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Featured Tips + Tricks

A collection of the best tips + tricks from Calendly employees and beyond.

  • 68 Topics
  • 119 Replies
68 Topics
Sean Marlin
Community Manager
Sean MarlinCommunity Manager
published in Featured Tips + Tricks
Getting the Most Out Of Your Free Calendly Plan

Calendly is a powerful tool that seems to get more features by the month, but even a basic single Meeting can take you far. In this article we will explore how to get the most out of your free plan. If you are reading this, you might be an unaffiliated individual that has Calendly for personal use, a small business with a single type of service, someone at a larger organization that uses your plan for internal meetings, or anyone else that only needs a single meeting type. While we think our billable plans pay for themselves and then some, we still want everyone to get the most out of whatever plan they are on.  The MeetingMaybe you are just getting started. If you generally offer 30 minutes for a meeting, you can keep the description of your event vague and send this link to anyone who would like to meet with you. But you might want to consider customizing your event name to better reflect you or your services. Open your available hours so people can find time between your other meeti

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Sam S
Employee
Sam SEmployee
published in Featured Tips + Tricks
Maximizing Automation with Routing Forms

🤔 Think about this— As a consumer, have you ever been so confused or off-put by a business’s interface that you throw in the towel and switch to a competitor? I can say with certainty that I have done this. Many times. On the other hand, think of a time when you were so impressed with the ease and simplicity of a business’s user interface that you found yourself filled with a feeling of fierce loyalty. Personally, these are usually the businesses that I recommend to anyone who will listen, unprompted.  Routing Forms are the solution for so many things, providing qualified invitees with more on-demand options and a better user interface. Who can use this feature? Routing solutions are available to users on our Teams and Enterprise plans, as well as the legacy Professional plan. FYI: The Teams plan is available for both multi-user organizations as well as for individual use. To learn about the features in each plan, feel free to check out our pricing page! Here are some of my favorite w

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brutherford
Employee
brutherfordEmployee
published in Featured Tips + Tricks
Admin: How to turn a Reminder Basic Notification into a Reminder Managed Workflow (and why you should!)

As an admin, you know that in order for meetings to be productive and for your team to deliver the best customer experience, teammates need to send communications around their meetings. At a baseline, we recommend you set up reminders for your team’s meeting so everyone shows up (and on time!) and you prepare a follow-up email to help your team pass along resources and kick off next steps.  Not an admin? Check out: How to turn a Reminder Basic Notification into a Reminder Workflow (and why you should!) To standardize your team’s meetings, you’re likely using Managed Events, which are admin-created and controlled meeting types.  Calendly offers two features that automate pre- and post- meeting communications for Managed Events: Managed Workflows and Basic Notifications. Check out this great article that compares these two tools, but to cut right to it: we recommend Managed Workflows over Basic Notifications! Here’s why: ✅ Managed Workflows can be applied to MULTIPLE event types, making

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brutherford
Employee
brutherford
Employee
brutherfordEmployee
published in Featured Tips + Tricks
How to turn a Reminder Basic Notification into a Reminder Workflow (and why you should!)

It’s not enough to get a meeting scheduled — you need to send reminders beforehand so everyone shows up (and on time!) and you need to follow up afterwards to pass along resources and kick off next steps.  Are you an Admin? Check out: Admin: How to turn a Reminder Basic Notification into a Reminder Managed Workflow (and why you should!) Calendly offers two features that automate pre- and post- meeting communications: Workflows and Basic Notifications. Check out this great article that compares these two tools, but to cut right to it: we recommend Workflows over Basic Notifications! Here’s why: ✅ Workflows can be applied to MULTIPLE event types, making them much easier to update and manage. ✅ Workflows can be sent based on more triggers, like if a meeting is booked, before it starts, once it starts, once it ends, or if it’s canceled. ✅ Workflows can be sent via email or SMS text message. Texts help make sure someone gets your message if they’re not in their email inbox.   ✅ Workflows ca

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brutherford
Employee
brutherford
Employee
brutherfordEmployee
published in Featured Tips + Tricks
Groups vs. Teams: Which feature do I need for organization management?

If you’re a Calendly Admin, you need organization management to be as easy as possible. Two top Calendly features help you do that: Groups and Teams.  Groups and Teams have some similar benefits, like an Admin can view a user’s meetings, Workflows, Analytics, and more, so you may be asking what’s the difference between these features? And when should you use one vs. the other?  ⭐ Groups: Perfect for Admins who want control, visibility, and standardizationGroups are available on the Teams and Enterprise plans, and allow you to: Manage day-to-day user operations: Groups are led by Group Admins, like a department head, who can invite users, assign permissions, and see a user’s profile details like their availability, integrations, meeting types, and more. Account Admins and Owners appreciate that Group Admins can onboard and manage daily tasks for their Groups, taking tasks off of the Account Admins and Owner’s plates. Create Managed Events (and Managed Workflows!): Group Admins can creat

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brutherford
Employee
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Employee
Danielle MaEmployee
posted in Featured Tips + Tricks
Event type permissions for non-admins

As a product marketer, I’m almost never an admin for anything. That great power usually lies with my ops and IT counterparts, and they do a great job keeping the trains running + the likes of me aligned with process and protocol. That said, there’s a little thrill I get when something like Calendly’s event type permissions gets democratized and rolled out for non-admins like me 💃🏻What does this mean? What power did I inherit overnight? It means that I can now grant any of my teammates view or edit access to any of my event types. It’s kind of like granting permissions to a file or folder online, same idea:Just as a normal, regular user -- on a standard or above plan -- with no admin controls needed. How awesome is that? I sit in on enough user calls to know that when teammates need access to each others’ event types, they typically resort to pretty manual workarounds. Like keeping a spreadsheet, doc, pinned Slack note, or post-it with a list of other people’s scheduling links. I love

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Employee
Kelsi
KelsiCalPal Emeritus
published in Featured Tips + Tricks
Hidden Fields: What they are and how to use them

➡️ Q: Who is this article for? ➡️ A: All Calendly users on all plans. 🔎 Picture this: you are an avid Calendly user and a massive Hubspot fan. You’ve set up routing forms via Hubspot that you are now implementing into your Calendly flow, and you want to be able to pass information between the Hubspot form and your Calendly booking page without others being able to see this information. Is that possible? If so, how do you achieve it? The answer is “yes” – it’s possible! The “how” is by using hidden fields (paired with UTM parameters) to pass information between the two. Hidden fields are an invisible-yet-powerful tool that can be used to send information which you don’t want others seeing from one form to another, or from your Calendly booking page to your website -- and more.  What are hidden fields? We’ve all typed something into Google only to populate overwhelming results that are unclear. “Hidden fields” might very well have been one of those subjects for you, until now (I hope!)

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Kelsi
Sam S
Employee
Sam SEmployee
published in Featured Tips + Tricks
Start Time Increments: Managing your booking page's intervals of availability.

Hey there CalPals! Something I find myself mentioning all the time in my support interactions is how robust a tool Calendly can be when you have a good understanding of how it all works. With that in mind, I thought it was about time that I write up some articles on different features and settings in every Calendly account, from the free plan to Enterprise. Unofficially, I’m calling these my Calendly 101 articles. We’re going to start off with a fun and fun-ctional setting you’ll find in every Calendly event type, start time increments.  What are Start Time Increments?Ever wondered why your live booking page displays times in 30 min increments or intervals when you first create a new event type? That would be the default “Start time increments” settings at work. You might also find yourself asking:Why isn’t my booking page showing the right times to book? Why don’t the available times on my booking page match the availability blocks I set for my event type?Start time increments are the

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Kelsi
KelsiCalPal Emeritus
posted in Featured Tips + Tricks
Heads Up: Google Analytics 4 has replaced Universal Analytics

Hey, Community Pals! Just a heads up, as this impacts anyone that uses Google Analytics + has integrated GA with Calendly. This news is from Google.  Calendly has been letting customers use the old Universal codes as well as the newer GA4 codes for quite some time re: our GA integration. On July 1st Google is finally going to get rid of the older codes. From Google“Starting March 2023: If you didn't manually migrate your active standard Universal Analytics property to a new Google Analytics 4 property and didn't opt out of an automatic property creation, we created a Google Analytics 4 property on your behalf. Automatically created Google Analytics 4 properties reuse existing site tags whenever possible. Learn more” “Starting July 1, 2023: Standard Universal Analytics properties stopped processing hits, including standard properties in accounts that also contain 360 properties. Some properties continued to process data for a short period after this as we staged the shutdown of Universa

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Kelsi
Sam S
Employee
Sam SEmployee
published in Featured Tips + Tricks
Workflows and Why to Make the Switch

Cal Pals! I’ve missed you! We’re back with a new year and I’m excited to talk about one of my favorite features for maximizing your Calendly ROI and making your day-to-day workflows ( 😉) so simple you’ll feel like you’re on vacation 🌴  Generally speaking, both Workflows and basic reminders are great tools to reduce no-shows and keep your invitees in the loop. This said, I am ✨such ✨ a Workflows cheerleader. I hope to help shed some light on my obsession and bring some new folks to the Workflows party.  Who can use this feature?Calendly’s Workflows are available to users on our Standard, Teams, and Enterprise plans, as well as the legacy Professional plan. FYI: The Teams plan is available for both multi-user organizations as well as for individual use. To learn about the features in each plan, feel free to check out our pricing page! Workflows vs. Basic Reminders  Workflows Basic Reminders You can configure *unlimited Workflows per event type.   You can track wh

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Kelsi
KelsiCalPal Emeritus
published in Featured Tips + Tricks
An Overview of Booking ConfirmationsTutorial

You’ve set up a slew of event types and you’re eager to get booking, but you see the “Communications” section in each of your event type’s settings and aren’t sure where to begin.  For some background, when setting up your Calendly event types, you have the option to notify your invitees of new bookings using either calendar invitations or email confirmations. There are pros and cons to each option depending on your specific use case, so here’s a guide to help you better understand how each of these work.  Who Can Use This?Both our calendar invite and email confirmation notification options are available to users on all plans, from Free to Enterprise. Users on our paid plans have the ability to personalize these booking notifications as well as to configure different booking reminder options. You can read more about our pricing, plans and features associated with each on our Pricing Page! FYI: The Teams plan is available for both multi-user organizations as well as for individual use. 

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Kelsi
jillian
Community Manager
jillianCommunity Manager
published in Featured Tips + Tricks
What exactly is a browser extension?

Alright, scheduling friends. I know we’re usually talking about all things meetings around here, but we’re going to swap it up a bit today and talk about something else that makes you super efficient. They’re small but mighty and usually casually live in the upper right hand corner of your screen. Any guesses?Browser extensions!Browser extensions make your life easier by adding custom features to your web browser, whether you use Chrome, Safari, or Firefox. They’re kind of like mini-apps. Each adds more functionality to your browser of choice so you can do the things you want faster, easier, and more efficiently. Why would you want to use one?The whole idea behind browser extensions is pretty simple. Like browser bookmarks, browser extensions are easy to access (one click!), but more powerful — they bring additional features to the forefront of the tab you're already working in. Instead of opening software in a new browser tab or app, you can access the app from your current tab.This m

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Kelsi
scotty
Employee
scottyEmployee
posted in Featured Tips + Tricks
Creating a Zendesk Macro for Ticket-Specific Calendly Links

Add context to your meetings to help understand the impact of Calendly on your support metrics Calendly is a great tool for support agents. They can quickly book time with customers and get to the heart of their issue. As usage grows, support leaders get curious about the impact of Calendly on their metrics. For example: How many tickets are solved with at least one Calendly meeting? Do certain Topics tend to involve Calendly? How does Calendly impact handle time? How does it impact CSAT? Calendly links and reporting helps answer these questions.A string added to the URL, called a UTM, can pass context to meetings. Context like a ticket id. You can then join ticket data with meeting data.However, it’s hard for humans to write UTMs. Fortunately Zendesk Macros with Placeholders can do the writing for the agent. This guide will take you through how to build a Macro that builds the link with the UTM added for them. The Finished ProductBy adding a UTM parameter with a placeholder, you

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scotty
Employee
Sam S
Employee
Sam SEmployee
published in Featured Tips + Tricks
Maximizing Automation with Workflows

Gone are the days of manually sending reminders, reconfirming bookings, and following up post-meeting! Be your own best friend and do yourself a fun favor— take advantage of Calendly Workflows. Who can use this feature? Calendly’s Workflows are available to users on our Standard, Teams, and Enterprise plans, as well as the legacy Professional plan. FYI: The Teams plan is available for both multi-user organizations as well as for individual use. To learn about the features in each plan, feel free to check out our pricing page! Here are three of my favorite ways to use Workflows: 🧠️ RemindersReminder texts and emails can be programmed for both you as the host and for your invitees. Reminder workflows help to reduce no-shows and allows you to send additional meeting prep materials, if applicable for the event type. You can opt to include the reschedule/cancellation links in your reminders if you would like to provide invitees easy access.👍️ ReconfirmationsReconfirmation workflows can be

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jillian
Community Manager
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Employee
willow.arthurEmployee
posted in Featured Tips + Tricks
Connect your favorite tools to Calendly with Zapier!

 You invest in many different tools and want to know how you can maximize them all to work together (why not keep yourself from all that manual back-and-forth?). While your Integrations page is the best place to go for specific Calendly integrations (think Salesforce, Hubspot, LinkedIn, Slack, Chrome), sometimes you need help creating your own integration between Calendly and the tools you use every day. Enter: Zapier! Zapier will act as the middleman between Calendly and other apps to trigger actions in the tools you use every day based on what happens in Calendly (such as an invitee booking a meeting or canceling). Check out this article to learn more about how Zapier works! With Zapier, you can create connections between Calendly and your other apps! Just think, you could: Create a connection between Calendly and monday.com to add items in monday.com for new invitees created in Calendly (when an invitees books an event) Create a connection between Calendly and Google Sheets to updat

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Employee
jillian
Community Manager
jillianCommunity Manager
published in Featured Tips + Tricks
Stop agonizing. Start here.

I freaking love this blog article from Jeff (Head of Product Marketing here at Calendly) on Calendly etiquette and totally recommend it as a getting start point when you’re thinking about how to share that little link of yours.https://calendly.com/blog/is-calendly-rudeThe tl;dr (but you should read!):Open the door for others first. Let someone give their availability the old fashioned way and offer up your Calendly. That’s like opening all the doors at once. How polite! Ask for their Calendly link. Either they’ll have one and you’ll be like “Hey! ME TOO! Are we best friends?” or they’ll be like “What is this magical Calendly?”… or it’ll be a good opening for you to share yours. It just inherently is a good thing. Saving someone time and effort is an incredibly kind and thoughtful thing to do. Maybe channel all the good vibes and good intentions and assume the recipient sees it that way too?What would you add?

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Kelsi
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Employee
willow.arthurEmployee
posted in Featured Tips + Tricks
Want to have your invitee questions pre-populate?

 Invitee questions are a great way to obtain vital context from your invitees before they schedule a meeting with you. You can use invitee questions to ask invitees necessary screening questions or what they’d like to discuss in your meeting - all to help you gather information that will create a more valuable, efficient meeting. However, there are some instances where you want pertinent information about your invitee, such as name, location, and answers to custom questions, to automatically display without them having to manually enter it. Having this information already displayed for your invitee creates a personalized experience for them, especially if they've  already been asked similar questions before. You can automatically display information such as:Name First name Last name Email Location Custom question responses Checkboxes and radio button Additional guests Phone number To learn how to add invitee information to your Calendly link, click here  

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Kelsi
baileyperezthompson
Employee
baileyperezthompsonEmployee
posted in Featured Tips + Tricks
Tip: Creating a "One-on-One" Event Type for Teams

Many admins and owners (for tracking purposes) like to have their team members’ events all in one place. However, Teams do not offer one-on-one events… or do they? One of the first “tricks” customers often learn in the system is that you can make a Collective event type within a Team act as a One-on-One event type. How do you do this? Follow the steps below!Go to your Team → select the “New Event Type” button on the right hand side of your screen → and click on “Collective Event Type”. Once you are in the “Team Members and Location” section of the event type, add the one team member you’d like to be a part of the Collective event type. Note: If there are multiple team members selected, uncheck the checkboxes for those team members and only select the user / team member you’d like to be on the event type.  Proceed as normal when setting up a collective event type.It’s that easy! Want to see all the steps at once? Watch this quick loom video.

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baileyperezthompson
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Employee
Danielle MaEmployee
posted in Featured Tips + Tricks
How are folks using the Calendly mobile app?

Calendly’s mobile app is getting a glow-up. How are folks using it now? Favorite/least favorite features? Wishlist items? Other hot takes? We want to know! Comment in thread, or if you have more to say, the product team is offering a limited number of user feedback interviews in early November. Let me know if you’d like to participate!

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beckyEmployee
posted in Featured Tips + Tricks
Using Calendly to facilitate in-person meetings at Conferences or Events

I had a problem I was trying to solve, and I needed to create a unique solution.When I used to work in Account Management, I would sometimes need to facilitate meetings for myself or others on my team to be able to meet 1:1 with clients while we were attending an IRL conference event. We wanted to use Calendly to make booking our client meetings seamless and efficient, but the tricky part was how we could do this while we had blocked our calendars off for our conference travel. Since our calendars were blocked for travel to avoid booking any internal meetings, how would we be able to let Calendly know we actually were free to book meetings with clients while we were at the conference?Since you can’t be in 2 places at once and double-book your calendar, this is how we created a custom solution that worked for us.  We wouldn’t be able to stop blocking off our calendars for the days we were OOO. So, we created a brand-new “Events” Google calendar for our team. This calendar remained open

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SchedulingSteve
Employee
SchedulingSteveEmployee
posted in Featured Tips + Tricks
Hello World! (from your Calendly CPO)

Hi everyone! I’m thrilled that we have our Calendly Community up and running now, and love seeing the conversations starting up even though we haven’t fully rolled it out yet.A bit about myself: As the Chief Product Officer at Calendly, my #1 goal is to help our customers become successful with any scheduling problem they need to solve. The product teams at Calendly define our product vision, strategy, and roadmap. To do that well, it’s vital that we listen to customer feedback, whether they be new ideas or even complaints.All feedback is welcome and important to set the direction of Calendly. If you ever need anything, just holler and say hello on the community!

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SchedulingSteve
Employee
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Employee
michaela.buschEmployee
posted in Featured Tips + Tricks
Enhance Meeting Efficiency with Calendly's Invitee Questions

Do you typically ask a set of standard questions when meeting with others? Imagine the increased efficiency of your meetings if you had those questions answered in advance, providing valuable insights about your invitee from the get-go. With Invitee Questions, you can achieve just that. Whether you're a sales representative, personal trainer, recruiter, or whoever you can have your invitees answer key questions before your scheduled meetings. This enables you to predetermine if the meeting makes sense for all parties or if a better-suited individual should handle it. Other benefits of using Invitee Questions:Gather essential information about your invitee early on, allowing you to come to the conversation prepared. Save the valuable face-to-face time for planning, high-value discussion topics, and questions. Here are two scenarios illustrating how Invitee Questions can improve meetings across various roles and industries: 1. Sales Representative (Abby's Story):Abby conducts frequent 30

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Kelsi
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Employee
Cloe MareckEmployee
posted in Featured Tips + Tricks
Interview Childcare Providers

I needed to interview childcare providers, but wanted to do a screening prior to an in-person interview, so I turned to Calendly.  Here’s how I did it:Made a posting on Care.com (it would be great if there was a native integration as you cannot share URLs through their email platform). Received applicants and exchanged mobile numbers with the most qualified providers based on their experience and background. Via text, I shared my scheduling page complete with custom questions to learn more and a Zoom location.  The interview was booked via Calendly and we connected via Zoom.  The interviews went directly to my work calendar (it’s the one I use most often), and the availability checked both my personal and work calendar to ensure they only took place when I was truly available. It was super simple and a great way for me to manage interviews outside of working hours without having people come to my home. The most qualified providers moved to an in-person interview (also booked via Calend

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Kelsi
KelsiCalPal Emeritus
posted in Featured Tips + Tricks
Integrations and Automations - all listed in one place!

If you are curious about what native integrations and automations Calendly has to offer, they are all available to be explored here on our Integrations and Automations page!A few snippets of the resources available there are: SalesforceSyncing additional guests and hosts to Salesforce Salesforce integration by group Calendly Salesforce package version 2 components Mapping Routing Form responses to a lead record in Salesforce Reference Calendly links as merge fields in Marketo emails Reference Calendly links as merge fields in Pardot emailsOther IntegrationsActiveCampaign Calendly for Intercom Calendly for Slack Getting started with Google Analytics Getting started with Make Getting started with webhooksRouting FormsCalendly Routing Routing with Salesforce lookup: scenarios and solutions Pre-populate invitee answers in routing forms How Calendly routing works with Distribution Engine How Calendly routing works with LeanData How Calendly works with existing routing toolsIf you do not see

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hilaryyeg
Employee
Kelsi
KelsiCalPal Emeritus
posted in Featured Tips + Tricks
Customer Success Stories - Straight from the Horse's Mouth!

Have you ever wondered what kind of customers are using Calendly, what that looks like for them, and how it might relate to your own use case? I know that when I am learning how to use a new product (especially one that I pay for!) I prefer to see real world examples of that product being put to good use. Our Customer Stories page lets you take a look at Calendly Customers and how they’re doing!A visual snippet from the Calendly Customer Stories web pageFor example, you can learn how Dartmouth increased their capacity to advise students, despite staff cuts. Or, you can read about how CI Assante Wealth Management achieved 323% ROI with Calendly! I also suggest checking out how Lyft accelerates its B2B sales cycle with Calendly - and these are just a few success stories that might inspire you! How do you plan to use Calendly to grow your business? What have you already implemented within your Calendly account that you feel will lead to success? I want to hear about it! 

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