Did you know that a scheduling app, like Calendly or Acuity, can literally be your one-stop-shop for growing your business online? And let’s be honest, offering your skills, time and services online is more prevalent now than ever before. It was already commonplace, but 2020 has seen millions of additional businesses forced to bring their goods to the internet — due to pandemic life.
Hence, you need to know how to get busy with a scheduling platform.
Whether you’re offering one-on-one coaching or any kind of virtual service (e.g., therapy, personal training, piano lessons, cooking lessons, consulting, etc.), dealing with customers can be a real pain in the butt. Everything from scheduling appointments to taking payments to communication.
So, the process needs to not just be easy for you, but for your customers, as well!
E-commerce scheduling apps are a simple and affordable way to allow your customers to schedule, pay, confirm and customize their sessions with you. You don’t need a website, any technical online skills or Shopify or anything else.
That is, if you use one that already has all of those features built into it.
Today, we’ll focus on 2 very popular options: Acuity and Calendly.
Benefits of Acuity and Ways to Use The Platform
- Virtual personal trainings because it links directly with your Zoom account
- Options for add-ons — if you’re a massage therapist, for example, you can set additional treatments to pop up when your client is checking out
- Manual credit card transactions for paying customers (through their online platform)
- Gift certificates
- Create online packages and/or Recurring payments for live workout classes
- Allow students to pick times for office hours
- Collect payments for whatever online training you’re doing
- Subscriptions
Acuity really just streamlines the whole customer relationship. You can collect payments, handle bookings and take notes all in one central location — without having to deal with the hassle of a domain name and a full website builder.
While Calendly offers similar features, there isn’t nearly as much customization and functionality. Acuity has a lot more that you can tweak and perfect because it’s all housed in one platform.
The main difference between Acuity and Calendly
Imagine someone were to book a one-on-one coaching call with you. With Calendly, you would send them an email and in that email there’s a link to go to Calendly — their payments handled separately. So again, it’s not the most streamlined process.
You can probably guess which app I lean toward!
For much more on this, like different payment tiers for Acuity and how to set it up, check out this Build Your Tribe episode:
And don’t forget to subscribe to BYT for all your business needs — whether virtual or brick and mortar!
