A booking form is more than a convenient way to schedule appointments. If done right, it has the power to increase conversion rates and fill your calendar with appointments. Whether you run a salon, manage events, or have a coaching business, having a well-designed and efficient booking form will streamline the appointment scheduling process and enhance customer experience. But how do you achieve that?
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore the ins and outs of booking forms, including their benefits, essential elements, and how to create highly converting one step-by-step.
P.S. We’ve also got some awesome booking form templates and examples, so sit back and let’s learn everything there is to know about this awesome tool to increase your revenue!
What Is a Booking Form?
A booking form is an online “document” that allows customers to book services and appointments in just a few clicks. It’s a bridge between customers and businesses that allows seamless communication that’s 100% automated. Booking form facilitates the whole scheduling process and many industries take advantage of it. And who wouldn’t? They allow you to gather specific customer information and effectively meet customer needs.
What Should a Booking Form Include?
Customers who want to book an appointment should give you certain information. To get everything you need, your booking form should include:
- Contact information: Request at least the customer’s name and email address. It’s vital for communication, sending booking confirmations, and any updates such as about rescheduling appointments. Based on your needs, you can also ask customers for their phone numbers.
- Service details: A place where customers can choose services is a must-have. Provide multiple options and checkboxes so customers can select preferred times, services, and employees.
- Quantity: Maybe customers want recurring appointments or group bookings. If your business offers those options, add them directly to your booking form.
- Additional requests: Every one of your customers has different needs. Allow them to express themselves by including an open-ended section where they can include any special requests.
- Payment information: If you ask for upfront payment, your form should include at least one payment option.
- Terms and conditions: Include a checkbox where customers can agree to your terms and conditions, such as an appointment cancellation policy. This establishes trust and clear expectations.
Booking Form Benefits
And what’s in it for you? If you incorporate a booking form into your business, you’ll enjoy the following benefits:
- Time efficiency: Booking forms eliminate the need for back-and-forth communication between you and your customers, which saves time for both parties. Customers can conveniently book an appointment and your business enjoys automation at its full power.
Image by macrovector on Freepik
- Reduce human errors: Unintentional double-bookings often happen due to clumsy errors, which is totally fine. Neither you nor your employees should have to worry about that. And booking forms completely eliminate the chance for these mistakes.
- Enhanced customer experience: A user-friendly booking form creates a positive impression on customers. Not only does it simplify the booking process, it also provides clarity and demonstrates professionalism. This enhances customer satisfaction and inspires them to book appointments with you over and over again.
- Streamlined business processes: When you connect your booking form with your calendars, databases, and customer relationship management software (CRM) you’ll efficiently manage various business processes and spend less time on repetitive tasks.
- Collect data and get more leads: A booking form offers you valuable data insights about your customers. You can track their preferences, booking patterns, peak times, and other relevant information. Analyzing this data will help you fine-tune your marketing and optimize your service offerings.
Creating an Effective Booking Form: Tips & Tricks
How do you create a high-converting booking form guaranteed to get you more appointments? Clarity is definitely one of the most important factors, but you should also focus on the ease of use.
- Keep it concise: Use clear and straightforward language and guide customers through each step of the booking process seamlessly. You will achieve that by avoiding too many words and keeping the form clean and organized.
- Use descriptive labels: Label each field and provide clear and concise instructions for customers. If you feel it’s necessary, you can also include examples. That’ll help you reduce the chances of confusion and errors.
- Error messages: Implement an error message that should appear every time a customer fails to provide the required information. Make sure that the booking form clearly emphasizes where the error occurred. You’ll provide a better user experience and avoid inaccurate bookings where you’d need to call to get clarification.
- A/B testing: From time to time, it’s important to test your form and see whether everything works smoothly. But you should also do A/B testing with different call-to-actions (CTAs) to see which one converts better. You can do A/B testing for other parts of the form as well. Make adjustments according to data and improve effectiveness, usability, and conversion rates.
Booking Form Design Best Practices
Designing a booking form that’s visually appealing provides crucial information, is user-friendly, and converts customers can be tough, so keep these tips in mind:
- Keep it simple: Avoid clutter and utilize white space. Seamlessly guide customers by using a logical flow when you organize sections. It’s important to minimize the number of fields, while still getting essential information.
- Go for a clean design: Use your brand colors wisely and make your booking form visually appealing and peaceful, rather than using too many elements and colors.
- Visual hierarchy: Take advantage of different font sizes, and styling to create a visual hierarchy that draws customers’ attention to the most important sections. Highlight them and use visual cues such as asterisk (*) to indicate required fields. It’s also important to group related fields together and use consistent formatting.
- Intuitive input fields: Choose appropriate input fields depending on the type of information (e.g. dropdown menus, checkboxes, text fields).
- Make it mobile-friendly: Responsiveness is a must! Ensure your form displays properly on all devices and different screen sizes. Make sure the text is 100% readable and that your form doesn’t appear crowded anywhere.
- Progress bar: If your booking form is longer and consists of multiple steps, provide a progress indicator to avoid overwhelming your customers. Highlight the current step and provide a visual representation of the steps they’ve already completed.
- Clear and powerful CTA: Clearly communicate what will happen after they click on the call to action by making it descriptive. You can also redirect them to a confirmation page where they’ll see more information. Your CTA should be descriptive, but still concise (e.g. Book now).
- Test and optimize: Ask customers to provide feedback about your booking form and identify any areas for improvement. Play with different elements, such as the size and color of your CTA button to measure which option is more effective.
How to Create a Booking Form Step-by-Step Guide
Creating a booking form is mostly easy, and you don’t need any advanced technical skills. We’ve prepared a step-by-step guide to teach you how to create one in a matter of minutes:
- Determine requirements: Identify which information is crucial to get from your customers. Think about your business and the services you offer to determine which fields and sections you absolutely need to include.
- Choose a booking form solution: There are thousands of options available to create a booking form. But you also want it to automatically schedule appointments without a need for manual booking, which can be done with the help of reliable booking software.
- Go for the booking form template or start from scratch: Booking platforms usually provide you with pre-designed templates, but you can also create your form from scratch. Templates are a great starting point and you can customize them to suit your branding.
- Customize the form: From design to copy, you should definitely take advantage of customization. Align your form with your customer’s preferences and modify colors, fonts, and fields to fit your business needs.
- Add fields: Think about which fields you need to keep from the template, but also add custom fields based on your business’s specific needs. E.g. if you’re a therapist, you’d want to ask customers to tell you what they need help with. This field can be optional or required.
- Configure settings: Set up additional settings, such as automatic reminders, booking confirmations, email marketing, payment methods, etc.
- Test and launch: Thoroughly test your form before you share it with the world. Check out the responsiveness, booking process, and data collection.
- Embed and share: Embed the newly-created form on your website and share it on your favorite marketing channels, whether it’s social media or email marketing platforms.
Booking Form Examples
It’s about time we see some awesome booking forms in action. Check out our favorite booking form examples and get inspired to create your own:
Rafflesbeauty
In this fantastic booking form example, you can see how you can make it detailed and user-friendly. Customers first choose the service category, then they choose the service, date, and time, and enter their contact details in the last step. Payment method is also integrated and they can pay directly. Since it’s a multistep booking form, customers can see the progress bar and book an appointment in less than 3 minutes. They see everything they need to convert, from services, descriptions, prices, location, and employees.
The Shave Club
Even though it’s in Spanish, we couldn’t resist sharing this awesome booking form example with you. It perfectly fits the brand identity of the business, and customers book appointments in a logical flow without room for errors and misunderstandings. They start with choosing the location since this business operates in multiple locations. Once they’ve done that, they prompt their clients to choose the service category, service, date, time, and employee and enter their contact details.
This example shows you how you can enter descriptions for services, and promote customer loyalty with coupons. You can also see the ToS checkbox, meaning customers are familiar with the salon cancellation policy and other rules.
Booking Form Templates
Did you like the booking form examples we’ve just shown you? What if we tell you that you can create similar forms in no time?
Trafft offers you pre-made booking form templates you can use right away.
We know diversity is important, and because of that, we’ve prepared templates for various industries such as
- Healthcare
- Salon Industry
- Barbershops
- Coaching
- Consulting
- Education & Teaching
- Fitness & Sports
- Dental clinics
- Cleaning services
- Personal services
- Automotive services
- Home services
- Government & administrative services
All you need to do is sign up for Trafft for free and choose your favorite booking form template. You can customize it to fit your needs, add custom fields, and payment options, and create discount coupons directly on Trafft.
The best thing about it? Trafft is absolutely FREE for up to 5 members, and pricing starts for as low as $19 for up to 10 users. See for yourself how easy it is to create, embed, and share booking forms with Trafft.
FAQ about Booking Forms
How to add a booking form in WordPress
To add a booking form in WordPress, everything you need to do is embed its HTML code in a specific place on your website. Booking platforms offer user-friendly booking forms and various customization options, but they also provide you with technical support to share and embed your form on the WordPress website.
Appointment form vs. booking form
The main difference between appointment and booking forms is their scope and complexity. Appointment forms are for individual or one-on-one meetings and they usually lack automation. Booking forms offer additional features such as payment processing, multiple attendees, special requests, and various services.
