Accepting bookings online

[Will]

Just wondering how many people currently accept bookings online through their website and what sort of conversion rate they're getting? I've been thinking of integrating my site with google adwords so I can better track and increase conversions.

At the moment almost all of my bookings come via the phone however I've noticed that uni students seem to favor booking online so I'd like to try and improve this aspect of my site. Thanks.

 

[Mr.Mike]

I am a mobile tech and I am currently setting up my new site to do just that. I am also offering remote repairs as an option. My site should be up within the next week or so. I'll let you know the results if you want to stay in touch. Just email me.

 

[300DDR]

I used to require an appointment for all clients (when I worked from my home). Answering machine message told people to make an appointment online and I would email and tell people the same thing (this is when I used to not pickup the phone because too busy and I hate waisting time talking to clients). I used setster.com for years and they are AWESOME! Highly recommend! Great service and great support.

 

[OzzyGeek]

Yes I take bookings via my website and it is very successful. Just make sure you always respond promptly to requests and it will work for you. I use a company called Formsite.com for all my online forms.

 

[Will]

I'm glad to hear that it's working well for both of you. Looks like I should put some more effort into this. Currently I'm using wufoo.com and they've been excellent, although the forms can sometimes be limiting in that it allows clients to double book.

OzzyGeek, do you still take the majority of your business through the phone?

 

[callthatgirl]

Online booking is something I am trying to figure out now for remote support jobs. We currently take "book an appt" type requests through mhelpdesk and our own forms via Wordpress.

http://callthatgirl.biz/computer-repair-online-ticket-form

Looks like that, it works...we get many requests a week.

I also have these forms in my blogs and in a variety of places throughout my website as "call to action" (call us!)

 

[OzzyGeek]

I'm glad to hear that it's working well for both of you. Looks like I should put some more effort into this. Currently I'm using wufoo.com and they've been excellent, although the forms can sometimes be limiting in that it allows clients to double book.

OzzyGeek, do you still take the majority of your business through the phone?

I have the online bookings option mainly because I believe a lot of customers prefer to do business online now rather than talking to someone face to face over the phone, it gives the customer another option to contact you. I would say at the moment it is probably around 80% phone calls and the rest via forms and email. However we are in the business of repairing computers and a lot of the time customers cannot use their computer to make bookings online because their computer is not working or they have no internet. So while I do offer this service I still think the old telephone is the way most customers will contact me.

My biggest hate is businesses who offer these services but either do not reply in a timely manner or don't reply at all. So if you are going to give your customers the option of online bookings etc make sure you respond in a timely fashion. Just the other day I went online looking for information regarding tyres for my car, contacted four business via there online forms and only one bothered to respond, needless to say the 3 that didn't respond will never get my business and the funny part is that one of the ones that did not reply put me on their mailing list. Unreal!

 

[Mr.Mike]

I believe a lot of customers prefer to do business online now rather than talking to someone face to face over the phone,

Ha Ha! Gotta love it.

 

[geek15]

I can't speak for the conversion rate yet, as I am just getting started. I decided to give Groupon Scheduler (groupon.com/scheduler) a try. It's free!

___________________________________________________________________
The Discount Geek - DiscountGeekMA.com

 

[Magic Miguel]

I've seen countless appointment software that integrates with WordPress or similar CMS but I am looking for something similar or even exactly as the one that Apple uses for their Genius Bar appointments.

 

[drpcfix]

We tried a few things;

Self-serve making their own tickets via a contact form - they couldn't provide enough information to make it useful

Various types of contact forms, like so;
http://drpcfix.com/get-help-now.html?from-top
(the form on the right)
These DO work - but I would not consider this 'online booking' - this is just lead generation, you have to follow up with all of these very actively.

We also use Joomla and used a number of "appointment booking" components, especially resource booking pro and appointment booking pro -
They work - but nobody would ever use them, and, the usability on tools like that isn't great.

I tried tungle.me for quite a while in my email signature, and with online links, I even told about 10 people to go there and nobody ever got all the way through it to book something 'all the way' to a scheduled appointment.

We eventually settled on just using various types of contact forms, with and without captchas, etc - when you get a lot of web traffic - the spam gets a little crazy.

One thing you should be doing is building multiple pages on your site, and multiple contact forms, and point one adwords campaign at one contact form -
setup funnels in google analytics to see those pages, tie them to the campaigns, and all the way through to the SEPARATE thank you pages for each form.

You'll be able to measure campaigns spend, and leads - unless they stop and call you.

I didn't spend the time to get properly sophisticated to show different tracking phone numbers on each contact form - because I thought enough people would start clicking around the site and the phone numbers would be generic again once they left the page.

IF you want to build some squeeze pages, so they can't click around, and you can use tracking phone numbers, it would give you some awesome feedback - I always thought a squeeze page would be the next thing I'll try in optimizing my adwords - but I can't figure out how to spend more than like $300/month in my market - so not sure I want to put a ton of effort in to that right now.

I can tell you this, if there was enough traffic to get that spend up to like $1000/month I would be building a set of squeeze pages right now.