A quick guide to course booking systems for small training companies and other course providers
Training course providers collect a lot of information about courses, bookings and enquiries. Some training providers start with spreadsheets, but then discover that as their business grows, the spreadsheets soon become unmanageable. Others begin with a generic CRM system, but then decide they want to switch to a more specialist system that is better suited to the needs of training and course providers.
What kinds of features should you look for if you want to find and implement a course booking system? There are areas to consider.
1. Course pages that are easy to create and update
A good solution is one that lets you integrate your course directory with your existing website. It’s better for business if visitors to your site can search, filter and browse through courses on your existing website.
Course ‘product descriptions’ should be ‘sticky’ and designed in a way that presents visitors with a clear next step - they make a booking.
With Coursedate you can:
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Create and publish courses in your own SEO friendly course directory.
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Integrate your courses directly with your website - you only have to add 3 lines of simple code to your website
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Fast copy courses to create new versions, alternative dates and venues.
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Set courses to auto hide when full or stay in your directory for enquiries about future dates.
And Coursedate also auto generates a list of alternative courses that keep visitors in your directory when the course they are looking at isn’t quite what they want; think Amazon product pages.
2. Intuitive course booking and enquiry forms
It has to be easy for visitors to your course directory to find and then book onto a course. You want a course booking form that is frictionless. It also makes sense to handle enquiries through the same system - because that way you build a single structured database of information about courses, bookings and enquiries that you can then query.
You also want course booking forms that are mobile friendly - we find that over 50% of our learners book through a mobile device.
With Coursedate you can:
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Choose between a simple booking form - one booking per learner - or a more sophisticated booking form that allows organisations to book multiple delegates at a time.
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Collect course enquiries in the same system.
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Still take phone & email bookings - course admins can make bookings on behalf of clients.
3. Flexible data reporting and analytics
Two benefits come from storing information about courses, booking and enquiries in a single database.
First, your course booking system becomes your training provider CRM system. You should be able to run simple reports, do some quick analysis and find useful insights that you can use to improve your course offer, identify new market niches and increase course bookings.
Second, you can use your data to measure impact. That can be important if you’re a continuing professional development (CPD) course provider - you can demonstrate that your courses make a difference.
With Coursedate you can:
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See at a glance how many booking and enquiries each course gets.
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Download .csv files of data about learners, courses and organisations/clients that make group bookings.
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Use Coursedate’s simple, built-in interactive charts to compare visitor engagement across different courses.
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Export data to do further offline analysis in tools like Microsoft Power BI.
Conclusion
To sum up, look for a course booking system that:
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Can be integrated into your existing website (or a future, enhanced version of your website).
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Allows bookings and enquiries 24/7.
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Streamline back office admin - you want to spend less time on routine paperwork.
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Will double up as your CRM system - use your data to develop new course ideas, spot niche markets and grow your course bookings.
Related Posts
How to publish and promote your courses with Coursedate
5 ways an online course booking system could benefit your organisation