Attention personal trainers and club owners! Online booking can increase your sales while making your lives easier. Let’s take a look at three different segments that benefit from using web-based scheduling.
Benefits to your clients: Your clients can log-on to your website and see your availability as you have set it. Your clients can:
• Sign-up for appointments
• Buy training packages set by you
• See available fitness classes and sign-up online
• Review past, future and current appointments
• Receive email and mobile text message reminders.
(It’s comparable to shopping for travel destinations or reviewing seats for an event through online ticket companies – and, many people prefer to book online, on their own time.)
Benefits to you: Just as you recommend to your clients that they continue to eat properly and maintain regular workouts to achieve a healthy lifestyle…a healthy business is not much different. With online booking, you establish your schedule and make it available to your clients 24 hours a day. You can:
• Set your own schedule and let clients book 24/7
• Determine your own rates and sell your own packages
• Set your own rules, e.g. booking and cancellation policies
• Use targeted marketing to increase participation in other areas.
• Check your schedule from anywhere with an Internet connection.
Once you establish a rapport with your clients, online booking becomes your trusted sales source. You can be on the training floor or away from work while your clients are booking appointments with you 24/7. You’ll be able to manage all aspects of your business anywhere, anytime. Here’s a proposition: Calculate the time you spend contacting clients in a week regarding booking, canceling, rebooking, no-shows, phone tag, email messages, reminders, and so on. Multiply this by four. Would it be worth $25 per month to have all of this done for you – so that you can spend that extra time on the training floor?
Benefits to your business: Business is about knowledge – knowing your clients; effective marketing, and access to precise data that tells you the story of your bottom line. With paper notes, you’ll have a good idea about how many hours you’ve worked. With computerbased systems, you have many more tools to give you all of the information you need, including precise statistics and reports on:
• Efficiency
• Hours worked
• Peak hours
• Comparisons
• Packages sold
• Past, present and future bookings
• Late cancellation tracking
• Automatic-invoicing by emailing PDF documents
• Automatic bank payments from your clients
• Acceptance of credit cards
• Enforcement of your cancellation policies
• Reminders sent to: clients, top clients, dropped clients.
Additional benefits of booking and scheduling online are:
Program Registration: In addition to scheduling, it’s easy to offer online program registration (you’ll want to have the option to add other modules to your software). Online program registration can save enormous headaches for those people or businesses that have a significant number of classes. For example, clients can sign-up for Spinning, Gravity, or other classes online and even select the equipment they wish to use.
Data: All of your scheduling data can be stored indefinitely, giving you the opportunity to review statistics over time periods and to discover how your business progresses. This can also indicate trends, giving you the edge to move with the industry. As your marketing campaign begins, you’ll be able to measure the effectiveness of your marketing with the numerous statistics available to you.
Payment Collection: It’s universal that it can be difficult to collect payment from various clients. The online process can significantly reduce the difficulty by automatically billing clients via credit card on pre-arranged dates. The money is transferred to your account within two to three business days, and your clients are automatically emailed their receipts.
The traits of successful business include: offering outstanding customer service; maintaining an aggressive sales campaign; offering items that competitors may not; using technology to your advantage, and realizing precisely where your business is and where it’s headed. When you have real-time statistics, you’ll be surprised at how much more information you have and the insight it gives you to run an exceptional and progressive company.
Some things to consider before going online… There are a number of items to consider before heading online. Is it beneficial to integrate scheduling with your management or billing system? Some people will opt to have scheduling on its own, and others will want to have the scheduling synched with their management system. Whichever option you wish to choose for your club, ensure that the program will work with your management system to save you from any trouble down the road.
When selecting a scheduling company, consider the following: How is the support, and is there a cost for support? There’s nothing more frustrating than doing something critical when your program is not responding properly. At that moment, you want support, and you need it now. So, be sure to find out – not from the software company, but from their clients – about a company’s support.
My final advice is to research the scheduling companies through the Internet, tradeshows, industry literature, or by calling other training businesses. You’ll want to contact their clients and find out how their software has been performing for them. Consider the benefits you will want to receive from your system. Choose the right company with which to work. Make your move online, and you’ll be on the way to a whole new world. The Internet is an extremely powerful tool, if used properly, and it can offer you benefits that you may have never imagined!
Pat McMurrich is the Web wizard of GameTime. He can be contacted at 866.230.4999, or by email at pat@i2.ca, or visit www.i2.ca.
