Connecting Appointedd to hundreds of other tools using Zapier ?

Taking bookings with Appointedd makes it easy to manage your calendar, and keep on top of your business. But it also gives you access to an array of valuable information about your customers, information which you may want to use with other tools and services. Traditionally, moving information like this from one tool to another would require either time-consuming and laborious admin work, or complex, costly development work. Thanks to tools like Zapier though, this process can be automated, and best of all, anyone can do it! This blog walks through how to get started with Zapier, and how it can be used to automatically add your customer records to another tool.

Connecting Appointedd to Zapier

Zapier is a task automation tool which allows you to take information from one tool, and use it to perform actions in another. Zapier “Zaps” (workflows) can be used to reduce time spent on admin, giving you more time for the things that matter. To get started with Zapier, sign-up for a free account.

After signing up for an account, it’s time to create your first workflow by selecting MAKE A ZAP! in Zapier. When creating a Zap, we need to select a trigger and an action. The trigger is the event which starts your workflow, while the action is the process which happens after this trigger has occured. To make an Appointedd event your trigger, select “Webhooks” as your trigger app.

After selecting Webhook, choose the Catch Hook option, then skip the optional Pick off a Child Key step. You will now see a custom webhook URL which we can use to trigger workflows in Zapier. Copy this URL to your clipboard. Now, we need to add this webhook URL to our Appointedd account.

Login to Appointedd, and navigate to Settings > Webhooks. On this page, select Add Webhook to connect to Zapier. Within the Create Webhook form, choose a name which describes the workflow. For example, if you are creating a workflow which sends information to MailChimp whenever a customer is created in Appointedd, you could call the workflow “Send customer to MailChimp via Zapier”. This name is only for your own reference. Next, select a webhook trigger. This is the event in Appointedd which triggers the workflow in Zapier. You can trigger workflows when a booking or customer is created, updated or deleted. Finally, paste the webhook URL you copied from Zapier into the URL input. Your form should look something like the example below.

Save this webhook. We can now test that your account has been correctly connected to Zapier. In the above example, I have set my Webhook Trigger as “customer_created”. To test the connection, I just need to create a new customer in Appointedd. If you choose “booking_created”, for example, you need to create a new booking to test the connection. After performing the action which is set to trigger the webhook, navigate back to the page in Zapier from which you copied the Webhook URL. This page will test the connection. If the test is succesful, you will be able to preview all of the data which has been sent to Zapier. If the test was unsuccesful, double check that the webhook URL you copied from Zapier was correctly added to Appointedd, and check that you performed the action which matches your webhook trigger.

Now, we can get creative with our workflow, by choosing what action(s) we want to perform in Zapier. I’ll walk us through how to send customer records to MailChimp.

Add new customers in Appointedd to a MailChimp list

MailChimp is a popular marketing tool for sending email campaigns to lists of contacts or customers. Using Zapier, we can automatically add new customers in Appointedd to a list in MailChimp, allowing you to send professional, automated marketing emails, without spending time manually copying customer records.

To create this workflow, create a new Zap by following the above steps, choosing “customer_created” as your webhook trigger in Appointedd. Within Zapier, choose MailChimp as your action app, then select Add/Update Subscriber. Zapier will then ask you to connect your MailChimp account. Inputing your username and password at this step allows Zapier to automatically add new customers to your MailChimp account. You will now be presented with a number of options for customising how customers are created in MailChimp.

• List – Select a list in MailChimp which you would like to add customers to, this could be something like ‘Customers who booked through Appointedd’.
• Subscriber Email – For this option, you need to select the email which was sent from Appointedd. To do this, click on the icon on the right hand side and select Event Data Customer Email from the list, as shown below.

All other fields for setting up your MailChimp subscriber are optional. However, I recommend selecting the first and last names sent from Appointedd, and choosing Yes for the Update Existing option to avoid duplicate contacts from being created in MailChimp. Once you are happy with your selections on this page, click “Continue”. You will now be given the option to test this workflow, which will create a new subscriber in Mailchimp. Now, you can turn on this Zap, sit back and let Zapier do this process from now on.

Once you are comfortable with how Zapier works, you will be able to send your customer and booking information to many other tools, including CRM systems, spreadsheets, task management tools, and chat systems. Let us know on Twitter @appointedd if there are other integrations you would like to use with Appointedd.