Sometimes a meeting is just the beginning of a relationship with a client so it's important to maintain communication. Follow-up emails are a tried-and-true strategy not only for thanking the client for meeting with you, but for facilitating whatever comes next in a professional manner.
By connecting Appointlet and Zapier, you can automate this process to ensure your follow-ups are sent to your clients at the right time, every time. Click here to learn how to set up a connection between Appointlet and Zapier.
Important: Zapier integrations require a premium Appointlet subscription. Click here to learn about Appointlet's pricing options.
Sending Appointlet Data to Zapier
When something happens in Appointlet, an event is sent to Zapier. Events are used to trigger actions in other applications, or within Zapier itself. Each event includes a list of variables related to each individual meeting, attendee, and host.
For one-on-one meetings: We recommend using the Meeting Scheduled event because it's the most universal option.
For group meetings: We recommend using the Attendee Scheduled event because it will fire each time a new attendee confirms their spot in the group meeting. This is important because you'll need to collect each attendee's email address.
Once you've selected your trigger event and connected your Appointlet account, you'll be prompted to test your Zap to ensure Zapier is receiving data from Appointlet. The test view includes a list of variable related to each meeting detected during the test.
Note the Meeting End variable. This is what we'll use to inform Zapier that the meeting is done and it's time to prepare the follow-up email.
Automating a Follow-Up Email
Click the plus sign below your Appointlet trigger step and choose Email by Zapier as the action step. In the action settings, select "Send Outbound Email" as the action event.
In the Action tab, select the attendee email variable in the "To" field to tell Zapier where to send the follow up email. Below that, choose a subject line for your follow up email.
The "Body" field is where you'll write your custom follow-up email. You can insert variables sent from Appointlet anywhere in your message. In the image below, we've created a greeting using the Attendee First Name variable.
The fields below the email body are helpful for further personalizing the experience. The Cc and Bcc fields are especially helpful in case you need to put the client in touch with a team member further down your company's funnel.
Important: Keep in mind that actions are triggered immediately when Zapier receives trigger data from Appointlet. If you'd like to pause for a moment before following up with your client, Zapier's built-in Delay tool offers plenty of control. We'll explore this below.
Adding a Buffer to the Email Delivery
After your meeting has concluded, pausing for a moment before sending a follow-up gives the client time to decompress and makes the communication feel more natural. Two additional steps are required to do this.
Important: A premium Zapier subscription is required to configure Zaps with more
Capturing the Meeting End Time
In order to delay the delivery of the follow-up email, Zapier needs to know when the meeting ends. Appointlet automatically sends a Meeting End variable with every Meeting Scheduled event, but we need to turn the meeting end time itself into a concrete value that Zapier can reference.
Start by clicking the plus sign below your trigger step (and before the action step) to add Zapier's Formatter tool and select Date / Time as the event.
In the Action step, select Add/Subtract Time in the Transform field. In this case, we'll be adding time to the value shared from Appointlet. Let's say we want to deliver the follow-up email one hour after the meeting has passed.
Select the Meeting End variable as the Input, and type +1 hour into the Expression field. This will add one hour to the time provided by Appointlet.
Zapier requires a format for the new time in the To Format field, but the option selected here will not impact your automation. This only determines how the time will be displayed while testing your Zap internally.
Complete the Formatter setup by testing it and confirming that the output value is one hour later than the input value.
Setting up the Delay
Click the plus sign below the Formatter step to perform another action using the new meeting end value. Choose Zapier's Delay tool here.
Select Delay Until as the action in your Delay step. This means Zapier will not perform the action (Send Outbound Email) until the specified time, which in our case is one hour after the meeting has concluded.
In the Date/Time Delayed Until field, select the newly-formatted time value. Keep in mind this will be listed under Date / Time rather than Appointlet's Meeting Scheduled dropdown list. Click continue and test this step to confirm that the Delay tool recognizes the value. A successful test means the setup is complete and you're all set to let Zapier handle your follow-up emails!