Reminder emails are an important part of the booking process, adding value to your customer and, by consequence, your business. They represent an opportunity to keep your customers informed, engaged and enthused about their upcoming course booking, while providing a practical value to your booking management processes.
Engaging Your Clients
After a booking has been made you probably send out a confirmation email or text (or both). But if that’s the last time you communicate with them until the course itself, then you’re missing an opportunity to keep them engaged, to keep your brand and your products in view and to maintain the sense that they’re valued customers.
After all, it may be some time between making the booking and the course taking place.
Reducing No Shows
No shows can be a problem for course providers for a number of reasons. For example, the course may form a compulsory part of a wider training programme or apprenticeship scheme. If the candidate doesn’t show then there’s the potential for further admin headaches getting them rearranged onto another session.
By sending reminders (or a series of reminders) then you significantly decrease the chance that a candidate forgets the booking or gets the wrong date, time or location for the course.
Helping You Get Paid
If you allow for deposit payments at the point of booking, or it’s an account holder who pays via invoice, then a quick and friendly reminder that the balance is due can help speed up the time taken to get the money into your account.
And if they still don’t pay, then increasingly stronger-toned follow-ups can also be deployed to help ensure the payment is made.
Capturing Candidate Information
For many training courses, events or activities there will be a requirement to capture certain information before the course begins. While much of this will be gathered during the booking, there may be some things missing from the profile (dietary requirements or emergency contact, for instance).
A quick reminder not only helps ensure you capture this with as little fuss as possible, but sends the message to the client that you are paying attention to their needs and are looking to ensure the best delivery possible.
Helping Course Delivery
To help your course run as smoothly as possible then you want your candidates to be fully prepared. This means ensuring they have full joining instructions from date, time and location, as well as any pre-course materials or preparation work they may need.
Reminders can help with this, either by simply reminding the candidate of all the details, or by using a message specifically to provide this information at a suitable point ahead of time. For instance, rather than overload course information at the confirmation stage, which could be lost or forgotten about, you could send joining instructions and preparation materials as part of a reminder a few days before the course.
Opportunities to Upsell?
If you’ve set up a series of communications between booking and course date, then you have the opportunity to strengthen the trust between customer and business. From whetting the appetite about the course to come, to reassuring them that everything is under control.
In so doing you can create an environment suitable for upselling, within your reminder emails. This could be incorporating links within the email to let clients order merchandise relevant to their training, or perhaps to other courses that might interest them that complement what they’ve already booked.
Automating Reminders Increases The Value
Of course, the hindrance to sending out confirmations, reminders and other forms of communication to clients is the fact they can be very time-consuming. Especially when you have a ton of other tasks to be getting on with.
Where the real value lies, therefore, is in the ability to automate these messages.
If your booking system can be configured to send out these different reminders, based on triggers you need, then you reap the benefit from meaningful engagement with each client. All of which helps keep the bookings and revenue coming in, enhances the relationship between client and brand and helps keep course spaces filled with enthusiastic candidates.
All while removing the manual burden from your workload.
At thinkBooker, we specialise in online booking systems for training courses, classes, activities and events – optimised for efficiency, growth and ongoing client satisfaction.
Browse the site to learn more about course booking systems, sports booking systems, event booking systems and more, or get in touch directly to find out how we can help you.
