So how to rent out your Dance Studio and start making extra money? Today we’ll talk about 4 possible solutions to achieve this goal.
If rentals are not your priority you may be good with one of the first solutions, while if you are interested in earning a lot of revenues from your space, by making space rentals one of your main income sources, you may be willing to use more articulated features included in the last (free) solution.
Some of these ideas and apps are free while others are paid or freemium.
Let’s find out how to rent out your Dance Studio with these 4 ideas.
Whatever solution you’re currently using, you’re probably writing your rental information like this:
Maybe you didn’t notice, but no one likes walls of text. Why? People just don’t read them. Probably you’re thinking “hey, I read it, I WOULD read it!“. Of course we would gladly re-read something we personally wrote. But not the other people of the Internet. So, how to do it?
1. Email / Text / Call
PRO: The old-fashioned calls, texts and emails are just great. In particular, you can chat with the potential customer easily and more directly. This is a great solution if you and your customer already know each other and we recommend it as super effective methods of customer retention.
CON: According to many researches, the average attention span of web users is 8 seconds (someone could leave after 3 seconds!). So you basically have 8 seconds to get the attention of your visitors and provide the information they need. Many users looking for a space to rent for a day won’t bother sending you an email or calling you for asking about your space availability.
1) They just don’t know you.
2) They do not have time.
3) They are distracted.
4) Your competitors are offering them the same services as you, just in a different way.
Let’s make an example:
You are looking for an hotel room to book. You’re in a hurry and you just need a cool place where to stay. You see there are two hotels who look quite nice. The first one has a website where you just see an image of a room and under it you can read “call us for more information about availability, prices, etc”. The second one has a website where you can see the different types of rooms, with lots of images, all the amenities and a real-time availability calendar. They can approve your booking directly from there, immediately, while the first hotel needs a call, after which, if your availability matches with theirs, they will send you their payment info to complete the transaction and a form via email to fill out with your details.
What would you choose? Pretty obvious answer right?
2. Contact Forms
PRO: A contact form is a good way to collect and store information in a database so you can have it all there. You can ask your website’s visitors anything you need to set up their rental and if they’re interested they will fill it out. With this method you can also have their e-mail address to send them extra information or your newsletter.
Another PRO is that you can take your time to respond and wisely think about the answer to give, prepare the documents and your feedback and get back to your potential customer.
CON: “Fill out this form, we will get in touch shortly“. How many times we wrote / we read this phrase? You can find even one like that on our website (right here). But the truth is, unless you receive 200+ requests per day, it’s probably counterproductive to use it. People need efficiency, speed and security. So in this sense, emails/texts/calls > contact forms.
Another CON is that contact forms are branded. You won’t be able to put your logo there.
Do you want to make a quick USABILITY TEST? Check your own website. Do you have an email displayed somewhere or you just have a contact form? Is that email address easy to reach or people have to find it hidden somewhere in a sub-sub-sub-page? How much time does an external visitor who doesn’t know your website take to find it?
Examples on how to rent out your dance studio:
3. Paid Calendar/Booking/Appointment Apps
Let’s get to the paid apps. There are thousands out there, so it’s quite hard to list them all, but we can talk about the most common ones(*we’re not endorsed by them neither we are sponsoring them).
Squarespace
How to rent out your dance studio with it? Squarespace is a website creation platform where you can easily create and host your site. Their platform offers different plans and add-ons. The one you’re looking for is what they call Acuity Scheduling. With a basic plan, costing around 160 $ per year, you can get an appointment interface.
You can also accept payments. The latest updated fees regarding the Commerce section of Squarespace are the following:
As you can see, with a Business Website, Squarespace takes out of your payments a 3% commission, while with the other plans it can vary from none to further options. Anyway, no matter what plan you choose, you still have to pay the payment processor fees (between 3% and 5% per transaction, depending on what you use). For example, with a received order of 100$, you are going to pay between 3$ and 8-10$. Your net income will be between 97$ and 90$. This mostly depends on the variable fees.
The booking interface is minimal, you may need to hire a developer to customize it:
Pros/Cons
PROS:
– you can accept payments
– schedule appointments and bookings based on your schedule
– create as many entries as you wish
– offer discounts (with some plans)
– lots of add-ons you can pay à la carte (some included for free with the basic plan)
– affordable pricing
CONS:
– no possibility to offer extras on the final price (for example a fee for cleaning, for using studio material)
– you can’t offer a variable pricing (if you want to set a different price for different days you need to create a separate entry)
– you have to pay the payment processors fees (+ the Squarespace commission)
– no protection against scams and last minute cancelations
– these add-ons won’t get you any extra visibility
– no pre-made rental inquiry form available to fill out after the booking request
– no messaging with the customer (available as add-on for Business plans)
Mindbody (and some other studio management Apps)
Mindbody is a platform offering a wide set of tools to manage your business more efficiently. Its features (which are pretty similar to other studio management softwares) go from staff management to booking and appointment scheduling, from listing your business (this is a unique feature other apps don’t offer) to marketing tools (email templates, reviews, referrals).
The pricing of Mindbody can vary depending on the amount of resources you need. If you search online you will find some website reviews platforms who can let you know the average pricing of its services.
PROS:
– you can accept payments
– schedule appointments and bookings based on your schedule
– create as many entries as you wish
– customers can choose different options according to the availability
– fully integrated solution (depending on your plan you can get more and more features)
– marketing and growth tools and dynamic pricing
– you can list your business on their platform as a customer (paid)
CONS:
– no extras on the final price (for example a fee for cleaning, for using studio material)
– it can be very expensive for small businesses
– the interface is very minimal
– you have to pay the payment processors fees (and other extra fees for promotion)
– no protection against scams, frauds and last minute cancelations
– no pre-made rental inquiry form available to fill out after the booking request
Calendly
Calendly presents itself as a scheduling automation platform. This means you can have a beautiful and enhanced calendar who allows you (and your customers) to schedule appointments. You can also accept payments for bookings with an extra add-on. As usual, you may need to pay the payment processors fees by yourself (3-5%).
Another good aspect is that they offer a FREE starting plan, so you can upgrade your pricing along with your budget. The free plan just allows one type of booking and you can’t set recurring bookings (full review here).
This is a small preview of their appointment scheduling system:
If you need to ask for more details from your customers you may need a bit of customization and development.
PROS:
– you can accept payments
– schedule appointments and bookings
– create as many entries as you wish
– customers can choose different options according to calendar availability
– enhanced meeting platform with great email tools
– FREE starting plan
CONS:
-bookings features are quite limited
– no variable pricing (if you want to set a different price for different days you need to create a separate entry)
– you have to pay payment processors fees for bookings
– no protection against scams, frauds and last minute cancelations
– limited layout customization
– you can’t offer discount codes to your customers for bookings
4. How to rent out your dance studio on Dancerents
Dancerents is a Dance Space rental platform. On Dancerents you can create your own listing announcement and customize it. Just like the previous platforms you can customize prices, calendar availability and accept bookings. Anyway, there are also some differences with the previous platforms. The most important is that Dancerents doesn’t offer subscriptions, there are no paid plans nor add-ons. Everything comes free for businesses who want to offer a rental service. There are no commissions applied on bookings, which means everything you get from your payments is yours. Dancerents covers also the payment processors fees. Another important difference in the pricing system is that Dancerents applies a commission (10%) which is paid entirely by your Guests to the final booking price.
If we take again the example we made before: with a received order of 100$, you pay 0$. Your net income is 100$. Your guests will pay 110$. This commission allows Dancerents to cover fees and give you a FREE service. For ever.
If you visit the Dance Studio Rentals page and click on one of them, you will see an example of how your listing will look like on Dancerents.
Pros/Cons
PROS:
– accept payments for bookings
– create as many listings as you wish
– customers can choose different options according to calendar availability
– offer extras on the final price (for example a fee for cleaning, for using studio material)
– offer variable pricing (set different prices for different days)
– FREE platform, NO commissions for Hosts and NO payment processors fees for bookings
– protection against scams and last minute cancelations
– offer daily/hourly bookings and pricing tiers
– offer discounts based on the number of booked hours
CONS:
– no layout customization
– you can’t create personalized discount codes (so far)
– guests pay a small fee (just like on Airbnb or Booking)
– only available in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK and France (so far)
So, how to rent out your Dance Studio? Now it’s up to you 🙂