As an online business owner, you absolutely need to have a booking system in place to allow your clients to book discovery calls and sessions with you.
Think about the time you waste in the back and forth of emails when you try to find a time that suits everyone…
“No, this day doesn’t work..
Not this time, kids are at home..
Unfortunately on that day…”
And so on. Now, I know that tech may not be your best friend, but if you don’t befriend a bit of tech to smoothen and simplify your booking procedure, you seriously risk to miss out on possible sales.
If your booking process isn’t easy and quick, boy, we have a big problem!
Two of the most used tools are Calendly and Acuity, but in this article I’m only going to cover Acuity, as it’s my absolute favourite: I’ve used Calendly, but I personally like more Acuity.
Why You Need a Booking System
Having a booking system makes the experience pleasant for your prospect and clients: they can choose the time and day they prefer, and just to mention some of the benefits for you:
- you set your availability and make it super easy for your clients to book a call/meeting,
- You have the chance to ask questions to learn more about your prospect so you can get to the call prepared,
- You can attach terms and conditions, so your clients know what is involved and what they can expect.
With Acuity, you can set email reminders for your clients to go out before the call, you can place you Zoom room link in the confirmation email so you don’t need to send it separately, and you can even create coupons and gift cards.
These are only a bunch of reasons why I love so much Acuity, but what I actually want to tell you in this article, goes a bit deeper.
During my weekly “learning and development session”, I decided to invest some time and learn more about the non-common features of Acuity and I was amazed!
So, if you’re looking for a great call scheduler tool, look no further. Acuity is simply one of the best investments you can make in your business to have a smooth, streamlined and simplified call scheduling system that helps you land more clients.
Feature 1 – Create Packages and Gift Certificates
As a business owner, you may want to offer packages of multiple sessions at once: whether you’re running a special promotion, or you want to give your clients the chance to book all of the sessions at once, you can absolutely do it with Acuity.
You can give your package an expiration date and you can even decide how your package can be redeemed:
- a specific amount of minutes: for example if the package is valid for 5 hours, you can give your clients the chance to book 5x60minutes sessions or 10x30 minutes sessions,
- X euro/dollars/pounds: for example if you offer a variety of sessions of different prices;
- a specific number of sessions: the sessions can belong to the same appointment type or not.
Acuity gives you the possibility of creating gift certificates as well: okay, they don’t look too nice, to be honest, but the most important part is the gift code: when you have that, you can create your own nice certificate using Canva, Crello or Photoshop.
Feature 2 – Ban People From Booking Calls
I don’t know about you, but when I started out, it happened many times to have a no-show during a discovery call.
Sometimes it’s an emergency, but there might be people that keep booking discovery sessions with you and they never show up without even letting you know in advance.
Or the client might have an outstanding payment.
In the worst case scenario, you may want to ban that person to book more sessions with you, and you can absolutely do it with Acuity.
You can even set Acuity to display a note, for example explaining why the client can’t book a session with you.
Feature 3 – Facebook Ads Pixel
Are you planning to run Facebook Ads? Did you know that you can integrate your FB pixel to work with Acuity for retargeting and for tracking conversions.
Let’s say you want to run an ad to encourage people to jump on a call with you or to buy a session: if you want to know your conversion rate, you can make Facebook talk to Acuity.
Pretty handy!
Feature 4 – Reports
About every quarter, I want to see what has been working in my business, and what hasn’t, or how many discovery calls I had, and how many converted into paying clients.
That’s exactly what you can do with Acuity’s reports.
You can track the scheduled appointments in different categories: if you have multiple types of appointments, you can see how many you had of each type.
Or you can check the revenue from each type of appointment, and this is pretty handy, especially if you offer different consultations and sessions, so you can see what has been the most and least popular.
I personally love this feature, it makes it super easy to track the performance of the quarters or year!
Summing Up
Acuity is definitely one of the must-have tools you need in place to run your online coaching business: not only it makes it easier for your prospect and clients to book a session with you, but it also simplifies and automate the process, and when you’re ready to grow and scale your business, you definitely need to look at automations (so you can focus on what you really love doing).
