Add Online Booking To Your Website To Get More Clients – Part 2

Online Booking part 2

Hi everyone! This is Part 2 in the online booking video series. 

In this video you’ll learn how to:

  • Set up your business info
  • Set up availability, booking notifications, and reminders
  • Set up booking and cancellation policies

TRANSCRIPT:

In my last video I showed you how to add Online Booking to your website, and how to set up a service that can be booked on your website. 

In this video I’ll show you how to set up your Business info, including your business’ booking availability, how to send booking notifications and reminders for you, staff members, and clients, and how to set booking and cancellation policies. 

I’ll also show you how to view all of your booking on your website in list and calendar view.

So I’m logged into the website builder.

The next thing I’ll do is set my Business Default Hours.

Click Manage Default Hours, and this is the general availability of your services that can be booked on your website, if you set the hours to default. 

We’ll set the default hours now. Click Save, and now we’ll go back to the Overview.

And lastly we’ll set the Business Info. 

I’ll set the Business Name

I don’t have a logo yet so I’ll leave that blank. 

For contact info, this is the info that will be shown on my confirmation emails, and the address will be used as my business location. 

You can also set your regional settings, and if you have prices displayed for your services, you can set the currency for your website. 

I’ll also set the time zone.

Now I’ll click Save and Publish. 

Now let’s go back to the site builder. 

I want to show you how to set notifications, and and how to set booking policies for the online booking system on your website. 

So we’ll open the bookings manager again, and now under settings, click on Notifications.

Here you can choose which email notifications will be sent out.

The first section are the notifications that are sent to you, the site owner.

The second category shows the notifications that will be sent to your staff that have been added to your website.

And the last notification category shows the notifications that will be sent to clients. 

So the notifications have all been turned on by default, so everyone will receive an email notification when an appointment has been booked, cancelled, or rescheduled. 

Clients will also receive an appointment reminder, which greatly reduces no-shows.

So you can deselect any of these notifications if you don’t want to get these sent out. 

Note that clients will always be sent a confirmation email when an appointment has been successfully booked, so you will not be able to deselect that option.

Now notifications to the site owner will be sent to the email that you have set up as the contact for the Business Info.

I’ll quickly jump to that, click Bookings Overview, and if you click on Business Info, you can set all of that up. Now we’ll click back to Notifications. 

Notifications for the staff will be sent to the email that is on the record for their staff contact info.

And notifications for clients will be sent to the email that they used to book their appointment.

By default, the emails will be sent from a generic system email sender, but if you would like to customize the email address that the emails are sent out from, you have the option to add a custom sender email. 

This is helpful to keep your branding consistent, and also to ensure that clients are more aware of where the email notifications are coming from.

I’ll show you where to find that.

To set up a custom email sender, we’ll need to leave the booking manager.

So we’ll close this, and then we’ll click to go back to the dashboard.

Now choose Site Settings, and under Communication Tools, we’ll click Sender Email Address. 

Now we can set up the custom email sender here. Just fill out this information for the email you want to set up as the email sender. 

For consistency, you might want to make the Custom Email Sender the same email address as the contact email that I’ll receive email notifications to.

Just a note, this will be the email address that customers will see as the sender for notifications about online booking, and also if you have a store, it will also be the email sender for notifications sent out for the store.

So you can set this up if you’d like, and click Save and Publish changes and close this. 

Since I didn’t set one up I’ll just close it.

Now I want to show you how to set the booking and cancellation policies for scheduling appointments on your website.

Now we’ll open the Bookings and click Bookings Manager again.

And then click on Booking Policy at the bottom.

Now you can set whether you allow cancellations, and if so, you can choose the latest time a client can cancel before a session starts.

For example, I’ll allow cancellation, but the latest time they can book will be 24 hours before the session start time.

I’ll do the same for rescheduling.

So if you allow cancellation and rescheduling, your clients will be able to follow the link in their booking email confirmation to manage their booking, and they will have the option to cancel or reschedule their appointment.

You can also set limits for how far in advance or how close to the session a client can make a booking.

Now once you’ve set your booking and cancellation policies, you can also choose to write out your policies, or any other health and safety policies that you’d like to inform clients about. 

If you add a policy, clients will see them on the booking form, and on the manage booking pages. 

I also want to show you how to see all of your bookings on the website.

You can see a calendar view by clicking booking calendar, and you can use the filters to see how appointments for specific staff, or click on the dropdown to see a weekly, daily or monthly view.

You can also modify the dates you’d like to see here.

If you go to Booking List, you can see how the appointments that have been booked for the website.  

So that’s it for this video! As you can see it is so simple to add online booking to your website, and customize the settings to suit your needs. We hope this was helpful, and thanks for watching!

To see Online Booking Part 1, go to this video.