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PICK YOUR OWN: How to Use Booking Systems to Maximise The Crop | Beyonk Blog
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With summer fast approaching and - as even a city-dweller like me knows - autumn following soon after, it won’t be long until ‘pick your own’ experiences are in full flow, culminating with pumpkins in October.
With summer fast approaching and - as even a city-dweller like me knows - autumn following soon after, it won’t be long until ‘pick your own’ experiences are in full flow, culminating with pumpkins in October.
For those of you who’ve been capitalising on the popularity of these in the past few years - and perhaps for some of you who are thinking about it - it’s worth making sure you’re using your booking system to full effect, so it’s working as hard as you are during these periods!
Set Up
It’s one thing having online booking available on your website, but don’t forget it needs to be visible. ‘Clicks kill’ so make sure there are as few as possible between a potential customer landing on your website and being able to book. Having a booking/payment form on your homepage or a large ‘book now’ button on the header is essential.
Control & Planning
With multiple touch-points before arrival, online booking systems are a great way to be in control of your customers and business, and be able to plan accordingly. Utilise the following if you can:
Automated emails: In the booking confirmation email, make sure to include any information they might need for the visit or experience, especially about the arrival. Here you can include detail about the location (in case it’s hard to find or sat nav is misleading), about the best way to travel there, about where to go on arrival, how early to arrive, what to bring - all things that will help ensure the customer arrives as prepared as possible, making their experience better and your lives easier!These messages can be reinforced in an automatic reminder email. Even if you don’t have anything specific they need to know before arrival, take this opportunity to simply send them a nice message, about how you’re looking forward to welcoming them. It all helps provide a nice experience.
Ticket types: As above this can be a great way to help collect more information about your guests in order to provide as good a service as you can. For example if you offer separate tickets for the over 65s, for families as a group, or for children, don’t forget to analyse the numbers every once in a while and use this information to ensure you’re targeting the right markets and charging the best price (eg. if you find very few grandparents are coming, make that cheaper and see if you can attract family groups for when the grandparents have the kids for the day!).
Timeslots: Another great way to manage customer numbers and help ensure a great day is had by all your visitors. If you’re open all day, consider if your customers booking arrival timeslots will help spread out visitors throughout the day, reducing crowding in all areas, be it on arrival, in the fields, or in the cafe and farm shop.
Revenue
Whilst online booking allows you to take sales in advance and therefore helps avoid no-shows and people opting for something else depending on the weather, or similar things beyond your control, there are some other great things it allows you to do to help increase revenue, and chief amongst these is ‘add-ons’.
- Add-Ons: At Beyonk we’ve found approximately 10% of people will buy an add-on to a booking - for example, a cream tea at the cafe, produce from the shop, or perhaps simply a donation to a related charity - so do take advantage of this opportunity to upsell and generate some useful additional revenue,
Resource Allocation
Do you offer anything to help customers on the day, for example, a wheelbarrow or basket to help collect everything in? If your system has a resource allocation function don’t forget to use this to ensure you don’t leave customers unhappy or waiting for others to finish before they can take one. And why not add a small fee for them at the same time and therefore save them for those that really need them and are prepared to pay a small fee to do so?
Marketing
Your booking system should also act as a crucial part of your marketing plans, capitalising on the already engaged status of your customers. Make use of:
- Discount codes: add discount codes to social media campaign or newsletters, or with your automated thank you emails to offer customers a discounted repeat visit.
- Checkout questions: make sure to utilise any opportunity to ask your customers questions before checkout to see if they want to go on your newsletter, or to find out how they heard about you.
- Automated emails: use automated thank you emails to have one final engagement with your customers, thank them for coming, and prompt them to leave a review, visit your social media pages, or of course to book again using the discount voucher as above.
- Distribution integrations: make use of any integrations with third party resellers (Beyonk for example partner with a large number of tourist boards (such as Go New Forest as on the image below), rail networks and other organisations), to get your experiences in front of new audiences.
We hope this is useful, and as ever we’d be happy to discuss any individual requirements on a one-to-one basis, please just contact us using the link below.
