How to Increase Training Bookings

Increasing the number of booking you receive for training is a vital aspect to running a successful and growing training business.
Without new customers you will never increase business, and as the saying goes "If you are not moving forward, you are going backwards!".
So how do you grow your customer base, thereby increasing your number of bookings for training?

"If you are not moving forward, you are going backwards!"

Have a Website
You need new customers. There are many ways to do this and step 1 is that you need to create a website, or employ someone to create one for you.
This needs to be a good professional looking website, not some amateur rubbish. Remember, this is your customers first interaction with your business so a good quality website is essential if you are to make a good impression and create trust. "A bad website is worse than no website at all".
Designing and building your website is a time consuming process so take your time and plan out your website in detail. What does your customer journey look like? how will they navigate through your website? how easy is it for them to find the information they need? these are all things you need to decide before starting to build your website. Remember this is your 'Shop Window' where prospective customers will check you out, see if you are trust worthy and decide whether to purchase from you, so make that decision easy for them.
We recommend using 'WordPress' or something similar to build your website. Wordpress is free software and there are thousands of themes (designs) for Wordpress which you can download and apply, it takes a bit of learning but anyone can do it with a little patience and watching tutorials on YouTube.


Online Booking System
Now you have your website, you need an online booking system. This is just as important or even more important than a good looking and easy to use website. Choosing the best booking system can be a difficult choice. You could use an e-commerce plugin for Wordpress like 'woocommerce' or something similar. The issue here is that they are designed to sell products. Training events are much more complicated than that because they have variables such as dates and venues. These are not well suited to off the shelf e-commerce plugins.
This is where Genius Training Management System and the website integration is the perfect solution. Designed specifically for managing training and all of the fine nuances in training, Genius can be integrated into any website in just 3 minutes by anyone. Integration is a simple copy and pasting of a code snippet into your website and you are done. Plus the Genius website integration includes secure online card payments powered by the worlds leading payment processor 'Stripe'.

Accepting Card Payments
Another aspect of online bookings is which payment system to use. Some people use their bank + Worldpay, or Sagepay.
Back in 2005 that was a good option, but now we have 'Stripe' who dominate the online payment landscape. Stripe recently had a valuation of $140 Billion USD (March 2024) and is a silicone valley unicorn. All that aside though Stripe's technology is world class, which is why we partnered with Stripe. Using Stripe you don't need a merchant account with your bank (saving you the banks fee's) and Stripe is the cheapest option available. Setting up an account with Stripe takes a few minutes, compared with weeks for a bank merchant account and the good news is that Genius Training Management Software and our website integration are fully integrated with Stripe. Setting Stripe up with your website takes a few clicks inside of Genius.
visit Stripe's website

Superior Customer Experience
Just having a website and any old booking system won't cut it today. Amazon leads the online shopping industry and they make their process completely 'frictionless'. This means you need to adhere to the same rules, as your customer will expect this..
1) Your booking system should be quick and simple for your users to find what they need and to make a booking. Remember not all of your customers will be tech savvy so make this as simple as possible.
2) Your booking system should be mobile first. This means that it should be designed to work on smart phones as the majority of people booking online do so by smart phone.
3) Your booking system should know when an event is full and not allow customers to overbook. There is no quicker way to lose a customer then to let them book an event then tell them the event is full or cancelled.
4) Your booking system should remember your customers details to make repeat orders quick and slick.
5) The payment system should remember your customer payment details to save re-entering it all again. Remember the whole system needs to be quick and slick.

If you use Genius Training Management Software you will receive an email when a customer places a booking to alert you. All booking information is then found inside of Genius Training Management Software so that you can easily process the order.

Use Training Brokers
A very quick way to increase your bookings with no outlay and no risk is to use training brokers.
Training brokers operate websites where they list training events from many different training providers across all educational sectors right across the UK. Listing your training events with them can bring you some additional bookings, but these should not be relied upon as the sole source of bookings. You should use training brokers as a 'top up' service to get you a few more bums on seats.
This is how they work; they typically charge 20% commission. This means if you are selling an event for £100 per place, they will pay you £80 per place and keep £20 as their commission only when they take a booking. The bonus here is that you don't pay any advertising costs, so it's no risk. If they don't take a booking, you pay nothing.
There are a few training broker services available, just Google 'Training Brokers UK' and you will find them.