One of the big advantages of using a booking system, is that you have the opportunity to create a bit of a marketing buzz around your classes and hold a pre-sale before you open a new term up to the general public.

This is a perfect way to reward loyalty amongst your existing customers, build your mailing list, and maximise sales for your classes.

You might also choose to only sell block / term tickets in the pre-sale initially. This will allow the bulk of your classes to be sold in advance and help save on your transaction fees - it helps give you some financial security for your term, and means you've only got to worry about filling a smaller number of ad-hoc spaces as the weeks progress. It also means your early customers get your classes at the best available price.

You can set a class to 'Hidden' in Happity to remove it from all of the public facing pages on Happity. This will also stop the site from submitting your class info to Google. This can be found on the Right Hand side on the admin page for each class:

Once you're ready to hold your pre-sale, enable 'Bookings' on the class. You'll then be able to share the link for these dates with your customers directly, and only those with the link will be able to book.

Provided you have uploaded a Privacy Policy, all of your previous customers via Happity will have been asked if they would like to sign up to your newsletter at the point of booking.

You can Export the full list of who has subscribed under Customers > Bookings, and these will be clearly marked as to which customers subscribed and which didn't. You may have also collected 'Followers' on Happity who have opted in to hear from you too.

These subscribers can be added to your own mailing list to receive regular news from you, until they unsubscribe. We highly recommend Mailerlite for an easy to use, lightweight emailing tool. They have a generous free tier, and it remains affordable if you need to upgrade.

For a new term, you'll probably also want to email your recent customers to invite them to book in. We recommend contacting these customers separately from your general mailing list however, as you'll be contacting them on a 'legitimate interest' basis only and should not continue to email them with other news thereafter.

You will need your booking link to include in your emails to parents. This can be found on the register for the class that you want to pre-sell.

Just click on 'Booking link' and then copy and paste your link into your emails!

Busy tired parents easily miss emails(!), so it's good idea to have at least 3 contact points. You could do this by:

a) announcing when your pre-sale will be starting, a day in advance

b) letting them know when the pre-sale opens

c) giving them a reminder before the pre-sale closes

Each time include what their deadline is, why they qualify for the pre-sale and if you are planning to accept single session bookings at a later date, then also make it clear that you're only taking term and block bookings in the pre-sale and that these will be available later (space permitting).

We tend to find that parents are most likely to open emails around the lunchtime nap, or shortly after kids bedtime!

As ever, if you have any questions with this feature - please contact us on [email protected]. 🙂