How to Connect Calendly to ActiveCampaign with Zapier

by Yujin Yeoh | Aug 17, 2019 | Uncategorized | 414 comments

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How To Connect Calendly to ActiveCampaign with Zapier

So Calendly plays a big part of any consulting business that I take part in. It’s also a tool I recommend when someone is looking to book appointments for their business.

In Automate Online I needed a system to manage my time whilst also allowing clients to connect with me for a call or if we need to jump on a screeshare via Zoom or Google Hangouts.

Here’s how I set up Calendly and also how I connect Calendly to ActiveCampaign.

If you’re familiar with Calendly you can skip ahead to how I’ve set it up for Automate Online.

What is Calendly?

Calendly is a event / calendar scheduling tool as the name alludes to. Some other alternative tools available include ScheduleOnce and Acuity.

When create an account on Calendly, choose your account name eg.automateonline, calendly.com/automateonline
You can set up different Event Types with such some public and other events that are private.
Set up your availability on when you want events to be booked
Customise your Event Type by asking additional invitee questions such as email, phone and other pre-qualifying questions
You can also set up email notifications for your event attendees, if you’re using ActiveCampaign then keep this disabled, we want to send these emails from ActiveCampaign.

How to Get Started with Calendly:

Before you start creating event types, you’ll want to connect Calendly to existing calendars that you use such as Outlook and Google Calendar. The reason for this is to get Calendly to check for conflicts when people are booking events, you don’t want to double book yourself. You can do this by going to the top right and clicking the menu and heading to Calendar Connection.

Once you’ve connected your existing calendars with Calendly you’ll want to create the different event types that people can book with you. In the case of Automate Online we offer a 30 minute free Discovery Call that clients can book. There is also a 1 hour Deep Dive call that is private so it will only be accessible if someone receives a direct link to book.

How We Use Calendly, Zapier and ActiveCampaign together

We use Calendly on the Premium plan which gives us access to Zapier integrations. This allows us to send data gathered from the invitee questions and send this to where we choose, in our case into our CRM and marketing automation tool, ActiveCampaign.

To send the data to ActiveCampaign a Zapier workflow is created which consists of the Trigger step, a new event booking in Calendly and a series of Actions.

The Actions between Step 2 – Step 5 are created to extract important information that will feed into ActiveCampaign later for use in custom fields to help with personalising emails being sent to contacts.

Step 2 in the Zap formats the date and time the event was booked into a MM/DD/YYYY format that can used in ActiveCampaign.

Step 3 of the Zap also formats the date and time of the appointment into a MM/DD/YYYY format that can used in ActiveCampaign. This data is sent into an ActiveCampaign custom field. This data is used in a reminder email sent on the day of the appointment and also used to customise content in emails. This date is also used in a wait step of an automation. The automation will wait until the today’s date matches the date of the appointment to send a reminder email to the client.

Step 4 of the Zap formats the date and time of the appointment into just the time formatted in a HH:MM format such as 5:00PM. This data is also mapped into an ActiveCampaign custom field and used in email content.

Step 5 of the Zap again formats the same date and time of the appointment but outputs it as the day of the week such as “Monday”

Step 6 creates a new contact in ActiveCampaign mapping the email, first name, last name as well as 3 custom Fields

Calendly Appointment Date
Calendly Appointment Time
Calendly Appointment Day

A tag is also added to the contact to activate a reminder Automation in ActiveCampaign.

Inside the reminder emails the data that is fed into the custom fields in the Zapier workflow is used in this email content.

The added bonus of sending this email inside ActiveCampaign instead of using the default Calendly email reminder is that the email content can be customised based on the user’s attributes.

We utilise an ActiveCampaign feature called “Conditional Content” to change the content of the email based on how a user answers the questionnaire in Calendly. If someone answers “No” to the question “Are you an ActiveCampaign user” then in the email we offer the a 14 Day Trial of ActiveCampaign.

In the email below we also offer prospects a chance to join our Facebook Group, Automation Mastery. In addition ActiveCampaign has a featured called Site Tracking which can be activated if a contact clicks the links in the email. By clicking links and opening emails we can also start to monitor the engagement of a contact in order to better customise the user journey.

A contact’s engagement is tracked and updated in ActiveCampaign whenever someone opens an email, clicks a link or visits the website.

Instead of sending all contacts down one path if a contact that has a high engagement can get a different custom message. Where if a contact has low engagement we can add them into a separate automation to try and re-engage and eventually unsubscribe.

This is why I prefer to send the event reminders through ActiveCampaign rather than use the default emails in Calendly.

By sending the Calendly data into ActiveCampaign we also create a deal in the Sales Pipeline ready for me to take notes on the call. A task is also created for me to follow after the call. All these automated tasks and processes saves me hours of my time each week not having to take care of these tasks manually.

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