If no one books your dance studio space on your website (or you get few reservations each month), it means there could be something wrong with how you are listing your space or how people can book it.
Visual Problems
If the problem is just visual, it’s quite easy to fix. Focus on posting more images of your space (one is not enough), and improve their quality. Blurred, tilted or zoomed images are usually not useful to understand what the space looks like. Avoid taking pictures of a single detail of your studio (if you have a kitchen with a microwave inside your studio, don’t just take a picture of the microwave). These are just some tips to focus on.
The description is also very important: don’t forget to add opening-closing time, studio policies, cancellation policies, hourly fees and every possible information that your customers could find useful. Sometimes all these details can become a wall of text no one will read. That’s why we would recommend to use a Dance Space Rental platform such as Dancerents. On Dancerents you can write all those information in a very clear and optimized way. This will improve your customer experience and increase your bookings already.
But let’s move on.
Booking Process Problems
The reasons why a customer abandons the booking process are many. According to a research (Salecycle) where 1000 customers from different countries were asked about why they quit a booking, the most common reasons were:
- just looking / need to compare (39%)
- price too high (37%)
- lack of payment options, technical issues, complicated booking process (29%)
While we can’t do that much when a customer is just browsing, neither can we when they think the price is too high (except decreasing the amount requested), we can do a lot about the last point.
The same research also showed not just why they abandoned but when. The results, also showed in the image below (from Salecycle):
- when they saw the price (53%)
- when asked for personal details (26%)
- when asked for payment details (21%)
So let’s say on your website you are writing something like:
“The price per hour for our studio space is [x] $. In order to book you need to fill out the rental inquiry form. Then we will get in touch with you to define the booking details, your availability and finalize the process by sending you the payment details. You need to send the payment in order to confirm your booking”
Basically you are doing exactly what made customers of the experiment leave. You are telling them your price (sometimes even that can be ambiguous if you offer different pricing tiers but you don’t make it clear); you are asking for personal details while they just don’t trust you yet; you are already letting them know you want to get paid, period.
So, what to do?
You have two options:
1) State your pricing very clearly and be careful about what you ask and when you ask it.
2) Use an established dance space rental platform your customers know and trust, where they can easily see what’s the price, what are the amenities and features, what are the cancellation policies and if they are covered (just like you) in case of scams and cancellations. In this case, your best option is Dancerents, who offers all these features (and more). You’re free to adopt the first solution anyway, but keep in mind it can be more complicated for you and your customers.
Now that you know why no one books your dance studio space it’s time to focus on the best solution 🙂