I have come across one of the coolest solutions for all entrepreneurs. You can be a health practitioner, doctor, dentist, tutor, digital marketer, or anyone who wants their business online this video is going to be helpful to you. As we all know about the current situation about the pandemic everyone expects the business in contactless as much as possible. Even though our government also insists on us. Being said that in your online journey you can do sales, marketing, e-commerce solution, or providing service as a solution. So for that, you may build your infrastructure as per your convenience but if you want to book an appointment online, it will be very easy for the customer end, just like a few clicks they can book an appointment. But being entrepreneurs in our online business we only know about our scheduling software, like where it is hosted, monthly or yearly fee for their services, not affordable with automation and conscious in the brand building so all those pain points as an online marketer we are facing many things. This solution is going to solve all the above problems.
Yes in this article we are going to talk about appointment scheduling software.
Table of Contents
What is Online Appointment Scheduling Software?
Online appointment scheduling software provides customers with a portal to book an appointment online with a few clicks and enables businesses to track and manage their appointments. This scheduling software enables businesses to schedule appointments, view calendars, print schedules and forms, customize schedules, and enforce scheduling rules effectively without any manual intervention.
In addition scheduling software with built-in, automated emails (reminders, follow-ups, cancellations, rescheduling, etc.) and/or notifications, online payment for services, custom profiles, and calendar integrations makes their business in a productive manner. These tools are used by a variety of business segments, such as health and wellness professionals, salon and beauty professionals, professional service providers, and medical professionals. Online scheduling software can integrate with content management systems, website builders, email software, and calendar software, among others.
Some Scheduling software application software is,
When you think about scheduling applications the above appointment scheduling software is part of this study. Within that, Calendly is going to be our first pick, cause their minimal user interface is the main attraction, and their community and support are active, clean interface takes just a few clicks for appointments to be scheduled.
Calendly – minimal User Interface
About personal brand building, you may conscious of your brand. But when you are using scheduling platforms like calendly and other software is coming their brand even if you are avail paid service. Calendly is an incredibly useful tool for letting anyone pick a time to chat with you. But anyway, Calendly does let you remove their branding a little, and add your custom logo – at a price of $8/m/user but to be honest even then, it’s going to be pretty obvious that you’re using Calendly, not least because of the URL.
So here few options if you want to put a booking appointment feature at your own site and/or brand it better:
Option 1: redirect to Scheduling software
You can always set up something like calendar.sankarprakash.com and have that URL redirect to your Calendly. To figure out how to do a redirect, it’s simple and straightforward you’ll need to google the name of your domain manager (e.g. GoDaddy, Namecheap) and the term ‘redirect’. Unfortunately, lots of domain providers have completely different ways of doing this, but usually, it’s very straightforward once you find out how. If you don’t know how to redirect ask developers for help it will take only a few mins. This option is not that great because your customers will see that they’ve left your site and gone to calendly.com.
In my case, I have a URL redirect with https://sankarprakash.com/appointment-with-me, it’s redirecting to my actual calendly link with their brand in the URL.
Option 2: Scheduling software iFrame Embed feature
Calendly has another option to embed their Calendly in their own sites. You can do this by using something called an iFrame, An inline frame is used to embed another document within the current page.
Calendly has a great guide on how to do this here.
I have preferred this option of calendly integrated into my website to book an appointment here.
This is a pretty good option, to be honest, and most people will end up doing this by using inline embedded iFrame when they want to have Calendly feeling more integrated into their site.
The downsides are that:
- You can’t change anything within the iFrame, so it’ll still fundamentally look like Calendly UI that you can not edit any CSS to override the existing style guidelines.
- Sometimes using iFrames in your website end up being quite awkward e.g. Like when you are scrolling don’t want them to scroll and there will be a bit of lack while loading the entire page.
Self-hosted application
I would prefer the third option, self-hosted the calendar scheduling application. So this tool is going to be hosted with your preferred domain name. In my case I will be hosting it in book.sankarprakash.com to maintain my brand I will host it with a subdomain. And there are no monthly or annual fees for the application usage.
Free scheduling software
So you don’t need to pay for the scheduling software, this going to be free forever. So you can create unlimited event-type appointments.
Third-Party Integrations
No need to pay for external application integration like google calendar, zoom, daily.so. So you easily without any hustle you can do the integration with your scheduling software.
Payment Gateway Integrations
And if you are worried about payment gateway integrations, here we have a solution for that too. Yes, this tool provides payment gateway integrations too with stripe.
Webhook Feature
If you are expecting any other application to integrate with our scheduling software means, don’t worry we have an option for that too. Yes, it’s giving webhook integration too so there is no limitation with third-party application integration. Webhooks features typically are used to connect two different applications. When an event happens on the trigger application, it serializes data about that event and sends it to a webhook URL from the action application—the one you want to do something based on the data from the first application.
How do you automate meetings?
Being in your online business you can do a business in a productive manner. So you can pick your preferred scheduling appointment booking software for your customers to book an appointment online without any hustle. This scheduling software enables businesses to schedule appointments, view calendars, print schedules and forms, customize schedules, and enforce scheduling rules effectively without any manual intervention. In addition scheduling software with built-in, automated emails (reminders, follow-ups, cancellations, rescheduling, etc.) and/or notifications, online payment for services, custom profiles, and calendar integrations
How do you automate a meeting in zoom?
Scheduling application software integrated with the zoom application can automate your appointment. So as a host you need to create your appointment schedule in scheduling software. Once it’s ready to deploy you can drive traffic to end-user to book their appointment. When they booked their appointment the respective data is captured and that going to pass on the zoom application automatically and with these user details the zoom meeting can create automatically and you can share that meeting details with them if you integrate any email automation tool. So the end-user receives their meeting details in a mail and they will join on time.
How do you keep track of the meeting agenda?
Once you do the setup automate with the zoom application and the meeting agenda is going to be maintained in the email itself. This email is going to be shared with the user who is all enrolling their data by using scheduling software. With that mail itself, they can keep track of the meeting agenda.
How do I automate scheduling an appointment?
I have created a meeting scheduler by using calendly application and embedded it in my contact page, so when end-user visits my page if they want to discuss anything about affiliate marketing or website building they can book an appointment easily and effectively.
How does appointment scheduling software works?
Once the user entered their data, it’s going to be captured and automatically inserted in my google calendar so that I can keep track of my appointment, and the same data going to be maintained in google sheet for my future reference and the same going to be added in the email autoresponder tool with user’s concern with respective tag information.
Conclusion
So decide with your brand consciousness, third-party application integration, monthly or annual fees you can use this solution for booking your appointment with automation. You need a hosting infrastructure for this application to run on your platform.
