Meetings are often criticized for hindering productivity and distracting employees from completing tasks. However, a significant majority—92% of employees—consider them costly and inefficient. Yet, not all meetings are wasteful. It’s crucial to allocate time for important gatherings, such as initial meetings with promising leads or quarterly business reviews with clients. These are vital meetings that deserve a place on your calendar.
Thanks to a range of meeting scheduling tools, coordinating a suitable time for all participants has become more streamlined. This article will guide you in selecting the ideal meeting scheduler for your business, covering topics like:
What is a meeting scheduler?
The benefits of using a meeting scheduler
Five meeting schedulers for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs)
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A meeting scheduler is an application or software designed to assist in determining the time and location of a meeting or appointment.
Integrate your calendar with a meeting scheduler tool to automatically identify your available hours, and further customize the times you wish to schedule meetings.
Meeting schedulers offer various methods to schedule appointments, tailored to the number of participants and the nature of the meeting:
For individual meetings, you can create time slots for the other party to select from
For multiple participants, you can conduct a poll and allow attendees to vote on a time slot
In addition to effortless scheduling, these tools can perform other tasks, including:
Synchronizing calendars
Automatically sending meeting reminders via email
Automatically following up with attendees post-meeting
Connecting to other business tools like CRM or sales software
This example illustrates a meeting participant clicking on a link from a meeting scheduler. Following the selection of a date and time, the scheduler requests their details and subsequently sends a calendar invite to both parties, eliminating the need for multiple email exchanges to finalize a schedule!
Before exploring various scheduling tools, let’s discuss the benefits of implementing a meeting scheduler for your team:
Reduce the back-and-forth required to finalize a meeting schedule
Generate links for your campaign’s call-to-action (CTA) buttons
Ease the appointment booking process for leads and customers
Measure campaign conversions
With the advantages of meeting schedulers in mind, let’s examine five tools, some of which are free, that you can utilize:
Calendly
Doodle
SchedulerFX
HubSpot Meeting Scheduler
Arrangr
Let’s delve into each one!
Price: Starting at $8 per user/month (with a free basic plan)
Calendly allows others to book meetings with you by showcasing your availability and the various meeting types they can select. This tool syncs with your existing calendar, enabling it to identify your available time slots. You can also create different meeting options, such as 15, 30, or 60-minute sessions.
Once a user selects and confirms the meeting, Calendly automatically sends a calendar invite to both parties. You can even embed a scheduling page on your website to allow website visitors to book appointments directly.
Price: Starting at $6.95 per user/month (with a 7-day free trial)
Doodle is similar to Calendly, allowing you to schedule one-on-one meetings with a colleague. Sync your work calendar with Doodle to create a booking page that displays your availability to clients and colleagues.
This scheduling tool also enables you to create a poll among participants and schedule the meeting for the chosen time. Doodle will send reminders to those who did not vote and update your calendar with the final schedule.
Price: Included in MarketingCloudFX
SchedulerFX is an automated calendar booking system that comes bundled with MarketingCloudFX, WebFX’s comprehensive marketing automation platform for SMBs.
Driven by IBM Watson, MarketingCloudFX tracks the intricacies of each campaign, providing insights into which scheduled meetings led to sales. This tool can help streamline lead contact times and assist in acquiring more clients.
Like most meeting schedulers, SchedulerFX allows others to schedule an appointment with you. By integrating it with MarketingCloudFX, you gain access to a complete marketing automation platform that allows you to measure your return on investment.
Price: Free
HubSpot Meeting Scheduler is a straightforward tool that integrates with your work calendar (Google Calendar, Office 365, or Exchange) to identify your free hours.
Share your link with your meeting participant to book a schedule with you. This free meeting scheduler also allows you to embed the tool on a webpage, enabling your website leads to book appointments directly.
You can also connect the Meeting Scheduler to your paid HubSpot CRM subscription, which removes the HubSpot branding from your shared calendar.
Price: Starting at $3.99 per user/month (with a free basic plan)
Arrangr is a free meeting scheduler (with paid plans available) that offers flexibility in syncing your calendar. It helps people book meetings with you by allowing you to select your available meeting slots or block busy times.
This scheduling tool is suitable for both individual and group meetings. For group meetings, you can choose between two poll response options to determine the best schedule for everyone.
Arrangr also enables you to create a Scheduling Page, a dedicated booking landing page for your meeting guests. You can define busy hours or set the hours when your guests can schedule meetings with you.
This scheduling page allows you to:
Define meeting type: Choose between in-person, voice call, or video call meetings.
Set call methods: Specify preferred locations for in-person meetings and available video call platforms.
Custom message: Write an introduction for your Scheduling Page.
Meeting schedulers streamline the process of booking calls and appointments with internal and external clients, enhancing team efficiency
