How ActiveCampaign delivers user value with their Calendly integration

Ever wonder how developers use Calendly’s APIs? We do too, which is why we were so excited when ActiveCampaign offered to give us a peek behind their dev curtain. They’ve evolved their usage of Calendly’s APIs over several years, delighting their customers by offering next level automation through an easy-to-use integration.

If you’re considering building a Calendly integration using our public APIs, keep reading to learn more about ActiveCampaign’s popular Calendly integration, including why they built it and how it’s improved their customer experience.

Responding to user needs

ActiveCampaign has continued to grow in popularity, particularly with small and growing businesses, and is currently the most popular marketing automation software, according to G2 reviews. 

This isn’t by chance.

ActiveCampaign is a one-stop shop for marketing automation and CRM, making it a great all-in-one lead generation and management platform. Plus, they continue to evolve their product based on user feedback and growing needs.  

Here’s one example: By listening to their customers, ActiveCampaign knew many users view scheduling as their primary lead gen mechanism. They also tracked increasing user requests for a Calendly integration and kept a close eye on Calendly’s growth and popularity. (Plus, the ActiveCampaign sales and customer success teams use Calendly in their own work, so they’ve seen firsthand how Calendly can streamline scheduling.)

ActiveCampaign’s product team identified multiple alignments with Calendly, including: 

• Overlap in customer bases

• Complementary use cases

• Rapid acceleration in the SMB space

In 2019, the ActiveCampaign product team introduced the first version of their native Calendly integration.

How ActiveCampaign’s Calendly integration helps users automate and improve the customer journey

Here are a few features and capabilities the Calendly + ActiveCampaign integration provides to marketing and sales users:

• Instantly create (or update) a contact within ActiveCampaign when a Calendly meeting is booked. Automatically create new deals when a Calendly Contact is added, and move deals from stage to stage without manual management

• Map meeting data from any meeting booked via Calendly into ActiveCampaign beyond contacts, including Deals, accounts, and private Custom Objects

• Feed new and updated contacts into customized marketing automations – exposing prospects to drip nurture campaigns, segmentations, and messaging to convert and grow them

• Embed a Calendly booking page into a custom ActiveCampaign landing page so customers can instantly schedule with you at the height of their interest

When you’re using ActiveCampaign as both your sales and marketing platform, the Calendly integration can instantly automate a full customer journey — from booking a meeting to adding information to your CRM and entering customers into your marketing automations.

How they built it

When the first version of the ActiveCampaign Calendly integration was built in 2019, Calendly’s v1 API was publicly available for partners.

The ActiveCampaign product and developer teams worked with the Calendly v1 API and built the integration with a version of OAuth, which allows their users to sign up for Calendly directly from the integration. This means ActiveCampaign users don’t need to leave the ActiveCampaign platform to connect the integration, even if they aren’t an existing Calendly user.

What does this mean for Calendly and ActiveCampaign users? When it comes to scheduling automation within ActiveCampaign, the Calendly integration is the most robust and powerful tool available. Not only does this combo provide ActiveCampaign users with an ideal scheduling app, it also makes ActiveCampaign an even more valuable tool for Calendly’ users.

Rolling with the changes

Since its introduction, ActiveCampaign has continued to enhance the Calendly integration, including migrating to the latest version of Calendly v2 API to offer more solutions. Most recently, they rolled out customer-requested updates that sync Calendly meeting and invitee data to ActiveCampaign from all types of Calendly events (including one-on-ones, Group, Round Robin, and Collective) and allow that data to be mapped into several areas within their platform.

If you build it, they will come

As part of ActiveCampaign’s robust app and integration offerings, the Calendly integration is available via the app directory, as well as in-product under the Apps section.

The integration is widely adopted and well loved, with over 10,000 active users, many who’ve connected multiple Calendly accounts to their ActiveCampaign account. 

The team at ActiveCampaign also offers prebuilt automation recipes (for Calendly and other integrations) to help users get started, including:

• Set up Consultation Call with Calendar Integration

• Cancellation Win-Back Series

• Sales Engagement: Post-Meeting Outreach

• Support Appointment Email Series

Each of these prebuilt recipes can help users start or accelerate their sales and marketing campaigns within ActiveCampaign.

Ready to build your own Calendly integration?

ActiveCampaign met the scheduling needs of their users by building a Calendly integration — and championing the product as users themselves. 

If you’re interested in how you can build a similar integration, Calendly provides everything you need in the Developer Portal.