Your website sometimes is the first kind of interaction you have with your audience and the goal is to have a website which brings in a steady stream of new customers, right? At least, that’s the goal for every business owner we’ve met with a website! And it’s the reason many businesses let visitors book appointments themselves through their website. This could be to arrange a consultation, reserve tickets for a gig, or to book a table in a restaurant.

So how can you get more bookings (or any bookings at all) through your website?

First, you’ll want to set up your website to encourage as many visitors as possible to book your services or product. In this blog, we’ll help you understand your website’s performance and show you how to get more bookings through your website with these 5 simple tips:

1. Find the right booking method for you and your business

Most websites have the same goal: when a customer pays to make a booking on a certain date or time, it automatically appears in your business diary. Convenient and productive, right? To make it happen, you need some information from your customer. Here are our favourite ways to obtain the information you need about the customers booking your business, and the pros and cons that come with each method.

Phone bookings

Simply put your phone number on your website, your customers call, and you discuss the details of their booking.

Pros

• Adds that personal touch your customers love and allows you to build rapport
• Helps you identify the customer needs quickly and more direct
• Easy for all types of customers, of all ages
  

Cons

• Not always convenient to take a phone call
• You can only take one booking at a time
• How much time you spend on the phone will vary by customer and level of service

Note: speaking to your customers on the phone is useful if you can easily interrupt your work for a conversation. For example, if run a small independent cafe or a mobile hairdresser just starting out.

Email bookings

You can add your email address and/or a contact form on your website. We advise you have your email address in the footer of your website, a Contact Us page and a contact form to your website if you wish for your customers to book your services/ product through email. A customer writes a message, and you write back and forth to confirm the details of the booking.

Pros

• Easy and convenient for you and your customers
• Saves time by using email and form templates
• You can schedule emails around your other tasks

Cons

• Customers don’t always know what information you need so it’s important to make it clear the level of detail you need in an email. The contact form is easier for your customer to understand what information you need because you have control of the boxes that they fill in
• People often expect an immediate response which isn’t always feasible
• Agreeing on the right details can take time and several emails back and forth which can be time consuming

Email bookings are handy if your customers tend to have special requests. For example, if you’re a party planner or vehicle hire company for events.

Booking services

You put a call-to-action button on your website to the booking service you use. Your customer then fills out all the boxes and provides all the details you need to complete the booking process.

Pros

• It is clear to your customers what information they need to provide you
• Easy and convenient for your customers
• Saves you time as a business owner, you don’t have to think about it

Cons

• Most booking services are paid services and require a subscription, which can be expensive
• Can feel less personal
• Relies on constant internet access

Booking services are perfect if you get a lot of bookings and only need standard information from your customers. For example, if you have a restaurant website or a website for a doctors surgery.

You can decide which method suits your business. In general, they’ll all work for your clients as long as you make the process clear and easy to use.

Here are a few of the most popular booking and scheduling services you can use today:



• Agendize
• Vcita
• Fresha
• Calendly
• SimplyBe.me

2. Make your booking option stand-out

It’s important to make your booking method easy for people to use. So clearly add it to your website for all of your customers to see. After all, your customers can only use your booking function if they notice it!

It's important to note, not every visitor will look at every page of your website. In fact, you may find that the majority won't venture past your homepage unless they are encourage to journey through your website with clear instruction or want to learn more about your business and what you have to offer. If your booking button on is hiding on a subpage, your visitors might never see it. You can easily avoid this by adding a button in the navigation bar of your website, for all to see. This should be linked to a page on your website that contains all the booking information your customer needs or it should be a drop down menu that contains that information. By displaying a button at the top of the page, in the navigation bar, you also ensure those visiting your website through a mobile device will also see the booking option.

Another way you can make sure your booking option stands out on your website is to add Call To Actions (CTAs) through the pages. CTAs are buttons, images/icons, or lines of text that prompt the customer to click and do something. Common CTAs you see on websites today are "Book Now", "Schedule A Call" and "Secure Your Place". All perfect examples of CTAs that can be used to make it crystal clear to your customers as to how they can book your company. To learn more about CTAs and get our free CTA checklist, click here.

3. Give your customers confidence

Before making a booking, customers want to know what’s included. For example, are towels included for guests who book a stay in your hotel room? Do I need to supply the products for the makeover?

If the website visitor feels unsure, they’ll be reluctant to book. So it's important you anticipate the questions they have and give them the information they need in advance. For example, on the page you display the pricing of your products and/or service, you can clearly describe what is and isn’t included and what each option costs. This will reassure potential customers and stop them from dropping out before they finish their booking.

If you get the same questions a lot, putting the answers on your booking page will save you lots of time. New visitors get their questions answered, plus they’ll see that you understand and care about your customers. This without a doubt will help you build the trust needed between you and your customers. It's a good idea to look at how your competitors inform their customers and compare. What information do they give customers before, during, and after the booking process?

Another great to way to ensure you give your customers confidence is provide a FAQs page on your website. On your bookings page, if you feel as if there are too many questions you want to cover and you don't want the page to be too busy, linking to a FAQ page is a great way to provide the answer to any question your customer has.

4. Check what the numbers say

When you look closely, you’ll start seeing lots of things you could change to your website to get more bookings. But what do the numbers say? Checking your website’s analytics will help you see what’s working and the areas that need a bit of work. For example, you can check how many visitors clicked the bookings button and how long they spent on your website. Use Google Analytics to see the numbers and see look into what your audience are doing on your website at the moment.

We advise you make your tweaks in stages and see if they make a positive impact on your statistics—like more clicks on your booking button or more contacts from your website visitors. if the numbers go up, you know it’s been a good change.

5. Experiment: find what works for you

If you’re just starting to look seriously at the numbers on your website, you might already have found some ideas from this article. Now you can make concrete tests out of them!

For each test, answer these questions:

1. What will you change on your website?
2. How many visitors do you need to see if it works?
3. Which numbers will show the impact of this change?

For example, your answers might be:

1. I’ll change the text on all my booking buttons to say "BOOK NOW".
2. I’ll check my statistics after 2000 visitors.
3. The click rate should increase.

Give yourself plenty of time to test the changes you make to your website. The more visitors you include, the more accurate your data will be, and the more certain you’ll be that the changes you've made have had an impact.

Here are some experiments to try now to increase bookings made through your website :

• Create a bookings page and put a link to this page on every page of your website
• Experiment with a different call-to-action buttons on your website with short and sweet instruction
• Answer frequently asked questions on your booking page
• Have a link to your FAQs page on your bookings page

Your website can do a lot for you. For example, let your customers book online no matter what time of day, leaving you free to focus on the important goings on in your business. These tests we have suggested above will show you what people respond to on your website so you can turn your small business website into a booking machine. So get analysing your website, go see what your competitors are doing, and then start test, test, test.