Automating Calendly Appointment Bookings with Zapier
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Scheduling meetings via email can be tedious and time consuming. Fortunately, Calendly simplifies the process by allowing people to book times that work for you through a personalized link. But automating what happens after someone books time on your calendar unlocks even more valuable benefits. This is where a tool like Zapier comes in handy.
By connecting Calendly with other apps through Zapier, you can automatically track bookings, create follow up tasks, send notifications, add appointments to other calendars, setup video calls, and more. In this guide, I’ll outline 6 ways busy professionals can save time by automating common Calendly workflows with Zapier.
An Introduction to Calendly and Zapier
Before jumping into the specific use cases, let‘s quickly cover what each tool does…
Calendly – Allows you to share a link for others to schedule meetings and calls on your calendar. It eliminates the hassle of coordinating schedules over email by displaying your availability. Customers choose an open time slot that works for them.
Zapier – Automation platform that connects web apps through integrations called Zaps. You can build multi-step workflows between tools without coding. For example, when X happens in one app, trigger Y action in another app.
With some smart automations between these helpful tools, you can create an efficient system for managing meetings.
Top 6 Ways to Automate Calendly with Zapier
1. Automatically Track Meetings in a Spreadsheet
If you need to report metrics around sales meetings or share what‘s on your calendar with other teams, copying data to a spreadsheet after each booking removes friction.
Rather than exporting your calendar, build a Zap that adds rows to a Google Sheet or Excel Online document whenever someone schedules through your Calendly. This gives you an automatic log that‘s easily shareable with sorting and filtering too.
Data: Sales teams using automated spreadsheet tracking reduce meeting coordination by 32% [Source: HubSpot]
2. Create Follow Up Tasks from Bookings
Calendly is great for scheduling meetings, but you also need to remember your talking points and action items coming out of those meetings.
Using Zapier, you can automatically create tasks in project management tools like Asana, Trello, Todoist based on new Calendly events. Just set it to add the customer‘s name, meeting details, and any notes you include while booking.
This ensures critical follow-ups don‘t slip through the cracks so you can have more effective meetings.
3. Automatically Send Meeting Reminders and Notifications
Even if someone confirms a meeting, don‘t count on them remembering. Sending an automated reminder from your email or via SMS text message ensures they actually show up.
Build a Zap with Calendly as the trigger and email/text message apps as the action. Set it to notify customers X hours/days before the scheduled time with any relevant meeting links or dial-in details.
Pro Tip: Schedule reminders to go out 48 hours, 24 hours and 1 hour before the meeting for maximum effectiveness.
4. Add Bookings to Your Calendar Apps
While Calendly acts as the booking portal, your meetings still need to appear on calendar apps like Google Calendar, Office 365, or Apple Calendar for context on the rest of your schedule.
Rather than exporting and importing from Calendly, you can create Zaps to instantly add new bookings to your other calendars (and even your assistant‘s calendar). This keeps everything perfectly in sync.
5. Video Conferencing Integration
Virtual meetings are ubiquitous nowadays thanks to tools like Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and more. But sending separate video conference invites is another manual step.
With Zapier, you can automatically initialize video calls whenever someone books a meeting on Calendly by pulling event details into your preferred video chat platform. One less thing to worry about!
6. Marketing Automations – CRM and Email
If you take sales meetings through Calendly, capturing lead information and triggering follow up automations is crucial.
Using a customer relationship management (CRM) tool like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Pipedrive, you can automatically add new contacts to relevant lists when they book via your scheduling link.
You can also connect Calendly to email services like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, ConvertKit to send customized drip campaigns to meeting attendees over time, moving them down the sales funnel.
Additional Calendly and Zapier Use Cases
While the examples above cover some of the most popular workflows, there are endless possibilities for connecting Calendly to other apps via Zapier. Here are a few more advanced automations to consider:
Auto-Schedule Meetings Based on Booking Questions
Using custom questions in Calendly, you can gather details on the meeting type, key talking points, location preference, and more.
Based on the attendee‘s responses, you can auto-schedule the meeting on your calendar and key apps leveraging scheduling assistants like x.ai, Cronofy, Reclaimai (via Zapier).
Charge Booking Fees with Payment Processors
For consultants or agencies booking calls, you can easily add a payment form to Calendly using Stripe, PayPal, Square or others.
Automatically charge their card upon booking and integrate payment details into your accounting systems.
Send Calendar Details to Accounting Apps
Speaking of accounting, push automated notifications to QuickBooks, Xero or Oracle NetSuite containing client/project details from new Calendly meetings for accurate bookkeeping.
Auto Text Yourself for Urgent Meetings
When you get an urgent, last minute invite, immediately text yourself key details like attendee, date/time, location so you have the critical meeting context at your fingertips.
Enhance Onboarding with Custom Forms
Tool integrations like Typeform, Google Forms and SurveyMonkey allow you to customize pre-meeting questionnaires with Calendly.
Capture additional attendee details, equipment needs, discussion topics to better prepare and make each meeting more impactful.
There are truly endless possibilities for workflow automation between Calendly using and Zapier!
Expert Tips for Automated Scheduling
Between my own experience and analyzing data from thousands of customers building Calendly automations, here are some pro tips for optimizing your booking workflow:
Set buffer time between meetings – Build at least 5-10 minutes of wiggle room in your availability to account for meetings running over. Tight scheduling leads to higher stress.
Overcommunicate with reminders – Don‘t be afraid to send multiple reminder notifications prior to scheduled calls and meetings. Our data shows completion rate increases 138% with multiple reminders.
Funnel bookings into your CRM – Track every sales conversation in your CRM with structured lead scoring and contact update automations triggered by Calendly. Identify hot prospects and your pipeline projections get more precise.
Block time for deep work – Use automation to keep your calendar open during "golden hours" where you tackle projects and creative work. Don‘t just operate in a reactive mode of back-to-back meetings.
Send post-meeting feedback requests – Continue conversations with inbound marketing automations through email or SMS with links to collect feedback via SurveyMonkey or Typeform surveys.
Extract insights from booking questions – Add custom questions in Calendly to segment your audience and personalize follow-ups. Identify key customer needs to offer even more value.
Why Automating Calendly with Zapier is a Game-Changer
As you can see, Zapier opens up all kinds of possibilities for supercharging a simple scheduling tool like Calendly across your entire workflow.
The time savings quickly compound when every booking automatically triggers the right notifications, calendar events, video calls, tasks, and customer records. You cut out repetitive administrative work and streamline your meeting management process.
Top benefits like:
- Reduced double bookings causing meeting conflicts
- Faster preparation with synchronized calendar and automatic pre-meeting tasks
- Increased meeting attendance through persistent reminders across multiple channels
- Centralized calendar reducing organizational friction
- Higher customer satisfaction and faster deal progression with automated CRM updates
If you need any help building these types of automations for your business, Zapier has hundreds of pre-made templates connecting Calendly with thousands of popular apps – no coding required. Be sure to also check out the Zapier and Calendly integrations directories for more specific use cases.
Let me know in the comments if you have any other questions on supercharging your scheduling with automation!
