Enhance lead generation on your booking page

Your booking webpage is a gold mine - and you're under-utilizing its potential. While many companies build elaborate and strategic landing pages to catch leads, a service business' appointment booking page does the trick. As we all know, not all website visitors are looking to purchase, while some are in the evaluation stage shortlisting their preferences before the final stage, others are browsing and collecting more information on the offerings. No matter what, each of your website visitors is a solid lead. The website visitors' profile has the highest probability of checking all your lead qualification boxes - whether it is matching your customer persona or whether they are a demographic fit. But, as established, not all tend to fill up your booking form. So, how do we broaden our horizons to ensure that we gather the information (especially contact information) for all these visiting leads? Let's take a look at a few tips and tricks that can enhance lead generation on your booking page:

1. Minimal form fields

Most businesses prefer to collect as much information as possible when collecting leads. The more information, the easier it is for the company to target them with relevant advertisements and a smoother sale process. Although, collecting a lot of information on a form means lengthy time-consuming forms - it is the easiest way to drive away your customers! You obviously do not want that. Keep your form short. Name, email, phone number, and the requested service - the 4 critical pieces of information you need to confirm an appointment. Your automated appointment booking application, Appointo, allows you to customize your form. Ensure that the customer does not spend more than a minute to fill in the form and submit the same. In the case of attached payment processes, you might require a few more fields, although this is a hurdle that we overcome in our next tip.

2. Conditional forms

Not all businesses can book appointments with a name and a contact detail, some services such as that of a doctor or a mechanic or a repair shop will most definitely require a few more details before they confirm an appointment. So, how do you make sure that your form asking for such details does not scare your customer away? Customers usually choose to book via the website in order to avoid multiple back and forth, avoid having to deal with communicating with another person on a call or in person, have access to booking an appointment after work-hours, and more. Although, a lengthy form is a definite no-no. For such circumstances, change the form style to conditional forms. Basically, this form type builds itself depending on the leads answer in the previous question. You can customize the form as per the request that the lead has - in case they wish to confirm an appointment at your health center and pre-pay for the service, the form can start collecting all the necessary information, on the other hand if someone is booking a first-time appointment with the doctor, the form can collect some basic details for the time being and collect the rest once they arrive at the health center. Since repeat customers are bound to stick to your service, they are more likely to be invested enough to fill in their details in order to confirm an appointment, but keeping the form short and simple for new customers encourages more new people to try the service. Appointo's custom form builder allows you to build complex conditional forms for all your customer personas.

3. Gated content

As already discussed, there will be website visitors prowling around, looking for more information, looking to understand the service you provide better or even just know more about the industry. These leads can easily be targeted and captured through gated content. Most of these visitors would be interested in informative articles, blogs, ebooks, whitepapers, infographics, videos, and more which can easily be gated with a short and simple form that captures their information. If you are a nail salon, gated videos of some of your better works or a short document on details on the types of services that your nail salon can offer can be gated with a short form asking for the leads basic contact information. This extends to most service businesses, whether its a repair shop, salon, mechanic, pet-groomers, therapists - no matter what field, there is a ton of content that can be value adding to those looking for more information. What's more, content related to your service industry also helps your website's SEO.

4. Scarcity marketing

Another tip to ensure that your website visitors are encouraged to book an appointment, is through scarcity marketing. Like most service businesses, your business must have a peak-time or preferred time and service that most of your customers wish to book. Whether it is a certain service provider, or a time slot or a service, each of these are available in limited numbers - obviously! Since you can't have infinite hours in a day, it's best to highlight these services are "Usually busy"or "Most preferred" and ask the reader to "Hurry before all the slots are full!" This ensures that customers who are still considering whether to try your service or not, might be encouraged to book a slot assuming the option will not be available later. This also encourages visitors to take faster decisions and helps boost new trials. This could also be used to leverage holiday offers and limited time services that your business maybe running.

5. Service descriptions

Lastly, an underwhelming tip but a very important and highly effective one is to share detailed descriptions of your services. As customers usually prowl through websites and land on your appointment booking page, they are most likely to miss the pages where you've talked at length about your services and what is inclusive in each of your offerings. Customers tend to be disheartened and wary of booking a service that they do not understand. A lack of description leaves the customer to build their own expectations or even delay the decision of booking an appointment. Let's assume you're a live experience provider and offer live engaging gaming experiences for your customers, for example a mystery room. Here, explaining the details of the experiences that the customer can choose from - such as the theme of the experience, the set-up - whether it is indoor or outdoors, number of people, pre-requirement for the experience, minimum/maximum age limit, time duration, and so on helps the customer decide which would be the best fit for them. In case of lack of information, the customers are highly likely to switch to competitors in favor of these ease of information or delay the booking decision until they have spoken to a spokesperson for the information who would then suggest and complete the sale.

To summarize, the appointment booking page attracts the most audience and holds a high potential for capturing leads. Follow minimalist forms, and custom fields, encourage quicker booking decisions with scarcity marketing, share information in exchange for their contacts, and ensure detailed service descriptions in the booking form to improve booking conversions and new trials.