How to Set up Acuity Scheduling for Your Marketing Agency - #AgencyToolbox

Welcome back to episode number three of Agency Toolbox. I'm your host, Gray MacKenzie, and today we are going to be talking about how to set up a tool called Acuity Scheduling. Now, Acuity scheduling we dove into last time in episode number two and I shared why we chose to use Acuity for our agency, Guavabox and software company do inbound over the alternatives. So if you're curious about the reasons that we made that decision, go back and watch episode number two. But if you tune into that or you have some familiarity with Acuity scheduling and you're running a marketing agency, I think this episode is going to be super helpful to you. We're going to dive into the actual back end of our Guavabox Acuity portal and I'm going to share with you guys exactly what we've set up and how you can set up your own portal to maximize your efficiency and effectiveness on a daily basis. So just as a quick refresher, last time we walked through this in more detail, but here's the front end where on a custom branded URL guavabox.com chatwithgrey you have access to schedule a personal conversation with me for 15 minutes here. And this is a specific event that's been set up inside of Acuity. It's got specific availability so we can walk through how this works just super quickly. Again, I'm picking a time, I'm going to run through this super fast and then we're going to dive right in. So I just fill out the information, complete the appointment and we're good to go from there. Now let's dive into the back end and I want to share with you guys how this works. So in the back end here I've got right now I've chosen this is the back end of Acuity scheduling and I've chosen my specific calendar to set my availability. So you can see I prefer to take meetings during the middle of the day and I give myself a little extra block of time on Monday mornings and Friday afternoons so that I can either recover work wise from the weekend or prepare and get things finalized on Friday afternoon before I head out. So that's what my availability looks like. Now, each team member is going to set their availability or you'll set set it for them individually and you can set this differently. You can override your regular hours if you've got something coming up, holidays or you're taking a vacation for some reason. But this is kind of the first step is you need to set up, you're going to Hook up your calendar and then you are going to put in your availability. Now once you have availability, what you're going to do is set up appointment types. You can see we've got a whole bunch of different categories, different types of events. And so under my events you can see I've got podcast interviews, HubSpot, support requests, meetings, or a conversation with me. Now I've got two different meetings, two different lengths. I usually use the second link here if I need to have an in person meeting. So I've got a little bit of time for travel and this one's typically a phone call. It's a little bit longer than a chat. So let's look at the back end here of a quick chat with myself. 15 minute duration. I block off 5 minutes ahead of time and 15 minutes afterwards. So if that call for some reason needs to go 30 minutes, I don't want to be scrambling, trying to push something back. I also don't want to go straight from a prior call into this one. So I have a little bit of time blocked off. It's a free event, but here's where I could set the price. If the, if the person wants to meet with me has to pay something for that conversation, give it the category, give it a custom color. Now that's just going to impact the back end. This is pretty important though. I want this event to be set to private. Now if it's not set to private, what happens if it's a public link? Let me jump back here into choosing my appointment. You will see from this drop down list, everything that's a public item will show up in this drop down list here. So virtually all the appointments that we have almost all the time, we keep them all private. So folks will need a direct scheduling link. So if we pop this guy open here, you can see here at App Acuity scheduling this whole thing, people will need the direct link. Now we've taken this link and the iframe and I can walk you through that. We will be talking about that in an upcoming episode here, but we've embedded that into globabox.com but that's why we keep almost all the events that we have private. You can also choose whether it's a group, class or event. So if you're scheduling something where multiple people can come in, maybe a workshop for multiple companies or an in person event, you choose that there you select what calendars this event can be booked on. So if this was just a quick chat in general with anybody from our team, I'd select maybe Andrew and Ben can also have this conversation. And that's going to obviously open up some more calendar availability because the times that I'm blocked, maybe one of them will be available or both of them. And then forms. So I also have included a simple little form. I just want people, if we don't have some reason that I already know about why we're having this conversation, I want them to put that in while they're scheduling my calendar. So that's not mandatory but that form is included. Then I'd update the appointment type and we'll be able to see all of that on the front end. We're going to get into how to embed this into your website in a future episode. But for right now, a couple other things that I wanted to share with you. You've got a client scheduling page. Now you've got some simple integrations here. You can control a number of appearance items in here. So obviously you want to pay attention to what's our business name, uploading a logo, time format, time zone and then a whole bunch of items down here. Now for the way that we have things set up right now we don't have any recurring appointments enabled and what that would do if we uncheck that is folks could either choose when they set their time zone and go here. They would see we pick a time either continue or they'd see a button for recurring right below that. So we have that disabled for right now. Client registration people can register and then there'll be a login link when they come back. And that is sometimes that'll speed things up if people are constantly scheduling new meetings for with you most of the time when we schedule client meeting we've got a set time with a client where you know we're going to have a weekly meeting and it's going to be the same time each week or monthly strategy meeting, same time every month. So we aren't. We don't have a lot of folks who have to log back in multiple times, but that's something that you can have if you do have somebody in that situation. And I think that most of the rest of these are pretty self explanatory the calendars here at the bottom. So what this means is if you have four different people who are each they're all eligible for an event. You can have it pool their availability or if you don't have that checked, they'll be able to choose which specific person they're going to schedule with. The reason that we have that checked is Most of the time they're getting our. This is a link that's sent out to a prospect and they don't know who they need to talk with yet. And so instead of making them choose between four random choices or five random choices, we'll just let them pick in the situations where there's a group event. One of the features that a lot of people don't know about from my experience in acuity, is this ability to change the actual wording of the front end. So I'm going to, I'm going to load this up. This is a front end editor here and sometimes it takes a minute to load, but it lets you go through and customize pretty much the interaction of everything. So if I choose, I don't want this to say choose appointment. I want this to say select your meeting. I can go ahead and submit that. That will change what that text says. I can pause to continue going through the forms. I'm going to change this back to appointment. But you can customize all the language, all the language and verbiage that you use in this inside the tool. So this is a pretty neat tool that none of the other alternatives that I have looked at to this point have had this. So there may be other ones who are adding it in, but really enjoy that. And then advanced css, we'll get into this as well, how we've customized what it looks like. And at some point I will show you guys to do the same thing real quickly because I want to respect your time and not take too much time here, but just want to show off a couple of the features here. Custom intake forms so you can choose from similar to using a tool like Gravity forms or the HubSpot forms builder. You can choose what types of questions you want and give descriptions, form names, all that kind of stuff. So you can ask people to fill out additional information prior to scheduling a meeting with you. Products and packages. You can set new products in here. Now this we have used in a couple situations. Now here's a possibility that you could use. You could set up a coupon where you set up. Maybe it's an inbound marketing assessment. You set up an inbound marketing assessment and you give it a dollar amount. Let's say it's $150 to do your inbound marketing assessment. And then, and this is, there have been a bunch of psychological studies. We have not used this at Guavabox yet. But it's something that we've kicked around in the past is you put a, put a price Tag on it and then give folks individually a coupon code to use to get it at a discounted price. Some people have talked about doing this for free, but some way to add some more product perceived value to that conversation. That's something that you might kick around and look at. Obviously you can use coupons like any other store for products. If you want to sell products through here as well, they've got reporting I think that's relatively self explanatory. Importing and exporting. Also syncing up calendars. So bi directional sync for all the different calendars you have in here. Your payment settings. I think I mentioned this last time, but you can accept payments using a number of different gateways here. Stripe, paypal and authorize.net and one of the cool things is this will create a client inside of Stripe so you can have somebody who's fulfilling a support request. For example, when someone requests a support request, we send them an acuity link. They have to enter in their credit card information if they're not an existing client and it doesn't bill the card at all, but they have. So a standard support request, half hour support request will cost $75. Now if it takes less time than that or more time than that and we're billing on an hourly rate, we already have their credit card and their approval to do that. So that's taken a lot of the back and forth and hassle of billing out of what we do sometimes in support requests. So that's one way that you can use the tool and hook it up to Stripe or PayPal, whatever your credit card processing gateway is, and alleviate some of the pain of going back and forth on support requests that are outside the original project scope. All right, well, that was a lot to dive into. If you have any specific questions about how you should be setting up your portal or ways that we've executed this, or any tips to offer to share back with the community about how you have customized acuity scheduling for your agency. I would love to hear that. You can shoot me an email@grayoinbound.com and if you check back next time in episode number four. Now, to get access to episode number four, there's a couple different ways that you can do that, but probably the best way to do this is if you're watching us on YouTube, go ahead and subscribe. But if you are not watching this on YouTube or on iTunes and you haven't subscribed yet, go do that. The other thing that you can do if you want early access is if you head over to doinbound.com toolbox, you can get early access to those videos, and I'll walk you through how to do that on that page in the next episode of Agency Toolbox. So this is episode number four. Coming up, we are going to walk through how to customize the front end. So how to take it from from looking like a traditional Acuity front end that is clean, but it's a little bit bland. It doesn't have all your own customizations to it, to something like this that's fully customized and matches in with the Guavabox brand. So that's what we'll cover in episode number four. Until then, get started diving into Acuity or getting your calendar scheduling tool set up. Send me any questions you have and we'll chat with you soon.