If you sell your time, booking appointments can eat up your day. Ontraport's booking pages let your leads and customers book their own appointments, with no third-party scheduling tool. Every appointment lives in Ontraport, which helps you avoid double-booking and no-shows. There are two steps: set your availability, then create and publish a booking page.
Click your profile icon, then Personal Profile, then the Calendar tab, and scroll down to availability. Under Calendar to check for availability, click Add and choose every calendar Ontraport should check, like your work and personal calendars. That way nobody can book over your other appointments. If you've connected Google Calendar, you can pick those calendars too, and your clients only ever see your open time slots.
Next, choose the Calendar for booking appointments, where new bookings go, and set your time zone, which controls the dates and times you offer. Then, under When can events be booked, pick your days of availability and your hours.
Now go to Calendar, then Booking pages, and click New booking page. Make a separate page for each type of appointment, like a dental cleaning or a tutoring session. The editor has six tabs: Details, Hosts, Custom fields, Confirmation settings, Form settings and Style.
On the Details tab, give the page a clear title and pick an event template. Templates are recommended, because they bring in location details, merge fields and automated messages. Choose a domain, either an Ontraport domain or, ideally, your own, and the URL you want. Click Add under Availability to set hours by day, like one schedule for Monday through Thursday and another for Friday.
Then set the booking time zone. Visitors see times in their own time zone and can change it. Set the appointment's duration, and whether appointments can start every hour, 30 minutes or 15 minutes. A minimum booking notice gives you time to prepare, a future limit caps how far ahead people can book, and buffer time adds a gap between appointments.
To stop last-minute cancellations, turn on Restrict cancellations and set a minimum cancel notice. Anyone who tries to cancel after that sees your cancellation policy message. Finally, add any booking terms people should read before they book.
On the Hosts tab, choose who takes these appointments. Pick specific users, each with their own calendar if you like, or everyone in a role, like your whole sales team. With more than one host, choose a round robin option. Maximize fairness gives every host an even share of bookings, but visitors see fewer time slots. Maximize availability lets visitors book any open slot, so one host may get booked more often.
For online meetings, choose Zoom or Google under Video conferencing, and each event gets its own unique meeting link. The host needs the Zoom or Google Calendar integration set up first. Choose None for in-person meetings.
Custom fields are the questions people answer when they book, like a pet's health history. Click Add to include a field, and turn on Required if it's a must. Use the merge field icon to prefill answers for visitors Ontraport already knows.
On Confirmation settings, turn on Automatically RSVP host when booked to accept bookings on the host's calendar automatically. Turn on Send confirmation email, then use the system email or your own, and choose who gets it: the requester, the host, or both.
If you write your own, you can attach an ICS file so guests can add the appointment to Outlook, Google Calendar or Apple Calendar. And add the Modify Event merge field to give guests a link to cancel or reschedule.
Form settings work like the settings on any Ontraport form. Choose where people go after they book, and add hidden fields. For a custom thank-you page that shows the appointment details, build it with the booking merge fields, select it here, and check Pass CGI variables to Landing/Thank you page under Advanced.
On the Style tab, set your company name and logo, a logo link, your button and background colors, and the submit button text. You can also add header scripts, like Google Analytics.
When you're done, click Save in the top right to publish your booking page. Share the link, or embed the page on another Ontraport page. The Embed your booking page article in the Support Center shows you how.
So: set your availability once, build a booking page for each appointment type, and let your leads book themselves. Next up, we start tracking opportunities with Deals, beginning with Deals and Companies.