It’s been a few days since New Years Eve and your clients are still trying to keep their resolutions, but they’re having a hard time. It’s your chance to help them make some positive changes while taking the edge of the holiday sales hangover. That’s why we’re offering a few ideas for cashing in on New Years resolutions.

Help people get started

Breaking bad habits, getting in shape and taking up new activities are the most common New Years resolutions. If you’re a coach, consultant or trainer you can help your clients get started (or get back on board) by offering some incentives.

You can discount a long-term membership or multi-class package, but your clients know as well as you do that resolutions don’t always take. A better tactic is to offer introductory packages, which can then be applied as a discount longer term packages. Alternatively, you can include some basic supplies (yoga mats, workout clothes, etc.) to eliminate the secondary costs.

New year, new looks

A New Years resolution is all about changing things up and not everybody is looking for something long term. You can bank on that sense of adventure around New Years to upsell existing clients and drive business to new services.

Salons can offer a discounts to anyone that changes their hair color. Tattoo artists can offer first-timer discounts during January. Whatever you decide to do it should focus on getting your existing customers to try services they may never have considered.

Keep ‘em coming back

Bringing a few extra customers in during January is a good thing but you want at least a few of them to keep coming back once the holidays are over. You could hope that everybody who decided to lose 15 pounds succeeds, but it might be better to offer some incentives.

Whether you’re offering classes or cuts, you can offer freebies to anyone who has hit certain milestones. (i.e. Attend five classes before April.) You can also offer second-chance discounts later in the year to anyone who got started in January but fell off the wagon.

Did you make any resolutions for your business this year? Have you kept them? Do you have any other ideas for New Years specials? Let us know in the comments!

The holiday season is here and, if you’re a small business owner, you’re looking for ways to capture some of those Christmas dollars. There are a lot of strategies for boosting sales at Christmas, but it pays to remember that old holiday mantra: “Tis better to give than to receive.’’

Supporting a charitable cause around the holidays is a great way to increase awareness of your business, drive some extra traffic and, if all else fails, earn yourself some good Karma. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

Create A Charity Product

The best way to get people to give to charity is to make it easy for them. Creating a special holiday bundle, package or product and announcing that a portion of the profits go to charity lets your customers kill two birds with one stone and feel good while doing it. You can even create a couple of bundles focused on different causes to give people options or focus exclusively on local charities to keep the money within the community.

Make sure the product is really solid, since customers aren’t going to buy a lousy gift just because it’s going to charity. Also, make it clear how much goes to charity for each one sold and make it enough to matter.

Become The Drop-Off Point For a Charity Drive

Koats for Kids, Toys for Tots, local food banks; they’re all active in your community and they’re in high gear around the holidays. All it takes in a phone call to get a bin or a barrel dropped off at your business. It’s going to bring a few extra people through the door, make your customer feel good about choosing your business and it’s an opportunity to do some advertising.

Offer a discount to anyone who brings in an item you’re collecting. Send out a newsletter or post on social media that you’re a drop-off point. Choose a charity that lists drop-off locations on their website. Anything you can do to get some exposure will help you and the organization you’re supporting.

Talk To Local Media

Once you’ve got your charity campaign up and running, reach out to the local newspapers and TV stations. They’re always looking for stories about local businesses helping out the community and even if they decide to be a Grinch and won’t cover you, they’ll have community calendars and event listings that anyone can be part of.

Giving back to the community and helping those less fortunate is what the holidays are all about. These are just a few ideas for how you can help your customers, grow your business and support some good causes. If you’ve got any other ideas, let the Bookedin team know in the comments!

Name, phone number and email address; it’s the holy trinity of client information. The first two are an obvious necessity, but there are so many things you can do with a client’s email address to help grow your business. You’ll be asking for it whenever possible.
Before you get started, you might want to sign up with an email service like MailChimp or Constant Contact to help you get organized. These systems make it easy to send out professional emails to your client list.

1. Follow-ups 

A follow-up email is an easy way to stay engaged with your clients once the booking is over. The follow-up can be a reminder related of their recent appointment booking, a discount offer to encourage repeat business or a simple request for feedback. As long as you have a reason to get in touch, clients will appreciate the attention.

2. Surveys

I already mentioned collecting feedback – and including a survey in a follow-up email is a great option – but surveys are good for more than just ranking customer satisfaction. Just got a new website? Ask your clients what they think! Considering branching out and offering a new service? See who’s interested! It’s a great way to show people you value their input while reminding them you’re still around. If you really want to drive engagement you can enter everyone who responds into a draw for a gift card or free service of your choice.

3. Promotions

Whether it’s a seasonal special, a limited time offer to a personalized deal, you get more bang for your buck when people you let people know via email. Just be careful not to have a sale every week or people will start treating your emails as spam. Use email exclusive promotions as an incentive to get people on your list in the first place. Try offering a ‘Welcome Back!’ rate to clients who haven’t been in for awhile. Or simply announce your feature service for the month. You’ll be surprised how much better your promotions perform when you’re using email effectively.
You can do a lot of these things in person or by phone, but they take a lot more time and you’ll end up leaving a lot of voice mails. (Which is like an email, but worse.) People may eventually unsubscribe from your list, but the ones that don’t are more likely to book appointments for your services in the future.
Ultimately, a client’s email address is a tool and it’s up to you how to use it best!

Feedback comes in many forms. Some are easy to recognize – like a client yelling at you over the phone – but others aren’t as obvious. Growing your business involves listening to what your clients are telling you, even if they never say it out loud.

There are a million ways to listen to your clients – some creepier than others – but these are some simple tactics for collecting and reacting to customer feedback.

Listening to a broken record

When a client calls in asking if you offer a service, they’re really telling you that you should be offering that service. That doesn’t mean you need to start offering cat manicures because one person demanded it, but tracking your service requests is an easy way to recognize market demand.

The same is true for web feedback and it’s already being tracked for you. Start collecting complaints – online and otherwise – and look for recurring themes. It will help you separate the real issues from the one-off complaints. Just try not to get defensive when listening to the people who gave you a 2.3 ranking on Yelp.

Voting with their dollars

Your clients will tell you what you’re good at by making it your most popular service. They’ll also tell you what they don’t want by never asking for it. Ultimately, you want to focus on the former and drop the latter. You might think more options can’t hurt, but an unfocused list of services is a down market calling card.

The most valuable feedback you can get from you clients is whether they come back. If you’ve got a system that tracks it, keep an eye on that number. If not, start asking ‘Is this your first time with us?’ after every appointment booking and track the ratio.

The silent majority

Your clients can tell you a lot about your business without realizing it, but they can tell you even more if you ask them. One of the most common reasons people don’t give feedback is because you haven’t given them an opportunity. Whether you email surveys, encourage people to post on Facebook or ask them while they’re paying for their appointment, you’ll be surprised how willing people are to share feedback.

Speaking of feedback, we want to know what you think of Talking Shop! Tell us in the comments what you want to read about, what we got right and what we missed!

We’re always excited when we release a new version of BookedIN, but it’s usually because of one game-changing feature. It’s a little different this time, since there’s a lot going on and everyone is bound to have a favorite new feature.

Of course, it’s not about our favorites. It’s about yours, so let’s check out your options!

Live support chat
Our support team has always been at your beck and call, but with live support chat you can reach them in real-time during business hours. You’ll see this option in the new ‘Help’ navigation menu, so ask questions, report issues or just say hi!

Flexible booking duration
Have you ever taken a booking not knowing how long it’s going to run? Well, the flexible booking duration feature makes it simple to customize the length of an existing booking.

Service lead time
Some services require more time to prepare, some less. Now you can set the minimum amount of notice needed prior to appointment booking, per each service. Great for mobile businesses who perform services in different places.
As you can see, there’s no shortage of new features in the latest version of BookedIN. We know your personal favorite is going to be whatever makes your life easiest, so let us know in the comments what you love and what you need next!

The challenge for the modern photographer is that everybody has a camera in their pocket or a cousin with a DSLR. It’s no different for Heidi Ram of Heidi Ram Photography in Toronto, Canada but she’s separated herself from the ocean of amateurs and built a successful business over the last five years.

‘Everybody is a photographer,’ says Ram. ‘You need to make yourself stand-out by consistently presenting outstanding images.’

Blogging as business development

The professional touch is apparent when you see the images Heidi produces, but it also comes through in her web presence. She has well-constructed website – basically a requirement for a photographer – but she’s found really interesting ways to turn her blog into one of her biggest sources of new business.

First, she commits to posting the finished product of each shoot on the blog within a specific timeframe. (1 – 3 weeks, depending on the type of session.) Second, she distributes the link to that post to her clients, so the flurry of traffic from friends and family is directed to her website rather than her client’s Facebook page.

Finally, she tags her images strategically and makes extensive use of metadata. It’s customer service, personal branding and solid SEO all in one.

Adapting to an evolving business

“As a professional photographer, it’s only a matter of time before someone asks ‘Do you do weddings?’” says Ram.

Though she initially focused on family photography, she officially added wedding photography to her services during her second year in business. She still splits her time 60/40 between family and wedding sessions and her business has changed along with her services.
The full lifecycle for a single wedding client can be up to three years, which can create cash flow issues under a standard ‘booking fee + final delivery’ payment schedule. As Heidi’s wedding photography business grew, the need to add second photographers meant evolving to a benchmarked payment schedule to keep things running smoothly.

It was an important change, since her recent focus has been on expanding her use of outsourced resources for editing and post-process work. It’s a move she’s glad she made, since shooting is her first love and the extra time enables her to photograph additional families or spend time with her own.

If you or anyone you know would make an interesting subject for Talking Shop, don’t hesitate to get in touch with BookedIn.

You gave up the 9 – 5 life when you opened your own business, but that doesn’t mean you should be working 24/7. You may be working alone, but that doesn’t mean you need to do it all yourself. That’s an easy way to burn yourself out, but there are plenty of ways to preserve your sanity while improving your business.

Social Media

If you don’t use Twitter in your personal life, you’re probably not going to become an avid Tweeter once you open a business. The same is true for Facebook, Pinterest and your blog. You could be an exception to the rule, but a mountain of mediocre Facebook pages says the odds aren’t in your favor.

An underwhelming social media presence is just going to create stress, since you’ll feel the need to do something with it but it will always be at the bottom of your to-do list. If it’s not worth the hassle, cross it off that list for good.

Website/Design

Whether you need a website, a business card or a sign for your storefront, doing it yourself is probably to worst possible option. The same goes for getting your nephew who ‘knows computers/photoshop’ to do it.

Design isn’t free, but good design will pay for itself and doing it right the first time means it will be at least a few years until you feel compelled to get it updated. If you don’t have the money to hire a local designer, you can try to reach out to local colleges and offer yourself as a project. There are also plenty of freelancing sites (99Designs, eLance) that you can turn to.

Administration

Everything else in this article is (technically) optional, but there’s always going to be paperwork that needs to be done. Payroll, invoicing, employee and appointment scheduling, and a dozen other functions take time and they’re all up to you.
You probably did this stuff yourself to save money when starting out, but clawing back some of your free time is the first step to preventing burnout. With the proliferation of cloud-based apps out there that offer month-to-month billing, it’s never been easier (or cheaper) to streamline the administrative side of your business.

Living in the now is great, but it’s always nice to know what’s happening tomorrow, next week or even next month. That’s why we’re proud to announce BookedIN’s new weekly and monthly viewing options!

With the click of a button you’ll now be able to switch from the existing daily view to one that will show you the whole week or month. You’ll even be able to choose which resources you want to display.

The full-week view will show you all of your bookings for the week, while the full-month view will simply show you which days you have bookings. These at-a-glance views make it easier than ever to quickly check your availability and take bookings in-person or over the phone.

You’ll also see your color-coded resources and can switch between them with a click, making  it easier to view a large number of resources and keep tabs on your whole operation. It goes hand-in-hand with the full-week and month views to make your business easier to organize, operate and oversee!

Whether you need to check availability for a client, book an appointments for next month, or if just need to know when you’re safe to take a day off this summer–BookedIN’s  new calendar options are there to make your appointment scheduling life simpler!

Craigslist is all about missed connections, not missed opportunities, which is why we’re bringing BookedIN to your ads with the ‘Get BookedIN’ button. Even better, since Craigslist ads are free and public booking is a part of every BookedIN account, this won’t cost you a cent!

Craigslist is free, local and gets a lot of traffic, so it’s no surprise a lot of small businesses use it to advertise their services. The downside is that, barring a few images and some text, there’s not much you can do to spruce up a Craigslist ad.

That changes today thanks to BookedIN and our incredibly flexible ‘Get BookedIN’ button. You could always use it to link your business website to your public booking page and now you can do the same with a Craigslist ad. With one click your clients will go from considering your service to seeing a list of prices and availability waiting to be booked.

Check out the video tutorial for a walkthrough!


If you’re already using Craigslist this is a great way to get more out of your ads by letting clients make bookings and pay without picking up the phone. If you’re not, there’s a lot of untapped potential for local advertising and new clients. Either way, it’s an easy way to get noticed, get booked and get paid… on Craigslist!

Finding the motivation to get active is one of the biggest hurdles for people when it comes to fitness, which might explain why Nick McAuliffe of NickFit Personal Training has been so successful. He started his personal trainer business in Cheyenne, Wyoming and is currently completing a PhD in psychology. He’s clearly got motivation to spare and puts it to good use for his clients.

Finding a career that fits

Nick has been focused on personal training for three years but he also has almost a decade of total experience. He started his own business as a way to combine his motivational skills and passion for fitness with the freedom to pursue his PhD.

He works Tuesday through Thursday, handles 30 appointments per week, and acts as the executive trainer for the local Fitness One location. It affords him the support and facilities to run his business, and it also illustrates something that small business owners often overlook: that there’s more than one way to run a business. Figure out what you want and build your business to match that ideal.

Getting personal
“Personal training has lost the ‘personal’ over the last 10 years,” says Nick. “I like to work on the person as much as their fitness.”

Nick sees the value in taking a psychological approach to fitness, and his clients are definitely responding to it. His retention rate is over 90%, which has gone a long way towards alleviating one of his early challenges.

Personal training – and fitness/wellness in general – is a crowded space and Nick realized early the finding a way to differentiate himself and keep things fresh would be important for the long term viability of his business. His solution was to become a trusted partner for his clients, which was something the big fitness chains couldn’t offer.

Providing value

It’s a market that’s saturated with competitors, and Nick also realized that it can be difficult for customers to sort the good advice from the bad. “Another challenge is helping people filter through all of the information that’s out there,” says Nick.

Whether it’s sending out interesting blog entries, deciphering fitness jargon, or just helping his clients sort through the flood of conflicting information, Nick’s personal connection to his clients has earned him a loyal client base. It’s a lesson that any business trying to separate itself from the crowd can learn.

Nick is the first BookedIN user we’ve highlighted on Talking Shop but he’s also an example of how technology—no matter what it is—can benefit a small business. You can visit his website and find him on Facebook. For more small business stories and other useful tips, follow BookedIN on Twitter, Facebook or Google+. Try our personal trainer booking software risk free!