How to use Calendly - Tutorial for Beginners

Calendly is one of the best appointment scheduling apps available. In this tutorial, Scott Friesen shows you everything you need to know about creating events, connecting calendars, booking meetings, and so much more. This beginner's guide will have you using Calendly like a pro in no time.

Transcript:
​Are you wanting your users to book time with you? Are you a consultant, a freelancer or maybe you're just looking for more leads and allowing people to easily and professionally book time in your calendar? Well, in today's video, I'm gonna show you everything you need to know to use Calendly. Hello everyone, Scott Friesan here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And I've used Calendly for a while now. It is a quick and very easy tool to allow people who are interested in my business and in my work to book time with me. So I wanna show you how to get things started. So we're gonna get things kicked off by going into our menu, into our account once you've signed up with Calendly. And one of the first places that you're gonna wanna go is up here to your account. And we want to go to calendar connections because really everything is based around your relationship with Calendly and your calendar. So the first thing that you're gonna wanna do is make sure that you add one or more calendar accounts. This not only allows Calendly to book those appointments directly to your calendar but it also allows Calendly to check other bookings that you may have going on. And what I mean by this, is things beyond just Calendly appointments but things that are happening perhaps in your personal life or other meetings that come up as a part of your day. Down below here, you can also check for conflicts. You can use multiple calendars to check for conflicts more than just the one that you have selected up here and you can also specify which calendar to add those appointments to. So this is definitely gonna be your very first stop to make sure that you have your calendar connections set up correctly. Just select add calendar account here and you can authenticate with any calendar service including Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook. Next up, we wanna stay with our account settings this time we're gonna go to account account settings and I just wanna encourage you to upload an image. So if this is meetings or appointments that people are going to be scheduling with you, I recommend that you put your nice profile picture here along with your name and perhaps a welcome message just when they land on your beginning page. Next step, you also wanna make a quick stop at the branding page to add your company logo or some other image that you would like to add here. And lastly, we can click on the my link. Now this is probably more important than you think. In most cases, you're gonna wanna put the name of your business or maybe it's your full name. But remember, this is the URL that you are gonna be sharing with users. This is what you can link from your website or your social media accounts or you can just copy and paste this and give it to people directly so that they can land on your Calendly page. All right, once you've been finished with your account settings, let's go back to the home screen. I just wanna show you where some of those changes take place. I'm gonna click on my link here just to show you where this shows up. So this is the initial landing page where people are gonna see my profile image, my name and that welcome message. I've got two events currently that people can choose from and when they click on one of those events, they are also gonna see my branding here. This is where the logo comes into play. But now let's move on to the events themselves and how can you set up one or more events so that it's as easy for your prospective leads or for your clients to come in here and book time with you. So let's go back to our menu within our account screen here. And this is really our main page here on the home screen where you can add and edit existing events. I've got two events that I'm using at the moment but let's go and create a new event from scratch. We gonna select that new event type, which is gonna open up a new screen. We've got two choices here, we can either create a one-on-one meeting or a group meeting. Now a group meeting lets multiple invitees meet with you at a single time. This may be great for a teacher or if you are providing a group webinar or something along those lines here. But in most cases, the majority of people are using Calendly for one-on-one meeting. So let's say create for one-on-one. On this screen, the first thing that we need to do is give it an event name. Now remember, this is more than just your reference. This is what people are gonna be seen when they land on your Calendly page. So I'm just gonna call this one, Meeting with Scott, really simple here. So I can identify, oop, Meeting with Scott. Let's keep that in there. Our second step is to add a location and you can see we can tell our users upfront, is this an in person meeting, a phone call or is it gonna be a specific conferencing meeting such as using Google Meet, Zoom, GoToMeeting or maybe something custom, something that's not even listed here. In our example, I'm gonna choose phone call in this case. And in many cases, depending on the option that you choose, you may have some additional options waiting for you. For example, do I wanna choose if I will call my invitee in this case, it's gonna require the person who's booking that time to list their phone number. I need to know who I'm calling or I can choose this option, my invitee should call me. In this case, I can add my desired phone number here and the great thing with Calendly is that it's not going to display this number until they have booked the appointment. So if someone is considering booking time with me, it's not as if they're gonna see my phone number or my dial in number right away, it's only after they've booked the time will this number be revealed. But in this case, I'm gonna say, I will call my invitees 'cause I'm gonna ask them to provide their phone number. I'm gonna say update, that's gonna save that option here. Down below we can add a description which is something you don't wanna overlook especially if you have multiple events that you're gonna be offering to your users. So I'm just gonna say, this is a meeting with Scott for a consulting session, something like that, just something so they can differentiate what this event is about compared to maybe some of the other events that I have available. And then just below the description, we have our event link. Now we already talked briefly about having your domain name or your business name or maybe your full name to get them to your main Calendly page but this is something that you can share in addition, a separate URL. So in this case again, you wanna try make it as specific as possible. So maybe I'm gonna say, meeting Scott, something like that, something that's so easy for me to identify but also if I just copy and paste this link, they know what they're getting as well. And lastly, we can choose a different color. This is very helpful if you have multiple events, I'm gonna choose red in this case just so it stands out from the other events that I've already created. Now once we hit next, we're gonna get to the nuts and bolts of our event. In this menu screen called when can people book this event. So by opening this app, you're gonna see a lot of detail and you wanna make sure not to skim over this because this determines how long of an event it's gonna be and other specific details including how far out someone can book you. So first up is event duration and by default, it's usually set to 30 minutes, in this case I wanna make this 60 minutes for my event. If you don't see a default time here that works for you, let's say for example you want to set up a 90 minute meeting, we can select the custom minute option here. Now date range is also very important. Here it says events can be scheduled over 60 calendar days meaning they can book me out up to two months in advance. Let's say that's a little too much. I wanna select edit here and I'm gonna choose this to 10 rolling days meaning they can only schedule me within the next 10 days. Now you can also change it from rolling days to a specific date range. This can be helpful if you have a special set of office hours, maybe a two week period where you are just offering a special service, you can do so here. The third option is also to choose indefinitely, I would be very hesitant to choose this option. Basically this means that they can book you any time in the future. So rolling days is typically the most standard option here. I'm gonna say 10 rolling days and hit apply and the nice thing about this screen is if you scroll down, it can actually show you what that looks like on your calendar. So if I say show more, the things that are grayed out means that that's past the 10 day rolling period. So this shows where people can book me as of today. So if you need to take a glance or preview that you can always scroll down and do so. Now event time zone by default, it is gonna show in your time zone which you set in your account settings and your invitees will also see it in their default or local time zone which is typically ideal. You can edit this if you want to, you can lock the time zone but that is really only recommended if this is gonna be a physical meeting that you're meeting at a specific address or location. For most of us, we are meeting via video conferencing or via phone so you wanna keep this at local so you don't have to worry about making the configurations or the calculations of the time zone difference and they don't have to either. It's just gonna show up in their local time zone. Next we have our preview calendar under availability and this is really core. First off, I recommend that you select some of the specific days. This is where you're gonna set the actual available hours that you can be booked. Now before we do this, I just wanna remind you that, remember, this is sinking against your calendar, the calendar that you set up in your account settings. So it is never going to double book you. If you have set which calendar for it to check, it is not going to double book if something already exists there whether Calendly book that for you or whether you have booked that or other people have booked your calendar in advance. But what we wanna do here is set what is the time limit on specific days? Or maybe you have the same timeframe. So here, if I click on this date, I can say, you know what? On Mondays, I don't wanna start that early. I don't wanna be able to be booked that early in the day, I want to be 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and I can say, I can apply it only to this day or can I say apply it to all Mondays. I got to say apply it to all Mondays but then going forward, I can change these dates as well. If nine to five works for me, that's great, I can leave it as is or maybe I want to be available nine to seven on Tuesdays and Wednesdays I never want to be available. So if I click on Wednesday, for example, I can say I'm unavailable, I can say, apply to all Wednesdays. And now you can see that date is blocked out completely. So you can make those changes in terms of specific hours of availability either on a specific date on a recurring day or even for the entire grouping as you go forward. But we don't wanna move on just yet, we wanna make sure that we click this advanced tab because there's some other details that you don't want to forget. First up is availability increments, meaning, how does you want this to look to your participants? The people who are booking you, do you want them to only be able to book you on an hourly basis like 1:00 p.m., 2:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m? Or do you want to also add 30 minute increments such as one, 1:30, two, 2:30 et cetera. You can make that change here. Next up is event max per day meaning for this particular event, how many do you want to be allowed to book you in a given day? So maybe I only want to allow two of these events to be booked. Even if my schedule is wide open, I only want people to book this particular consultant session two times a day. If you don't wanna set a limit, you can just leave that blank and it will adhere to your other rules such as the amount of available hours. Next up is minimum scheduling notice and this is really important to pay attention to as well. The default is four hours away, meaning that someone could book me four hours from now. So if it's 10:00 a.m., my time 2:00 p.m. would be the earliest that they could book me today. If I think that's too close, if that's too soon, well, then I just need to increase this number maybe I stretch it out to 16 hours, 18 hours, maybe I prefer 24 hours so that no one can book me within 24 hours that are always gonna be booking me for at the very least tomorrow. Maybe I need some time to prepare, I need to send them a questionnaire. Whatever the case may be, you can adjust that here. And then our last option has to do with event buffers. Meaning if you don't want meetings to be scheduled back to back to back, you can add a buffer before an event but also after an event, this is very helpful if you have a habit of having your meetings going over time or maybe your clients push those meetings over time. If you don't wanna bump into your next meeting, you can add a buffer for either before or after that event. We're gonna hit save and close and that brings us to four additional options down below. The first one is invitee questions. So when someone comes to book your event, what will they have to provide? Now name and email is going to be mandatory if we click this little gear icon we can say that we don't want to allow them to add guests if you don't want them to add other email addresses or guests you can do so. You can also change if you want both first name and last name as separate fields. I like to try and keep it nice and simple. So I just leave this as name but you can choose what you desire. You may recall that we are requiring our guests to add their phone number because I want to call them, they need to provide me with a number. So here, this is gonna be here by default. If I didn't need that, if I didn't make that choice earlier then I could choose if I wanted to add phone number or not. And then the last one here is just an open comment field. Please share anything that will help prepare for our meeting. I can change the text, I can change the wording of this question, I can just delete it altogether if I want to or I can add additional questions. If I wanna add a few preliminary questions in advance, this can be helpful if you wanna get some more information, maybe find out what they're after, what they're looking for you can add questions here. Save and close, next is notifications and cancellation policy. So how do you want these events to look on their calendar and how do their email reminders or their email notifications, how do you want them to look as well. Do you want something specific in the title? Do you want a specific wording? Here in the right hand side, we can select personalize and you'll see how it's gonna show up to that individual. What it's gonna look like when they receive these calendar invitations, you can always change these defaults as a part of your setup. If I close this and we select switch to email confirmations, I can select personalized and this is how their email reminders will show up in their inbox. Again, if I don't want it to start with confirmed, if I wanna change what the event name and what it's gonna look like, I can add links, I can italicize and add other formatting., I can do all of that right here as well. Now down below, we've got some other things that we can set up such as email reminders in terms of when they are sent email follow-up and even text-based reminders. If you wanna send them a text reminder as well. By default, these are all set to off but you can turn them on and make adjustments as you wish. The last thing that we wanna look at here is the cancellation policy. So if you want to include something like you must notify me 24 hours in advance or else you will be charged the full amount or something to that effect, you can include your cancellation policy here. Otherwise, you can uncheck this box and not have anything show up as a part of that cancellation policy. Next up is the confirmation page. Now by default, it's gonna show just a standard Calendly confirmation page but if you would like to send them somewhere specific, you can choose redirect to an external site, maybe you want to send them back to your website or to a social media page or maybe you have a custom thank you page. You can include that here as a part of a custom link. And then the last option that we have available to us has to do with payments. Now this isn't gonna be applicable to every user and yes, you must have a pro account in order to use payments. But if you want to require your users to pay you via PayPal or Stripe or some other method, you can do so here so that they have to pay prior to confirming that event, you can make that connection here within this window. So now that we are done with this event type, let's go back and see what it looks like on our page. So now we see we have this red meeting with Scott, this is the one that we just set up. Here is the extension, right. It could be calendly.com/simpletivity/meetingScott. That's what it's gonna look like so if I click on this directly, it's gonna bring me to this meeting invitation and here you can see, Monday, I'm booked the rest of the afternoon. So the reason why this is not available is because I have other bookings going on. Even though I said, I wanted to start a little bit later, I've got nothing more available today. And remember I said, I don't wanna meet on Wednesdays so you can't meet me this Wednesday or next Wednesday but I do have some availability on these dates. So if a user clicks on the ninth, here they'll see my availability for that day and they can choose any one of these days, they can confirm it and continue with the process. I hope you found today's video helpful and if you have further questions about how to use Calendly, be sure to let me know in the comments down below. Thank you so much for watching and remember being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.