We’ve all heard the expression “Seek and ye shall find”. When it comes to getting more bookings, you need to seek out and engage your audience across as many platforms as possible. This ensures that client prospects can easily access your services. If you are only sharing your booking link in one or two places, a percentage of the people looking for solutions will never find you. Let’s take a look at how to fix that!
The Seven Best Places to Share a Booking Link
- Your Organization’s Website
- Client Email Correspondences and Campaigns
- Social Media Channels
- Customer Support Auto Messages
- Embedding Links in a Video
- Digital Advertisements
- Television, Radio and Print
Sharing to a Website
If your organization has a website, there are many ways to funnel visitors towards the booking page. Here are just a few ideas:
- Create a Book Now CTA button and place it on your landing page so that it’s immediately accessible.
- Generate custom book now buttons that link directly to a member and/or meeting type. Place them on pages where your audience will be looking for those services specifically.
- Blog articles are a common destination for organic traffic, due to the concentrated use of SEO keywords. Take advantage of this by ending each article with a CTA.
- After Form Submission: If you have a form on your website where you gather information on leads, you can set up a redirect to your scheduling page to load on submit and pass that form data to the scheduling page. This technique, called form prepopulation, saves your client the hassle of entering their data twice.
Email Campaigns and Correspondences
Websites are a good initial point of contact. People seek you out through a search engine, but once they’ve made contact with one a representative, it’s important to have a strategy for sharing your booking URL via email.
- Don’t use email signatures. Several email clients, including Gmail, will exclude signatures by default. If you are sharing your booking url in a signature, take it out and put it in the email body.
- Position the booking link somewhere in the main body of the email.
- Advanced: If you are using a CRM to manage your email campaigns, consider using variables to prepopulate the customer’s data.
Leveraging Your Social Media Channels
Setting up and maintaining accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn will significantly improve your visibility. Additionally, these platforms also help in gaining more followers with improved visibility. While you’re using them, you may as well drop a link to your booking page URL for easy access, and don’t forget to create a rockstar bio.
- Facebook specifically provides a call to action button for business.
- Instagram and Twitter’s profile description areas permit hyperlinks.
- LinkedIn provides a blog feature where you can write content and share hyperlinked images (i.e. book now buttons).
- You can even post an image on your socials containing a QR code to your booking page.
Customer Support Auto Messages
If your organization is using help desk software to handle customer communications, you likely have automated messages set up to handle incoming support requests. Some of the best services include Intercom, Zendesk, and Freshdesk. Here are a few places where bookings links might be appropriate:
- Out of office: Don’t miss out on leads who come to you when you’re out of office. Reduce friction by giving them a booking link automatically when they contact you after hours.
- Offer a suggestion while they wait: If a customer contacts you during a period of high traffic, some help desks will provide AI bots to detect keywords and provide solutions proactively. If they are in a rush and don’t want to wait the 5-45 minutes that it might take to get a response, giving prospects a clickable link can speed up the process.
- Use A/B testing on buttons and links: Depending on the psychology of your clientele, people may have a bias towards links or buttons. Use A/B testing to determine what works best when sharing your link. You can typically add buttons to in-app and email auto messages.
Embedding Links in a Video
Have you heard the expression Content is King? One of the most powerful ways to promote a brand is through viral video content. Consequently, sharing clickable links within a video has emerged as a popular alternative medium for sharing content.
- Youtube’s Partner Program provides channel administrators the option of linking to websites using card-overlays.
- Business Video Hosting services have been used by Appointlet customers to add clickable links and gain additional video analytics that Youtube does not provide. SproutVideo is one solution that our users have used successfully.
Digital Advertising
The scope of digital advertising is immense. If you are just getting started with marketing your brand online, here are a few critical resources to consider for advertising your website and booking page.
- Google AdWords
- Advertising on Facebook
- Advertising on Instagram
- Advertising on LinkedIn
- Advertising on Youtube
Television, Radio and Print
If your organization’s booking page is easy to remember, you can use traditional marketing channels to promote the page. The downside here is that your audience cannot click on something and get instant gratification. They will have to manually type the URL into their browser. It may be a better idea to provide your home page rather, and use the CTA button technique outlined previously to drive traffic to your booking page.
So, what’s the best fit for YOU?
Now that you are aware of the best ways to share a booking page, it’s time to figure out what will work best for your organization. If you are currently using only one or two of these techniques, can you identify a few more methods of sharing that will improve your conversion rate?z
