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An appointment booking funnel is a robust way to discover quality leads and bring them to convert. It focuses on potential customers’ problems and gives personalised solutions to convert them into a sale.
A booking funnel is a step-by-step process that brings your leads closer to your product or service. Various touchpoints are utilised to set up efficient appointment funnels, like automated emails, videos, articles, and landing pages.
In this blog, I will cover how you can set up an automated appointment booking funnel and generate high-quality leads without manually managing and following up.
What Is An Appointment funnel?
In an appointment funnel, the aim is to bring a visitor into your system. Then by understanding their pain points in the scheduled meeting, convert them into a prospect and eventually into buying customers.
The appointment funnel is great for most consulting or service-based businesses wherein you need to speak to the prospect before selling them the actual service. The appointment funnel aims to get your prospects to fill in dates in your calendar to speak with you on autopilot, and yes, that’s right, without you having to chase them manually every time.
Strategy For Creating An Appointment Booking Funnel
Below is a simple flowchart of how an appointment booking funnel works.
First, with the help of Google Ads, a visitor is attracted towards a landing page. By filling out the landing page’s form, the visitor converts into a lead. This visitor-turned-lead is added to the automation tool or, in this case, to the ActiveCampaign.
After filling out the form, the lead is directed towards a thank-you page where a meeting scheduler is present. If the lead books a call, you should start preparing for the meeting. And if they don’t, then with the help of email automation, you can nurture the prospect into booking one.
Introduction to Appointment Booking Funnel
An automated appointment funnel will save you time and work while you can focus on things that matter more. It helps filter quality leads through the appointment setting funnel that asks the right questions from the prospects and determines whether the lead fits into a targeted buyer’s persona.
Let’s cover the five steps to building an automated funnel from scratch.
- Traffic
- Landing Page
- Booking Form
- Setup Meeting Scheduler
- Thank you page
- Email Automation
1. Traffic
There are different ways to generate traffic to your booking landing page. But a landing page is most effective.
Booking funnel landing pages can generate traction in paid and organic channels together. Through SEO, a landing page can be made fit to land at the top SERPs of a targeted keyword, but it can take time. For faster results, one can use PPC ads.
In my experience, Google Ads works best for consulting businesses as prospects type their problem directly into Google’s search box. These visitors have high intent to buy vs Facebook ads where people don’t actually need to buy but could buy if the product/service is right for them at the right moment.
I would recommend using Google ads to drive high-quality traffic.
2. Landing Page
A landing page is the first thing you need to set up an appointment booking funnel. It is the page that visitors reach when they click on an ad. A landing page is a standalone webpage dedicated to a single goal.
For appointment booking funnels, the landing pages focus on encouraging prospects to book a call. The copy and design of a landing page showcase how you can help the targeted audience through elements like FAQs, social proof, etc.
The landing page aims to capture the visitor’s information that helps you better understand your prospects.
To achieve that, you need to do a few things:
Relevancy: You need to make the page relevant to the product or service your prospects are looking for.
Establish Trust: You need to talk more about the benefits of your product/service and showcase social proof and reviews so your prospects know that you are the expert and can solve their problem.
I recommend capturing the page’s name, email, and phone number so you have enough information to reach out to them.
To build a landing page, I recommend using Unbounce, Instapages, or SwipePages. You can host the page directly via WordPress or your CMS if you have a website.
Suggested Read: Essential Principles of Landing Page Design
3. Booking Form
A booking form on the landing page allows you to gather information about interested leads. It allows you to stay in touch with prospects and nurture them further. If for some reason, a lead cannot attend the scheduled meeting, you can always catch up with them through shared email or any other contact info.
Booking forms must not be complicated, with too many form fields. Collecting prospects’ names and emails are enough to start a lead nurturing process.
After filling out the booking form, a lead must directly move towards the meeting scheduler to book a call with you.
4. Setup Meeting Scheduler
You can use tools like:
Honestly, there are tons of them.
I like Calendly for two reasons:
- It integrates with Activecampaign, my email marketing automation tool, without me hooking it up with Zapier.
- I can pass URL parameters which mean prospects don’t have to fill out the form twice; they simply pick the date/time, and their other information gets passed on from the main landing page via URL parameters.
No matter what tool you use, you should look for a way where the scheduler integrates with your calendar so prospects can easily pick a time when you are available.
The other benefit of using a scheduler is that it will send out an automated email calendar invite to both parties, so it gets marked in the calendar.
5. Thank you page
Next is the mighty thank you page.
Thank you pages are great as they will get visited by all of your prospects who fill out the form.
You can do a couple of things here:
- You can establish trust and build a connection with your prospect by embedding a video on the page.
- You can add a button and link it to your scheduler or embed the scheduler directly on the page.
I know you must be thinking, why not show the scheduler on the main landing page?
Well, you might want to test that, but most of the time, prospects don’t want to speak directly with someone. Consider this a foot-in-the-door technique, where prospects have already given you their contact details, and now they are taking the next step of booking a call.
The other advantage is that even if they drop off at this point, you still have their name, phone and email to follow up.
How to Use Email Automation in Your Appointment Booking Funnel
You can also hook up your booking appointment scheduler with an email automation tool like ActiveCampaign, where you can send automated emails.
As I discussed earlier, there can be leads who fill out the form and do not book a call via the scheduler.
At that moment, you have a couple of options.
- Either you pick up the phone and call them.
- Or you can send out an automated email and send them a link to your scheduler so they can book a slot in your calendar. It saves a lot of back-and-forth emails as prospects pick the date/time based on their availability.
The best part with tools like ActiveCampaign and Calendly is that you can automate them. So anytime somebody does book, they are removed from the automation automatically.
If you want to know more about email automation, I suggest you check out this blog:
A Simple Guide For Email Nurturing Campaigns With Examples
One of the other benefits of an email automation tool is to send out a drip email. You can send out a welcome series to every lead and introduce them to who you are and what you do to build rapport.
It is extremely powerful and can happen in the background, saving you time, energy, and money to follow up manually.
Conclusion
With the help of this article, you’ll be able to create your appointment booking funnel and connect with your prospects seamlessly. While landing pages and email automation are vital, you can create a better user experience and develop a strong booking funnel by focusing on the thank you page and meeting scheduler.
If you are interested in knowing more about landing pages, you can check out my blog about lead generation marketing strategies.
Also, Check
Top Of Funnel Marketing
Middle of the Funnel Lead Generation
Bottom of the Funnel Lead
