The prep takes weeks or even months. You hire staff, print forms, and set registration hours. And the results will have a huge impact on your success! It’s a lot of pressure on just a couple of days. Even though registration time is exciting, the same challenges always seem to come up. Whether it be for camp, after school, your community center, swim school; you name it - here’s how bringing your activities online by offering your customers the ability to select, register and pay virtually can solve the most common registration challenges.
An online platform will give your clients the convenience of registering themselves while you work on other aspects of running your business. You might have once said “registrations take a village” but you'll no longer need a team of admin staff or days of your own time to take them all down. Not to mention, you can assign staff to more important projects. On top of that, an online software, which is seamlessly integrated into your own branded website, can capture registrations 24/7, which makes your activities accessible for your community at any time, from anywhere. You’ll make sales while you sleep, literally.
Your business likely has unique questions for customers when they register – how old are they? Who is their emergency contact? What size do they wear? Any allergies? Well, you can customize these fields when creating forms on a sophisticated eCommerce platform. Being online makes it easy to create and manage any number of forms you need to run your activities, and they can be assigned to specific programs, subscriptions or memberships. Making forms part of the registration process also ensures that you have all the information you need ahead of a new session and reduces time spent on chasing down missing information. The possibilities for forms are endless, plus, you’ll never run out of copies once you go digital!
If you still use paper forms, get ready to de-clutter when you switch to a secure cloud-based technology; you’ll instantly be able to find a client file just by searching their name in the database. Remember the forms we just talked about? Well, all the information that’s collected through the forms automatically appears in the client profiles.
Plus, with your registrations on a cloud-based eCommerce platform (which means all your data gets stored in the cloud rather than directly on your device) there’s no risk of losing any of the client profiles you’ve painstakingly accumulated. What’s even better is that clients can sign into their account at any time and manage their own profile such as updating emergency contact numbers or their payment method, which allows you to provide an even better client experience.
Sometimes you want to be able to provide special pricing to certain members or clients. It could be a senior's discount or a special rate for young children. You might want to give residents of your community priority pricing or make a program more accessible to communities who are underserved. Whatever the case, it can be hard to manually ensure that clients or members who qualify for special pricing get it. This is where the game-changer comes in: an online registration platform automatically applies discounts or promos to individuals who meet your pre-defined criteria. YES, we did say automatically!
We’re realists here, so we know that once the registration period is over, there are always things that come up. When your registrations are online, you can easily modify or cancel them afterwards with auto-refunding. What’s more? Mass-cancellations are possible, which means that if you need to cancel a whole class or session, you can with the click of a button! Even though this might be for a less than ideal situation, clients will appreciate the amazing customer service and how seamless and fast the experience is which ultimately positions your business as trust-worthy and reliable.
Once you’ve tackled your registration challenges, you’ll shift all the time and energy you’ve saved into other projects, dare we say getting even more sign-ups!? Moving your activities to an online platform can help you do exactly that by increasing engagement and ultimately registrations with features like merchandise stores and waitlists (which means you’ll never have a spot go unfilled).
You can also create incentives such as discounts for when clients register more than one participant (such as siblings) or for if they sign up to more than one of your activities. What makes it all so easy is that it can be all done through one member account, making it super convenient for clients to take advantage of all the services and activities you offer, resulting in higher engagement!
Identifying, anticipating and solving multiple challenges on the go is a tall order during busy season. With an online registration software, you’ve got that extra set of hands (or more) to help you get the job done. Amilia offers SmartRec, and with it, you have all the tools to help you tackle each challenge, grow your business and offer more to your community.
If you want to learn more about SmartRec, click the link below to get in touch with us.
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