Appointments: Booked and Paid on your website
One of my favorite ways to streamline my workflow is to eliminate unnecessary email communication. There is nothing that drives me more crazy than a series of emails that goes something like this:
“Hi, I’d love to learn more about your services can we find a time to talk?’
“Yes, great! Let’s chat. When are you available?”
“How about this Tuesday at 4pm.”
“Oh, sorry I can’t be availalable then. How about Thursday at 2pm?” And if that doesn’t work, please let me know what times are better for you.
………THIS COULD GO ON FOREVER. Maybe I don’t have the patience for it, but to me - it’s just plain inefficient. Instead, I do everything I can to make my website work for me.
Your website should be one of your hardest working, best multitasking “employees”.
We use the scheduling feature on Squarespace websites to help customers and prospective clients book appointments or farm tours. It is a service provided by Acuity. If you don’t have a Squarespace hosted website, you might consider looking for an Acuity integration (extension) to add to your website.
We can set the length of the appointments and the price, if we’d like to charge for our time, too. I set the parameters for the schedule and my available time. I choose how much time I’d like between appointments. And everything is integrated with my email account calendar (we use the Google suite built into Squarespace to host our @littlefarmhouseflowers.com email addresses).
This feature is great for booking initial phone calls with prospective wedding clients, setting up proposal presentations, booking farm tours with individuals or small groups, requesting pick-up appointments, connecting with random inquiries, scheduling interviews with prospective employees, etc. There are so many ways to use a feature like this to your advantage and save yourself time (and money!) answering emails.
If you’d like to learn more about how we leverage our website to do SO many things (with more tasks added almost monthly!) check out my Website Starter Course. A beautiful, easy to use website is one of the most (if not the single most) important thing you can do for your business.