If you are familiar with Mailchimp and its ecosystem and methodologies, you know that they’re constantly evolving, adding new features to make it a full-featured CRM, Client Relationship Management tool. One of the two things they announced recently was the Mailchimp stores and the Mailchimp appointments. The Mailchimp appointments booking system is available now in beta. Mailchimp Stores is coming at a later date.
Appointments Require a Mailchimp Website
To use Mailchimp Appointments, you need to have a Mailchimp website ready to go – meaning published. So, if you haven’t done that, your first step is to create a Mailchimp website. Now you have two options there. You could use a custom domain or add in a new domain right through Mailchimp and set it all up to have it to be like ‘yourdomain.com,’ ‘yourbusinessname.com.’ Or you could use a Mailchimp-hosted website. And that’s what I did in this case. Also, the Appointments booking is available to both free and paid Mailchimp accounts.
See more information on Mailchimp websites.
Setting Up an Appointment Service
To get to Appointments, go to the Website navigation tab and click on Appointments. This is your Appointments dashboard. If you haven’t yet created a service for the Appointment booking, you should see a prompt to create one. In this demo, I already created one.
The service creation process is easy and self-explanatory. You enter your service name, description, length, and cost, and URL. Clicking the Continue button, you then select a location for your service. You have three choices – At a location, Virtual, or Phone.
Once your location is set, you then enter the time slots and designate days of the week. On the last page, you review the information you entered and Click Publish. You now have a service available on your Mailchimp website! From there, you now have the option to share the URL to your service to start accepting appointments. You and the person making the booking receive emails that contain the booking information.
There is certainly opportunity to improve Mailchimp Appointments. Let me know what you think in the comments below!