5 ways to create a high-converting direct booking website

Whatever your business, your website is (or could be!) a vital part of it. A website is like a virtual shop front, where customers come to investigate who you are and what you do. It can also be where they come to schedule appointments with you.

Direct booking through tools like TIMIFY allows customers to schedule their own appointments with you. A direct booking option is fast and efficient and doesn’t require customers to have lengthy calendar negotiations with your agents (although providing a “call” or “message us” option is handy for customers with complex needs or who prefer the human touch).  

But even the best booking engines need to be integrated with a great website. 

How can you create a direct booking website, with a high-conversion rate, that impacts customers on arrival and continues to impress with smooth and efficient functionality?

Let’s take a look:

5 ways to create a high-converting direct booking website

To deliver  a direct booking website that gets the online bookings rolling in, there are several things you need to consider. Here are five of the most important:

1.   Do plenty of customer research

Ultimately, the success of your website depends on how well you know your customers and how well you can cater to their needs. 

For example, do your customers value a fast, friction-free booking experience, or would they prefer more opportunities to check the information they’ve entered and make sure that everything is secure?  

Will your customers be viewing your website on mobile devices, desktops, or both? Where will they be clicking onto your website from? Social media? Email? Direct messages from your communication center? It all makes a difference. 

The needs of different customer groups vary widely. The booking experience that works for one demographic could confuse another. The same applies to almost every aspect of your website, from basic design elements to the color of your CTA buttons.

So, make sure that your web design and build team have a full and complete understanding of who your target customers are and what they want. Customer research will help a lot with this. 

It’s also a good idea to make sure that your website team communicates well with departments or team members who work regularly with customer research and data, such as marketing and sales. 
 
These departments/team members are likely to have valuable insights that could save your web design team a lot of time and effort.

2.   Don't neglect good web design

We’ve spoken above about the importance of understanding your customers and their needs. You’ll be able to fulfill most of those needs within the design of your site. Of course, some needs will have to be handled through SEO, marketing etc., but the basic design of your site can handle a huge amount of what your customers require. 

Think hard about everything from layout to color scheme. It’s important that your direct booking page is consistent with your branding but also that branding and imagery don’t come at the expense of functionality.

Similarly, consider what you want the copy surrounding your booking forms to say, how it should say it, and how the copy should be positioned for maximum clarity and impact.  

We’ll go into SEO in a moment — that’s a very important aspect of web copy — but layout, font, and other design-based aspects of your web copy can also make a huge difference to your site’s performance. 

It can help to create a web design wireframe before starting full development. This will allow you to see what your website will look like and even put certain elements to the test before committing any serious resources to building your website.

3.   Focus on accessibility

To get the most conversions, you need to make sure your site is accessible to all. 

Accessibility goes a lot deeper than you might think. It's not just about image descriptions and strobe-free media. It’s also about:

• Using color-combinations that are accessible for people who are color-blind 
• Making sure that all text can be read comprehensively by text-to-voice devices such as Alexa
• Making all buttons large and easy to click
• Making sure that all your ideas for domains are easy to type, read, and say (for voice-to-search purposes)
• Providing easily accessible subtitles for all video content
• Enabling keyboard navigation for customers with motor difficulties
• Having a simple and consistent web navigation system 
• Leaving time-limited content (for example, carousel slides) up for long enough for those with cognitive or motor issues to access
• Avoiding jargon and overly complex language

4.   Think SEO at every stage 

A beautifully designed and accessible website is no use if your customers can’t find it. So, make sure that you build SEO into everything that you do, from the basics of ensuring that search engines can crawl your site to things like writing highly optimized copy and link-building.

If you’re working in a particular area, consider local SEO as well. Work with local social media pages, make sure your direct booking business can be found on Google Maps, and generally make enough local references for Google and other search engines to understand where you are and include you in proximity-based results. 

For example, when someone searches “Lawyer Manhattan”, local SEO will first bring up results within Manhattan. Searching “Lawyer Brooklyn” will bring up different results.

The domain you choose can make a difference with SEO. Obviously the domain name is a huge factor in searchability, but there’s more to it than this. The TLD (Top Level Domain — the bit that comes after the . in a domain name — for example, “.com”, “.net” etc.) can also make an impact.

For example, is .tech a good domain for a software development company? Sure. Is it a good TLD for a hotel business? Probably not. When someone searches for “good hotel in London”, Google is unlikely to prioritize .tech domains. It will sweep relevant .com, .co.uk, and even .net options before .tech addresses.

5.   Use the best booking tool

A good website experience can be a huge factor in customer retention, so it’s important that you pick the right booking tool. 

The exact booking experience your customers want will vary depending on who they are, who you are as a business, and what your customers need. But there are some universal requirements:

• Security: Booking appointments involves quite a lot of customer data. It’s very important that you keep this data secure, both for the comfort and protection of your customers and so you don’t fall foul of data protection rules and regulations. 
• Efficiency: A clunky booking process that’s lengthy, confusing, or glitchy isn’t good for anyone. Prioritize efficiency and a smooth user experience.
• Usability: Your customers should be able to easily access and use your booking software from any device. All buttons and forms should be optimized for mobile and desktop. No user should have to struggle to see, fill in, or generally access any buttons or form fields.
• Easy integration: From a web design perspective, it’s vital that your booking tool fits into your website and any other channel you might want to share it from (for example, email or virtual phone systems). 

TIMIFY can provide all of this and more. It’s one of the most flexible and versatile appointment booking tools available, allowing you to customize your direct booking website according to your customers’ needs and benefit from the best, most efficient, secure, and accessible booking tools available.

Build a high-converting direct booking site to get more appointments and grow your business

Direct booking is a great way to empower your customers and get more appointments. Integrating a direct booking tool like TIMIFY into a well-written, well-designed, well-optimized website will boost those bookings even further.

The right website in combination with the right booking tool will send your booking conversion rate skyrocketing. Then it’s just up to you to make the most of those appointments, impress your customers, and hit your business growth goals.