One of the best things about having an online booking form is that you can start building up a true picture of your business and your diners.
Asking for reviews and feedback after a visit is nice, but there’s nothing like a booking form to gather true information about your venue as it has to be used by every customer who wants to book online, not just the select few who might go back to talk about you afterwards.
Booking Ninja offers access to a range of different analytics about your overall booking patterns and busy periods, but we also offer a full customer database that you can use to learn more and, ultimately, connect with your customers.
Every customer that creates a booking with you will have their own entry created automatically in your database, and if they use the same booking details again, we will continue to keep track of their preferences and habits.
But how is this actually helpful? Let’s go over a few different examples:
No Shows
No shows can really hit your revenue if they happen too often or in busy periods. Using our data, you’ll be able to see just how many no-shows you receive, and if any of those are repeated customers.
You can then use this information to decide how to handle no shows. Perhaps you’ll want to take deposits for bookings during busy periods to offset that risk.
Or, perhaps you’ll simply want to try to reduce them by sending SMS messages a few hours before a booking, or send a message after the no-show happens.
Custom Reporting
By default we already report on some of the more universal things you might want to know about your customers, such as the frequency of common allergies that people note down when booking, which can help inform your menu decisions.
But as Booking Ninja also allows custom fields on our PRO account, you can capture just about any information you might want about your customers.
For example, creating a tick box question asking customers if they’ve visited before could help you discover just how many online bookings are returning customers.
Marketing
The booking stage is the very best time to ask people to join your email lists, or follow you on Twitter. They’ve already engaged with your restaurant and are far more likely to be interested in continuing that relationship than someone just visiting your website.
Plus, it’s so much easier for a potential return customer to tick a single box to allow you send them marketing emails when they’ve already entered their email for booking purposes.
Once you have a list of all customers you can easily filter by those who accept marketing emails, and you can export that data into any other programs.
Our customer database feature and most of our analytics are available on our free account, so sign-up now to get a better picture of your business.
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