This is a YouTube video titled "Acuity Scheduling Review: The Best Calendar Scheduling App for Marketers? - #AgencyToolbox" created in September 2015. It features Gray McKenzie hosting the second episode of the Agency Toolbox series, where he reviews and explains the features and benefits of the Acuity Scheduling tool for managing calendar appointments, comparing it with alternatives like Calendly, and discussing its use in marketing agencies.
Welcome to episode number two of Agency Toolbox. I'm your host, Gray MacKenzie, and today we're going to be talking about one of my favorite tools. This is a tool that has saved myself and my team countless hours of wasted time and loads of frustration, for sure. So the tool that I want to dive into today is a tool called Acuity Scheduling. And this is a tool that helps you take the back and forth hassle of scheduling out of the equation when it comes to setting up meetings with people on your team, with potential prospects, with clients that you currently have with colleagues. This is a tool where anytime somebody wants to set up a meeting with me, I will almost always just send them a link to schedule my calendar directly for the specific type of meeting that they need. So let's go ahead and dive in, take a look at the front end of the tool, and I'll walk you through why we've chosen this tool over some others and then some of the possibilities that exist when you start using Acuity Scheduling. All right, so here is an example page custom branded for Guavabox. And this is what I use to allow people to schedule a quick 15 minute conversation with me. So the very first step that they're going to go through. This eliminates a ton of the frustration that we've gone through as a company who does work not only across the United States, but throughout the world by the very first thing that it does is set the person's time zone. So it already recognizes that I'm in the eastern time zone, but asked me to confirm it. And this is gonna, this is gonna customize the times that I'm gonna see to the time zone that I'm in or the time zone that I'm going to be in when this meeting happens. So I'm gonna go ahead and set my time zone to schedule my meeting with myself. This is a little strange. And I will pick a time. I'm recording this right now in the beginning of August 2015. So I'll pick a time for Tuesday and see what is on my schedule. I am free most of the day on Tuesday, so you can see start times every 15 minutes. Pick a start time based on the schedule that I have dictated. Go ahead and continue. Just put in your first name, last name, phone number, optional email. And I also have a custom form in here asking people if there's not something. So this is my most general appointment booking and this will complete 15 minute conversation with me. So if I throw this information in here, go ahead and give them an address. I'D like to test out Acuity and complete the appointment. And I now have a chat booked. I'm going to get a confirmation email right away. I've customized that email that I'm going to get. Obviously I can reschedule it, edit what I put in on that form, cancel the appointment directly from here. So I'm going to show you one more example of this, and that is if you want to schedule a demo of Do Inbound, here's a Do Inbound demo with Ryan, and the same process works over there. So I use this both at Guava Box and we use this every day at doinbound. Now, there's a lot of tools out there right now for calendar scheduling. One of the newer ones that is catching on really quickly as well is a tool called Calendly. Calendly we used for about a year prior to switching over to Acuity, and I can get into why we made that switch. But Calendly is a great tool. Schedule once has been around for quite a while. Doodle, I think, might be one of the oldest players in the space. MeetMe. There's a whole bunch of alternatives and the reason that we chose Acuity Scheduling. And I'll pull up their website here for you to check it out. It's just acuityscheduling.com that'll all be linked in the show notes. By the way, the reason that we switched to Acuity Scheduling is this allows us to do a couple things that Calendly didn't and that some of the other options also didn't allow us to do. And one of those was having team scheduling. So neither of these links are set up that way. But if I wanted to, I could set up a link that's a due Inbound demo and it could pull from the availability of our entire team, whoever is someone who's qualified to give demos. So I could pull from the availability of our entire team and give people a lot of options. So if Ryan is on vacation for a week, I don't want someone to have to wait for eight days before they're able to schedule a demo. I want them to be able to see the tool earlier than that. So the team scheduling aspect was a big deal. Being able to manage everyone's calendars from a single back end was a big deal. Some of the reporting that's available inside of Acuity is pretty powerful, but the other big factor that played into this equation was the ability to sell either blocks of time or products directly through Acuity. So we have used that to sell if you want to book a consulting hour or even a package where you book a recurring appointment, maybe we're meeting twice monthly for three months, you can set that up and hook it up to your stripe account or PayPal account. There's a number of different payment gateways that Acuity supports and folks can directly check out from that. Directly from the interface here. The last thing that we wanted to do was be able to have it custom branded to our design style and also sit on our domain itself. So you can see that this is not hosted through Acuity Scheduling.com it's actually pulled in and looks like it's directly on the Do Inbound website. And that's just a small thing that really isn't a. Isn't a big deal. Some people really care about that, some people don't care about that. But that was just a nice added benefit that Acuity had that some of the other platforms didn't have. So that is just a quick look at how Acuity works, some of the reasons that we chose it over some of the alternatives. If you don't currently have a tool like Acuity, I would suggest checking one out. And Acuity is a great place to start. They have a free plan. Plans I think go up to $34 on the high end. As of the time I'm recording this right now, we are on the growing business plan and that works well for us. So for 20 bucks a month you can manage a whole bunch of what's going on in your day to day business. Obviously this is only for six different calendars, staff or locations so that depending on how many people need to have a public scheduling link that at some point we're going to outgrow that obviously and change that package. But in a lot of cases, not everyone on your team needs to have a calendar scheduling system set up. So that may or may not be the right package for you. If, if you're not looking for the features of Acuity, you could also I definitely suggest checking out Calendly and seeing what meets your needs. They also have a free and paid plans as well. In the next episode, episode number three of Agency Toolbox, we are going to talk about how to customize Acuity scheduling for your marketing agency. So I'm going to dive into the backend of Guavabox's Acuity portal and show you exactly how we've set it up, set up reminders and all the different features inside the backend so that you can set up Acuity for your agency. If that's something that you're ready to move forward with and take a lot of the hassle out of your everyday life. All right, well, I appreciate you tuning in to this episode of Agency Toolbox. If you enjoyed this, shoot me an email@graydewinbound.com or hit me up on Twitter. Gray McKenzie. Let me know what you like, what you'd like to see improved, and we will continue moving forward. All right, well, we'll see you back here in episode number three of Agency Toolbox.
