Should I Take Bookings Online For My Baby and Toddler Classes?
Happity is the UK’s most loved website for baby and toddler classes. With 2.6m parents using the site every year, it’s a great place to list, promote, and take bookings for your wonderful classes. Find out more and get started for free here.
If you’ve just started running your baby and toddler classes, you might not be thinking about using a booking system. Maybe you ask families to reserve a spot via DMs or emails, or maybe you just let people turn up and pay on the door.
This is fine in the early days, but as you progress to running two, three or more classes a week, a proper system for managing your capacities and taking payments will probably become more and more important to you!
Let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons:
4 benefits of taking bookings online for your baby and toddler classes
Online bookings give parents the confidence they need to come along
We all have that friend or family member who would never visit a restaurant without a booked table, and it’s no different with classes. While some parents are totally happy with just turning up, others will feel nervous about the class not running, or being turned away because it is full.
Taking bookings online is a great way to inspire confidence, and open up your classes to a much wider audience.
Building your community and turning customers into fans
Some booking systems (like Happity!) will allow you to download the email addresses of customers who book your class to build your mailing list – one of the most powerful tools you have for nurturing loyalty and turning your one-off bookers into fans.
Social media is another great way to build community, but it’s risky to be completely reliant on social to reach your audience, because even small changes to the algorithm can have a big impact on your business.
With a mailing list, you can build much closer relationships with your customers.
Growing your online presence and reaching more families
Happity is different to many other platforms, in that you can list your classes without taking bookings on the site. It’s really important to us that parents are able to find everything going on for babies and toddlers in their local areas, and the non-bookable listings make sure we’re providing full coverage, as well as helping more families to fall in love with classes!
Nevertheless, our bookable pages get up to 4 times more visits than those which are listed without bookings, showing that parents and families are looking for bookable classes above all.
Wherever you choose to promote your classes, it’s likely that making bookings available on the site will really improve your findability, and get the most value out of your listing.
Online bookings make your business more stable
Whether you choose to make your classes bookings-only, or still have a mix of drop-ins and pre-booked parents, as you start to build loyalty and have a good number of families booking every week, you will see a real impact on your cash flow.
Offering small discounts for block and term bookings can also be incredibly valuable for helping you plan your classes – secure in the knowledge that even quieter sessions will cover your venue hire and other costs.
What about the downsides?
There are no booking systems that are completely free to use (that we know of!) and so the most obvious downside to taking bookings online will be the fees.
At Happity we work hard to keep our commission as low as possible, charging 2.5% per booking (VAT and Stripe fee also apply). Check the Pricing page of the platforms you are considering, which should transparently list all commission and fees you will pay, as well as any monthly/annual subscriptions to use the service. (You can see ours here)
Also worth bearing in mind is the time you will need to set-up your booking system and the new processes around it – such as checking the register at the beginning of every class. Don’t worry, though, because once bookings are integrated into your business, you’ll get that time back every week!
Happity: The only booking system designed specifically for baby and toddler class providers
We might be biased, but we happen to think our booking system is one of the best in the business! Designed specifically for baby and toddler class providers, we’ve worked hard to include everything you need, but none of the faff. Let busy parents book your classes in seconds; while you take back your evenings from fiddly admin with your tickets, timetables, venues and registers all in one place. Plus, our subscription and commissions are some of the lowest in the industry. Find out more and get started for free here.