Chances are you have a booking button on your site. That click is the pivotal moment on your site, so why not make it the best booking button that mankind has ever seen? Coming right up, I’ll share some ideas with you on how to make a booking button with maximum potential.
You may not have thought about your booking button much, but given that it’s the hinge upon which your website swings, I’d recommend making sure you have the best one possible.
Here are my 8 steps to a great booking button:
Step one: Have a booking button. Any button is better than no button, right? A huge amount of tour & activity operators don’t even HAVE a booking button! They just a small link in the menu that says ‘bookings’.
That’s kind of like opening a shop and hiding the cash register. Sure, the determined people will buy, but you’re going to miss out on sales.
Step two: Make it obvious. On a page with a booking button, that button needs to be one of the most obvious, prominent things on the site. The trick to this is to take your glasses off or squint to make the screen blurry. Does the button stand out? If not, it needs to be bigger or brighter.
Step three: Use a contrasting color. The color of the booking button needs to stand out in a big way. It should be the one time you see that color on that page.
Step four: Use imperative verbs. This might seem silly to you, but it’s important with a button that you tell people what to do. ‘Book Tour’ will always work better than ‘Bookings & Enquiries’.
Step five: Create a sense of urgency. They need to do it now, not later. ‘Book Tour Now’ will work better than ‘Book Tour’. Even better if you have a calendar which shows your limited availability.
Step Six: Write in the first person. Joanna Wiebe is one of the world’s top experts in writing amazing buttons, and she says that we should always write in the first person.
A good rule of thumb, she states, is to take the words ‘I want to’ – whatever follows those words should be the words on the button.
If I’m looking at your site, I want to book my spot now, so I should be putting ‘Book My Spot Now’ on the button!
For example the words ‘Start My Free Trial’ work WAY better than ‘Start Your Free Trial’ – by a difference of around 25%.
Step seven: Fear of missing out. People are much more likely to book when they’re worried that they will miss out. So rather than use the generic word ‘tour’, why not say ‘Book Your Place Now’ or ‘Book Your Spot Now’? These are specific things, and they imply that once gone, they will be gone forever.
Step eight: Make it pop. A great booking button needs to break its design in some way. It needs to be big, it needs to be surrounded by white space and, if possible, it needs to break the visual lines of the design.
So, those are the 8 steps, but hang on for the next video where I’m going to show you two MORE tricks to make that button do some heavy lifting for you.
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