How to optimize appointment booking funnel conversion for more booked appointments?
Booking funnel conversion is a route that takes browsers from discovering your services to scheduling an appointment.
Funnel conversion is the process of bringing your potential customers step-by-step closer to your products or services. It consists of several touchpoints like emails, videos, articles, and landing pages that you use to attract customers. Appointment booking funnel conversion works for consulting businesses or service providers where you first need to talk to the potential clients before selling the actual service.
The primary requirement for booking funnel conversion is to integrate marketing and sales into a single loop. Standing on top of the funnel, your marketing strategy should be tailored to navigate browsing prospects on your booking page.
5 pillars of successful appointment booking funnel conversion
As fun and exciting as creating a booking funnel conversion is, a lot of research and undertaking goes behind it.
1. Exposure
You may have the coolest funnel, but as long as it is not seen by the audience you envision, it is wasted. Making people get into the booking funnel is the first concern that you have to handle.
There are different ways to generate traffic to your landing page such as publishing articles, podcasting, and social media. paid campaigns. Traditionally, businesses used to offer lead magnets such as ebooks, and e-newsletters, for the purpose of collecting contact details. But, this type of lead generation does offline products like hotel bookings, beauty & wellness services that should be delivered via the physical participation of parties.
You can look for Facebook Ads, and Google Ads depending on the occupancy of your target audience. For consulting types of businesses Google Ads works seems more promising than other types. Since prospects type their problems directly to the Google search, the chances of getting higher lookbacks are more here.
While on Facebook, users are actually surfing for a fun time without intending to make a certain purchase. You can kind of remind people about the matters that can be a problem or solution for them through Facebook Ads. Your ad copy and visual has a huge impact on getting higher click-through rates. Be sure to include the main problem users face and match it with your unique solution also called the unique value proposition in the lead generation dictionary to the ad.
2. Landing page
Next is a well-curated landing page that visitors come through the ad. Well, this is the tricky part that most marketers overlook. Picking the right landing page is halfway through getting the booking calendar filled. Usually, businesses pick random pages in their content optimization process to drive attention to the booking page.
The aim of the landing page is to collect prospects’ names and the medium of contact that you would reach them. You need a few things in order to make them submit that form. The number one requirement is relevance. Make sure that the landing page is relevant to the service that you deliver and the problem that the target audience looks for.
Next, you need to show that you are a credible source of solutions for the prospects. Concentrating on the benefits of your services is more suitable than mentioning feature descriptions. Considering that you have a separate page for features, you do not need to worry about awareness of them. Showcasing social proof via customer testimonials and reviews would be a nice extra to help prospects know that you are the right avenue for them.
3. Appointment booking scheduler
Our aim is to reduce person-to-person contact and direct visitors to our booking calendar. There are various booking scheduler tools that you can incorporate into your website. You need to invest in the one that will walk you through all phases of the appointment booking process. If your website is built on WordPress, you can consider the Booknetic appointment booking plugin. It entails several functionalities that will facilitate the booking process for you and your clients. Integration with third-party tools helps to automate processes at a relatively low cost that you would have in individual software.
Customization parameters allow businesses from any background to personalize their booking procedure, change the order of steps, and manage unlimited working units, employees, locations under a single system. Supporting the most popular payment gateways helps to receive service fees without manual touchpoints.
Its built-in CRM system ensures that prospects’ details are automatically saved to the system. Once clients fill out the registration information, their data is added to the system. Integrating with Google Calendar that prospects can easily book appointments at the time you are available. It also sends automated email notifications to staff and clients that the appointment date is saved on everybody’s calendar.
4. Thank you page
You may embed a video or leave a sweet thank you message to prospects for their visit, add the calendar to the window. In fact, you can embed the appointment booking calendar right to the landing page. But collecting the information of prospects is the nitty-gritty part of appointment booking funnel conversion.
Most people get stuck at this phase of appointment booking funnel conversion, going back and forth to either book an appointment or not. In the light of these changing dynamics, it is crucial for you to be out there and be available for booking in all parts of the day.
We recommend you provide people with more information about your services, link some case studies, or post a promotional video on your site that might catch subscribers’ attention. Videos have great potential to deliver your story and awaken people’s curiosity. It is proven practice that the more content people consume about your brand before talking to you, the higher the chances that they will convert.
5. Email automation
Email automation is the last step of booking funnel conversion that you get in touch with prospective clients as well as the existing ones. It is a fact that a large proportion of people who fill out opt-in forms drop browsing the website without making appointments. Yet, the holy aim of appointment booking funnel conversion is to bring short stoppers to your appointment room. If you make customer communication smoother and short, you organically fire the user retention rate of the appointment booking funnel.
You can either directly call prospects one-by-one which is a very time and resource-consuming process. Or, you can send out automated emails adding the link to your booking calendar. Keep your email content geared towards the solution and use a proper call to action for the scheduler link. There are lots of email automation tools, email plugins for WordPress users that will walk you to the end of booking funnel conversion.
Another benefit of email automation is that it nurtures relations with clients. You can send out emails to welcome email subscribers and introduce them to who you are and what you do in a more friendly way. This further can be followed by seasonal email campaigns, discount offers to trigger appointment bookings. You have to be extra careful with email sequences so that you do not end up getting lost spam boxes instead boost email open rates.
How to optimize booking funnel conversion?
To get clear insights into what happens inside of the booking funnel you need to look deeper into each stage of analytics. Analytics of your booking funnel will reveal at which stages you lose clients. This will also help to categorize website users according to their device categories, locations, and source, and treat them accordingly in the further stages of the funnel.
Optimization of your booking funnel includes your overall website experience. Your homepage acts as the front food for your online bookings. You need to have an intuitive design and to-the-point content that encourages visitors to dive into other pages of your website. Overly complicated pages overwhelm users and drive them away from your website.
Packed with persuading CTAs, website content will guide users across the booking funnel conversion. CTA text should exactly indicate what users should be expecting upon clicking the button. Costly CTA mistakes can waste your whole booking funnel.
Mobile optimization is a vital factor that can jeopardize your website performance as well as your booking conversion.
Bottom line
Constructing booking funnel conversion that generates more leads is a long process intersecting your marketing, sales, and product teams. In order to make this funnel work, you need to put the time in to fully understand customer behavior and guide them through your website until they book an appointment. When this funnel fetches customer data throughout the customer life cycle, it eventually increases booking rates and produces higher ROI.
