How to Scale Up Yoga Business with Appointment Software

It’s costly to increase staff capacity, but you can boost the productivity of every team member you have now. It’s time and resource-consuming to monitor and analyze the key metrics of your business performance, but you can enable the software to do the job.

This is why it should come as no surprise that boosting your business nowadays heavily relies on software capabilities.

And heads-up. The appointment software is sometimes the only thing you need to significantly scale up your yoga business by automating your workflows, whether you are self-employed or work as a studio, without breaking your bank account.

Implementing appointment software will help you boost your yoga business in three fundamental areas:

• Operations and infrastructure: an efficient system for yoga class schedules will help you better deal with payment processing, client registration, and overall management routines.
• Customer engagement: event-driven notifications, class reminders on customer phones, smooth online bookings, personalized bonuses and more will help you optimize customer relationships on multiple levels.
• Marketing: technological convenience and secure online payments, as well as the ability to connect your site to external booking platforms, will help you build a more trustworthy brand online.

Let’s now get down to more actionable tips using the example of the BookingPress WordPress booking plugin. 

Since this scheduling software collects client data, you can use it as a CRM (client management system) as well to manage customer data, streamline communication with clients and analyze their preferences, as well as track appointments.

Furthermore, the booking plugin is a two-sided software, meaning it also takes care of your yoga instructors, giving them tons of tools to simplify and accelerate their schedule management and interactions with clients. 

Reduce inefficient operations with automated bookings

The error rate is much smaller when clients self-schedule the next yoga sessions via the dedicated piece of software. Why?

There are field validators, secure payment gateways, and their personal data stored in their browsers pre-populate the fields in the booking form. All this contributes to simplifying the user experience on your website.

It saves time for your management team or instructors, as well as reduces human error, and automates the entire process, making your website and business overall more sufficient in the result.

Optimize instructors’ workflow with flexible schedules

Automating the booking process means you need to create a schedule for the team that will help you designate all their working hours, as well as breaks or days off.

Once you do that, the available and booked dates in a calendar are displayed accordingly and – most importantly – without a need to keep an eye on it.

Reduce distractions that arise with client calls and emails. Set the yoga appointment software just once and let it do the job for you.

What’s more, you give your instructor’s team the ability to take control over their own schedule in personal accounts, as well as centralize all communication with clients.

Boost marketing activities

With BookingPress, any of the following activities are super easy to set up and scale:

• Upsell more services by offering side products or services at checkout when clients are booking a service.
• Enable personalized coupons and engage costumes to use them when booking a session.
• Automate email marketing by sending attractive offerings to segmented groups of people.

Accept online payments to reduce no-shows

The BookingPres plugin, and we believe many other yoga and gym software, can help you reduce the number of no-shows by simply requesting payments in advance. 

With the flexibility the plugin offers, you can collect only deposits first, and enable clients to pay at the desk. At the same time, you can choose to charge the full cost to completely automate bookings and have your schedule full and yoga sessions prepaid.

One more benefit, you’ll have a record of payments centralized improving the overall revenue management both inside the dashboard and via external solutions, such as Google Analytics.

You can offer 17+ various payment gateways at checkout, which means the payment collection is going to be easy in any part of the world, with no extra charges for you or your students.

Scale your reach via integrations

Improve the productivity of your team and management by embracing different types of integrations available for the appointment scheduling software.

For example, with BookingPress, you can:

• Allow clients to add their appointments to their calendars upon the booking submission (for example, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook, etc.)
• Connect international payment gateways to serve more needs of different customers (PayPal, Stripe, Square, Skrill, 2Checkout, Paystack, and 10+ more are available).
• Use Mailchimp to automate email marketing campaigns for the email addresses clients provide while making a booking.
• Send notifications in WhatsApp to reach customers via their favorite messenger.
• Enable Zapier to smoothly connect dozens of apps you use.
• Integrate Google Meet to handle virtual yoga sessions, workshops, consultations, and meet-ups.

All these integrations are fully supported in the plugin to help you choose the right strategy for boosting your business. 

Better deal with last-minute appointment cancellations

The inner workings of the software are quite often very complicated but how can you be sure it really helps you deal with the last-minute appointment cancellations?

Here is how:

1. It helps you ensure customer agreement to your terms of use and cancellation policies when they submit bookings via the booking widget. If they don’t show up, you have the legal right to charge for that.
2. By requesting deposit payments in advance via the software, you incentivize customers to show up for the session.
3. Simplify the rescheduling process and still win over a customer.

Take your data along

Automating and optimizing processes, even with the help of the software, is a challenging task. But measuring the results of your actions and creating scale-up strategies based on those results is not easy either.

With BookingPress, this task is simplified thanks to the built-in system for analyzing the interactions with your booking system, clients, services, and revenue. We have no doubts you can use this data, such as identifying positive and negative tendencies, to further scale your business.

Final remarks: How to scale up yoga business with the appointment software

Implementing full-fledged booking software for class scheduling needs can become a watershed moment for any service business, yoga, and fitness studios in particular.

The only software alone can drastically increase the scale of your business without a need to hire more people, increase the services line-up or pay huge money to marketing companies. So why not give it a try?

Read further: How to choose a yoga business name (+ free bonus names)