end site so you're just going to go over to pages add new and just gonna give the page a title and then the way you make the embed work is just gonna go down to the text editor and just click away from the visual editor you want to actual HTML which sounds scary but we're just gonna copy and paste it remember from before so just paste it right there and then we're gonna go ahead and click preview to see what we've got and there we go it's all set to go so basically what we're looking at is exactly what the customer is going to see it shows the the event type and the first step is choose a day so it only allows days that are pre specified so let's go ahead and just choose that Monday and again it's only the times that were specified as well so let's click 1080 confirm we have to fill in all this information and then here's the confirmation page that we talked about and that's all there is to it one thing I should say here if you'd rather have a more clean look and remove this calendly branding you can but that is a pro feature so what we've kind of gone through today was the free version so the pro version has a few features you'll have to pay extra for like removing the branding the ability to schedule a consultation or an appointment with one of many team members like let's say you've got a sales team and so those appointments can go to one of several people that's a pro feature as well as the ability to send text reminders amongst a few other things but I think the free version is gonna be fine for about 95% of you so that was a lot to cover but now I want to hear from you I want to know how you're planning on using Cal only on your site what are you planning on using it for I want to know so leave it in the comments below along with any other questions or comments you may have and I'll get to all of them and if you're not subscribed to the channel yet go ahead and click the little circle logo icon right over here to subscribe and if you have not accessed my free mini-course how to guarantee website ROI just click the box right up over this way and you'll get free instant access to that all right guys I'm Wes McDonald for the deep end and I'll see you in our next video

Channel: Wes McDowell

Views: 46,621

Keywords: calendly tutorial, calendly tutorial 2018, calendly tutorial for appointments, calendly, tutorial, calendly demo, calendly how to, calendly how to use, calendly wordpress, how to embed calendly in wordpress, how to set up calendly, how to use calendly, appointment scheduling, booking, calendar, digital marketer, digital marketing, internet marketing, marketing, marketing strategy, scheduling, small business coaching, social media marketing, Christie Bilbrey, Jamie Good

Id: ZpmhujFxQa8

Length: 21min 16sec (1276 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 13 2018