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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
NOTE: this transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate
Hello, party animals Mitch here from Party Business Growth Solutions, and today we’re going to talk about the super important booking form for your party business, see, I speak with a lot of children’s entertainers and a lot of times they are very clear to me. They know how important their website is to their business, and they work super hard and having a very compelling and captivating and exciting website that really conveys the message of how exciting their events will be, which is awesome, right? But a lot of times when I go take a closer look at these websites, I also see that these same children’s entertainers are ignoring one of the most important pieces on their website, which is their booking form. See if we compare you are your party business to, for example, even a car dealership. Your website is kind of like the car showroom, right? So that’s the room with all the beautiful cars getting you excited with all the features and and the amazing colors and shapes and all that stuff with all the cars and gets you excited to want to drive one of those vehicles home. But the your booking form is kind of like the sales rep that you can have to negotiate with and sign the paper we work with. And I’ll do all that kind of stuff, right? And if you get an icky feeling from that sales rep, there’s a pretty good chance you’re walking away from that car dealership without a vehicle that day. And the same is true for your party business.
Children’s entertainers have to make their booking process as smooth and easy for their clients as possible. So it it needs to be the easiest thing they ever do with you, and that’s where your booking form comes into play. It is the first sort of point of contact when it comes to making an enquiry or making a request to book your services, and we want to make sure we get that experience started with the right foot forward. All right. So what we’re going to do in this training today is we are going to look at real live booking forms for other children’s entertainers, and we’re going to uncover some of the most common mistakes we see happening on booking forms on what you can do about it. So without further ado, let’s jump right into that. I’m going to get rid of this here. We don’t need that anymore. And let’s head over here to our booking form number one. All right.
So this is one of the most common mistakes I see happening when it comes to children’s entertainment pages and party business pages. Your booking forms are often too overwhelming. They’re too long. When you scan through this booking form here, you could see that there’s a ton of questions and answers that you need to fill in a lot of long form questions here as well. A lot of text to be reading and what’s going to happen is your potential clients are going to look at this, get overwhelmed, say I don’t have time to do this right now and then, and they might even tell themselves, I’ll come back and deal with this later. But unfortunately, there will be a large percentage that will never come back and do it later. And as a result, you’ve just lost out on some of that business.
The second thing that happens when you have a very busy, overwhelming booking form like this is that any add ons or upsells which can really boost your revenues are going to be just sort of blending right in. So here’s an add on an upsell, but it just kind of blends right in to the to the whole page. It doesn’t really jump out at you and so doesn’t capture your attention and your imagination and get you excited to want to just want to pay for that additional service. OK, so this is the first mistake. Don’t make your booking forms way too overwhelming. All right. Let’s head over now to another booking form. Give you another idea. OK, so we look at this booking form here. So here we are on this website. And if we go to higher Joe, Joe is is using his booking form and it’s doubling up as his contact form as well. And so this is a huge mistake. I see a lot of entertainers making your booking form and your contact form are two separate things, and they should be treated as such a booking form. You want it designed in a way that collects the right information that you need to eliminate unnecessary back and forth communications between you and your client. And the reason you want that is probably pretty obvious, but it’s frustrating for you and for your client. If there’s too much back and forth, everybody’s busy. Everybody’s in a rush. We want to provide the information you need in one go. We want to eliminate unnecessary back and forth conversations. And that way, your communications with your client can actually focus on what’s important, which is building rapport, building trust, getting them excited about what it is you do and knowing you and liking you and trusting you so that they’re prepared to spend money with you. OK, so all those additional conversations you’re having going back and forth to talk about what was the address again and who how old are the kids? And all that could have been dealt with in a more smooth method using a more detailed booking form? So we went from the first example where the big mistake was there was way too much information, way too overwhelming to now, the second one, which is way too little and trying to combine the contact a contact form with your booking or your request form. Now something I should say at this point is to me, a booking form isn’t necessarily someone who’s ready to put their money where their mouth is and actually make the booking. A lot of times people want to fill out a booking form when it’s still at the inquiry stage, and so that will come up again as we go through the other forms are going to be showing you. But another opportunity to eliminate friction is thinking about what you call these forms to your clients. It might. Your get an instant quote form, it might be your checker availability form, it might be make an enquiry form, it might be booking form, it is up to you. You have to think about what makes the most sense for you and your clients. So booking form number two, we just gave you an example of one that didn’t ask for enough information.
So now we’re going to go to another website and here when I click on birthday parties, it actually opens it up in a whole new tab. And that’s OK. You can do that with your booking forms. It is nice when it appears where you wanted it, so I’ll show you an example. What I mean by that in just a moment, but you can even do it where they don’t even leave the page that they’re on on your website and they get to your booking form. But if we look at all that fun here, here’s another booking form. This one’s kind of in between the other two that I showed you where it’s not asking for too much information. It’s not asking for too little information. Maybe they can ask for a little bit more, in fact, but there would have to organize it in a way that’s a little bit more user friendly. This form here, it does feel a little bit overwhelming when you scroll down it. There’s a lot of visual elements here. There’s a lot of distractions on the page is a lot of text when I get to this section and you’ll see there’s a lot of duplicate information here. So the price is mentioned twice things like that. And so some of this stuff makes a little bit confusing and overwhelming. Here, for example, if you want extra time per hour, if the check this box and then you also have to select the dropdown. But it feels like both steps aren’t necessary because if I if I selected the extra time that I’m already agreeing to the the extra time per hour, so some of this stuff feels like it’s extra steps you’re asking people to take that will lead to the user not being clear on what to do, which might make them a little bit more frustrated and worried about how smooth this whole thing is going to go. And I know that this booking form is no reflection of how great a service they’re going to provide, but clients who don’t yet know you might be thinking that way. And so everything you put in front of them is a representative of you and in their view, how your business operates. And so we want that first impression to be like, Wow, this is a professional organization. I’m excited to work with these people. OK.
So the last thing I wanted to point out on this sample form is at the very bottom here, they’re asking for a credit card. So you guys saw the process I went through. I went straight from the birthdate, the website. I clicked on birthday parties in the top menu and it brought me not to a phone that’s even asking for my credit card. And this is going to create a little bit of extra friction or possibly a lot of extra friction where people aren’t quite sure if they want to fill this form out now, because I don’t want to give your credit card information, I’m just trying to get information from you. Right? And so I’m not at the stage yet where I’m ready to give you that kind of information about me, my being my credit card information. And it’s it’s adding friction to the process. All right. So that’s the third one. So we don’t want to have that extra friction. We want to make this as easy for people and feel as risk free for people to fill out. Because once you have their contact info now, you can get the dialogue going between you and them and you can really get them excited about booking you. But unfortunately, in this case, a lot of people won’t even fill the form out in the first place, and you’ve now missed all those opportunities. All right, let’s go to one more. So we go to this website, beautiful site here. Very compelling. I love the layout. Looks like somebody’s actually got some inspiration from our website template, which I love to see. Click on the book now button. And unfortunately, it takes us to this page, which leads to some confusion. So I assume this is legitimately under construction right now, but you have this conflicting section here. Be that as it may, we’re going to click into book now because it does lead to a booking form. All right. So it leads to this really well laid out booking form. First step, you’re asking me to pick my date. So that’s great. So let’s say I pick a random date and now you’re asking me to pick my time. Awesome. I’m going to do that. This is already a great experience for me as the user. However, for you as the business, you might have created problems for yourself that you weren’t considering by allowing your clients to feel like they’re in control fully of your schedule and booking you. Because as we go through this one, actually you will see that, OK, let’s just Donald Duck. I’m just going to put in some quick information here. I’ll put my email address. All right. So there you go, putting some info in here by four five one six three. All right. There you go. So we’re filling in some some details. Theme of event. I don’t know what your options are. I may have click through your website, but I may not. Is this the theme that you want from me? So I’m filling these things out here. And then as I get to the next stage, you’re it’s asking me to check out. So check out feels like a purchase is about to be made. And now all of a sudden, I may say, Oh, I’ve taken all this time to fill the sudden I’m already. I don’t check out. I just wanted to find out if you’re available and put a package together. And so again, you’ve created a situation where people might not click that button and send the info your way. And so it’s created extra friction in the process. All right.
So what we did was we put together this, this fake company here, a sample page for you to have a look at. And I’m going to. Pop this up here and this if you look at this website. All right. So this is just a sample website. Get an instant quote that feels risk-free. OK, so I’m going to close some of these other ones here just to make sure things are running smoothly on my own. And a click getting instant quote and then boom right on the website. I didn’t even leave the page. The booking form appears and it’ll be branded with with my logo and my colors and all that. And I could fill out this form. And look, it’s not overwhelming. It’s just asking me for three questions. OK, I can do that. I’ll fill that out. Click next. And it only adds more questions as the questions become relevant. And I mean, next step is to pick the type of party. It’s very clearly labeled here. What’s virtual? What’s a mobile service? What’s a you come to our venue type service and then I click it at the moment that I select that, then it layers on top the next option. So I’m only ever presented with just a few options, even though this company actually has 20 different options. You’re only ever seeing two or three or four at a time. So I pick the one character option and I tell them how many kids were expecting. And then I picked my character, and then I’m presented with the add ons and upsells, and they really jump out at me because it’s right at the right moment. Do I want an extra helper around? Sure. And as I’m doing this, it’s building out my quote. And then it’s showing me different add ons that I could add and I could add them or not add them and continue and so on and so forth until they get through to the very end. And all it’s doing is sending a request, not ask for a credit card.
I’m not being asked to check it out. I haven’t been asked for too little information. Too much information. OK. So this form here, this is obviously this is built with Party Pro Manager and you can have a form exactly like this one, but you might want to go and try and do it yourself. You might want to go and DIY a solution for your business. So below this video, I’m going to share with you a link to our booking process checklist. So we’re going to try and DIY this thing. I want you to get it right. OK, so whether you work with some Party Pro Manager to get the perfect form on your website or you try to do on your own, we’re going to give you a checklist. The following is going to give you all of our rules that you need to follow to make this process as smooth and frictionless and successful for you and your business as possible, OK? So if you want that checklist below this video, I’m going to give you a link to that. If you want to give this sample form that you see me, load it up right here. A try. You want to give it a try right below this video. I’m going to give you a link on how you can get to this page and click around and see what it might feel like for your clients to have a booking form that’s really designed in a way where it’s being presented with the right amount of information at just the right time, with the add ons and upsells being offered at the exact right moment. All right. So both of those links are going to be put right below this video And then finally, if you have more questions about your booking process, you want to brainstorm solutions. That’s what we’re here for a Party Business Growth Solutions are single mission is to help you grow your party business as rapidly as possible. And so there are a lot of ways we could do that. And doing free trainings like this is one of those methods. So if you want to chat, you want to brainstorm. Below this video, I’m going to put a chat, mess a chat button, start a chat with me and between myself and the team at Party Business Growth Solutions will get you moving. OK, so that is it. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I hope this video helped you out. And let’s get you booking way more gigs.
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