In this video, we are going to look at how to use Calendly. Calendly is a scheduling tool that simplifies the process of other people booking appointments, meetings, and events with you from your website, social media, or email signature, eliminating the need for any back-and-forth communication. Let’s take a look. Calendly offers everyone a free solution. This isn’t a trial, but more limited version of their complete offering. The main difference is that it only allows you to create one meeting type, such as a 30-minute one-on-one or a one-hour interview. But if you don’t have complex booking needs, then the free plan should work just fine for you. Today, I am going to be using the Standard Plan, which is the lowest cost paid plan. The Standard Plan allows unlimited meeting types, and you can connect multiple calendars. You get additional support and app integration with this plan as well. During this video, I will call out any feature that I use that is not available in the free tier. There is also a Teams and Enterprise pricing tier for larger businesses, and these plans offer more in-depth analytics tools. When you first sign up for an account, Calendly will ask you some basic questions, including having you select a customized booking link. You can either answer the questions that they ask concerning scheduling and calendar integration, or you can select "Set up later," as I’ll be walking through how to set that all up from the main dashboard. Once you have created an account, it will take you to your homepage. Let’s start with your account settings. Click on your profile in the upper right-hand corner and select "Profile." This is where we will begin customizing your account. You can start with adding a photograph that will appear next to your name when someone is scheduling a meeting. This step is optional, so feel free to skip it. You can also change how your name appears to a user, as well as create a customized welcome message. You can adjust the language settings, as well as the date and time format. Select your country, as well as the appropriate time zone, and make sure to select "Save Changes" before moving on. Next is the branding page. If you have a company or team logo that you would like to have displayed in the top-left corner of your scheduling page, you can upload it here. If you have multiple users in your account, you can also choose to have the branding consistent across all users. Calendly allows you to turn off their branding if you deselect this button. This means that your picture and logo would appear versus the Calendly branding. The My Link button provides you with the opportunity to create a custom URL, as long as it’s not being used by another user. Under Phone Numbers, you can choose to add your phone number or skip this step. The phone number is used if you want text messages to get sent to someone who schedules a meeting with you. This will be part of your scheduling workflow that we’ll discuss in a little bit. The Calendar Sync allows you to connect your personal or work calendars with a Calendly calendar. This way, the system will automatically know when you’re busy, first when someone can schedule a meeting with you. The alternative to connecting an existing calendar is to create your own within the Calendly platform, which we will look at in a few moments. If you do want to connect an existing calendar, select the type of calendar that you want to sync. Enter your login details and follow the prompts. With a standard plan, you can connect up to 6 calendars, and with a free plan, you can connect one. If you have connected more than one calendar, you can edit it to choose which one you would like Calendly to check for conflicts with. Any events labeled "Busy" in the selected calendars will be read as conflicts, and those times will be removed from your scheduling page. You can also select which calendar you would like Calendly events added to. When an invitee chooses an available time to meet with you, the details will be published to your connected calendar, as well as the scheduled events tab on your homepage automatically. Now let’s take a look at the homepage. Go ahead and click "Back to Home." Here you will see the default 30-minute meeting. Let’s go ahead and edit this. Select the settings button and click "Edit." Start by clicking on "Event Details." This is where we will create our first meeting type. Note that if you’re using the free subscription, you’re allowed one meeting type at a time. If you’re using the standard subscription or higher, you can create as many events as you wish. First, title your first event type. I am going to create a free phone consultation for my event. You can also choose to edit the color next to your event name if this helps with your organization. Select the duration of your meeting. And then select from the multiple options for location. If you want to have a virtual meeting, there’s multiple web conferencing and zoom options for you to use. If you click on one of those options, you’ll follow the prompts to connect it to your account. If you choose for an in-person meeting, you can add the address as well as any other pertinent details that would allow someone to locate you. For this meeting type, I am going to select "Phone Call." Here you have two options. You can either have the invitee call you and provide them with your phone number, or require that the invitee provides their phone number when scheduling the meeting, and you can then call the invitee at the scheduled time. Under "Description and Instructions," you can go ahead and write a summary and any details that your invitee should know about the event. Once you’re happy with how your first meeting type looks, go ahead and select "Save and Close." Depending on your subscription type, you may be allowed to have multiple hosts for an event. You can also choose to either allow or disallow invitees to add guests to an appointment. The scheduling settings page gets us a bit deeper into the details. You can first choose how far in advance an invitee can schedule a meeting, either the number of days into the future, within a specified date range, or indefinitely. Next, we’ll add which hours and days you’re available for this meeting type to be scheduled with you. We are going to set the basis of our standard working hours. Click on the pencil icon button to continue. Here you’ll select which days and at what times are your standard working hours. Note that even if you set your working hours from, let’s say, Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., that events won’t be scheduled during the times that your connected calendar already shows that you’re busy. These are just parameters for your standard workday. If you chose to not connect an external calendar, you can go to date overrides and add times on specific days that you might not be available. For example, if I know that I’m going on vacation during specific dates, I can select those dates on my calendar and mark myself as unavailable. Saving and going back to our scheduling settings, we’ll move on to event limits. The first option is the buffer time. You can choose to add buffer time before or after a meeting type. For example, if someone schedules a meeting, let’s say from 10 to 10:30, you can add a 15-minute grace period automatically, so that the next person scheduling a meeting with you would not be able to schedule it until 10.45 a.m. Minimum notice gives you the opportunity to not allow invitees to schedule an event with you within a specific amount of time. Although the system defaults to 4 hours, I’m going to go ahead and change that to 24. You can also set a daily limit for how many times you want this specific event type to be scheduled in a day. For example, if you’re a teacher and you’re scheduling conferences with parents, you may choose to only allow five conferences to be scheduled in one day. Or in my case, perhaps I only want to schedule four free phone consultations per day. Additional options include how your time zone is displayed, as well as what you want your start time increments to look like. If you have someone schedule an appointment with you from 10 to 10:30, and then you have set a 15-minute buffer between appointments, that would allow someone to set up the next appointment at 10:45. However, if you change your start time increments to be 30 minutes, they wouldn’t be able to book the next appointment until 11 a.m. This is just a personal preference for how you want to structure your appointments. Within the booking page options, you can choose to create a custom URL for this specific event type. This way, if you were to send a user this particular URL, it would bypass your general booking page and bring them to this specific event type. Next, you can choose what information you’re going to ask of your invitee. You can choose which questions to ask, add new ones, and also specify if the questions are optional or required. Let’s say you’re creating an event that requires an upfront payment, here, you can select "collect payment." In order to collect payments, you must have a paid Calendly account. For example, if you want to connect to a PayPal, you first need to set up a PayPal business account, and then follow the prompts for integration. By default, all of your event details will be displayed on a Calendly hosted confirmation page, but, you can choose to redirect an invitee to an external website. You can also provide an invitee with the option to schedule an additional event if you have one of the paid subscription plans that allow you to create multiple events. Once you’re satisfied with your choices, select "save and continue." And lastly, you have your communication settings, starting with the email confirmation that your meeting invitee will receive. You can customize the subject line and body of your email. You can also include an optional cancellation policy. You can also choose whether you want Calendly to automatically send email cancellation or email reminders. If you add a phone number, you can also choose to have a customized text reminder sent at a certain duration prior to the meeting start time. Now, if you just have one of the free accounts with one meeting type, this is what is considered your workflow, meaning the order of events that will kick off once somebody books a meeting with you. If you plan on creating multiple meeting types, we can go ahead and create a workflow. A workflow is the type of communication that you’re going to set up for your invitee to receive after booking an appointment. You could create one workflow for all of your events, or you could create multiple workflows depending on the event type. For example, my workflow could have an email sent to an invitee 24 hours prior to an appointment. I could include a workflow option that would have a booking confirmation button inserted into that email. I could also have an automatic thank you email sent once the meeting time has completed. I could also send text reminders before the meeting to the invitee as well as the host. Other options include sending surveys after a meeting time ends or sending emails encouraging other action items to be completed. Once you have finished your workflow, you have officially set up your first event. If you are using the free version, you can only have one type of event at a time, but you can edit it to change the event type or name whenever you wish. If you want to have multiple events, you can either select New Event Type, or you can click on the Settings icon on a current event and select Clone. This will copy all of your previous settings from your first meeting. You can then edit the event details and rename it. When you save and close the new event, you go back to your homepage and you’ll be able to view both of your events. You’ll notice here that the newest event is turned off. You can, at any time, turn a meeting type on or off by selecting the Settings icon and toggling the button. This allows you to cancel hosting a specific type of event without having to delete it from your platform. There are two ways that you can share your booking. One is by copying and pasting your customized Calendly Booking Page URL. The second option is sharing the link for a specific meeting type. This then bypasses the general booking page and only allows a user to book that specific meeting type. Let’s take a look at what that external booking page would look like to an invitee. Here you can see what an external user would be able to view when booking an appointment. Once users have begun to book events with you, you can view all the scheduled events on the left-hand side. Here you can see future events as well as past events. And if you click into the details, you can view specific notes as well as contact the meeting invitees. Let’s take a look at the other icons available to you in the Calendly platform. The next one is workflows that we looked at earlier. You can edit or revise or create a new workflow at any time. The next section is routing. This is more appropriate and applicable for those with a larger team and using a Teams or Enterprise account. If you have multiple event types, you can create a routing form that can direct visitors to specific people or types of meetings in order to book. If you are offering different types of meetings based on whether someone works for a small versus large company, for example, you could create a routing form that if the user selects that they work for a large company, only allows them to book a certain event type with a certain member from your team. Next is analytics. Since we’re just setting up this account, we aren’t going to see much data yet. However, once you begin to receive bookings, you’ll have a wealth of data at your disposal. You can also customize how your dashboard looks, as well as export all of the data. Next on the left-hand side is availability. Here you can go in and edit your weekly working hours at any time. You can also put in those date overrides we looked at earlier. This way, if you’re going on vacation or need to block specific times on a certain day, you can go ahead and do that without connecting an external calendar. And lastly, integrations and apps. There’s hundreds of different third-party apps that you can integrate within the Calendly platform. Here you can see some of the most popular ones. Now let’s go back to the homepage to finish up. I’ve gone ahead and added some additional event types, so you can take a look at what a more robust booking page could offer. And finally, this is what a finished product could look like. I’ve gone ahead and inserted my custom Calendly link for the 15-minute free phone consultation. My website then brings people to book directly here on my Calendly platform. This was a quick overview of how to get started. I hope this Calendly tutorial was helpful, and that you try saying Calendly five times fast. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions, and remember to subscribe to our channel.