Better than a one-time customer is a customer that returns. These customers form a major part of reliable income. Most of the time, these clients spend more money than one-time clients. Thus, it is worth the effort to keep track of these recurring clients.

You can do much to please your favorite customers. If you keep track of them, you can offer them their preferred treatments, times, and staff members. You can offer to schedule them recurring appointments so that they can enjoy the best service.

Amelia has a special feature that allows you to schedule recurring appointments with a few clicks. You can schedule more than one recurring appointment after enabling this feature for a client.

The Benefits of Regular Clients and Recurring Appointments

The idea is simple. Recurring events have a certain recurrence pattern. This could be once a day, once a week, once a month, or at another interval. At times, it is necessary to adjust these repeating appointments.

If you only work to attract new customers, likely, your business will not last very long. New clients are more prone to cancel an appointment or not show up at all. Or, being on a search for the services you offer, they may find a similar business to which to go. Also, new clients are very difficult to market to.

But it is easier to convert one-time clients into loyal customers. One way is by offering them recurring bookings. The following is a list of some of the benefits of repeating events.

Regulars Are More Convenient

Finding new clients is not easy and takes a lot of time and effort. If you have a solid client base less time and effort can be spent in attracting new clients. You can build a personal relationship with regular clients, which makes it easier and more pleasant to deal with them.

Less Scheduling Conflicts, More Value

It is almost inevitable that scheduling errors enter a calendar. People book, rebook and cancel. The chance of that happening is a lot smaller if you have more recurring appointments.

These repeating events allow you to put more emphasis on higher-value products and services.

Fewer No-Shows

Of course, you cannot completely avoid no-shows. But the likelihood becomes a lot smaller when you create recurring appointments. It instills a certain sense of responsibility in clients. They realize that you made a special appointment window in your calendar, so now they need to keep their end of the deal.

More Effective Marketing Campaigns

The most important benefit of regular appointments is that they create a steadier income, and that allows you to plan ahead. You can stimulate the growth of your business by investing in a marketing campaign. You could, for example, spend money on new promotional content; that is money that is sure to pay itself back.

How to Create a Recurring Appointment with the Amelia WordPress Booking Plugin

Amelia has special features to create recurring appointments. These series of appointments give clients a good motivation to come back. They don’t need to remember to call to make new appointments; they can book all their appointments in one go. The Amelia system will send them a reminder of their upcoming appointments.

Clients can book their repeat appointments by choosing the time and date of the first occurrence and repeat them for the period of their choosing. The system will generate reminders for the clients and the staff of upcoming appointments. Amelia makes planning far ahead very easy.

Creating Recurring Service

To enable recurring appointments for a certain service you need to customize your options in the Service module:

• Go to the Service tab
• Click on Add Service
• Edit the existing service the way you want it
• Go to the Service Details tab
• Enable the Recurring Appointment box by selecting one of the four options::
  • All. Customers can repeat the appointment every day, week, or month.
  • Daily.
    With this selection, customers can choose to repeat the booking by day. They can choose to repeat every day, every two days, every three days, and so on. They can choose an end date, or they can choose the number of appointments they want.
    
  • Weekly. With this selection, customers can choose to repeat the booking by week. They can choose to repeat every week, every two weeks, every three weeks, and so on. There is also the option of booking appointments more than once a week. They can choose an end date, or they can choose the number of appointments they want.
    
  • Monthly. This option is like the ones above, but the recurrence pattern is by month. Customers can specify the date or the day of the week that they prefer.
• With the recurrence details set you will see two new options:
  • Handle unavailable recurring dates. Here you can set the action the platform should take if a certain time and date are not available:
    • Recommend the closest date after
    • Recommend the closest date before
    • Recommend the closest date before or after
  • Handle recurring appointment payments.
    • Customers pay for the first appointment. The software will show the price calculation for all appointments but only charge for the next one.
    • Customers pay for all appointments at once. The customer will have to pay for all the scheduled appointments.

How to Set Up a Recurring List in Notifications

You can receive a list of recurring appointments in your Notifications. To do this, copy the %recurring_appointments_details% placeholder to the Notifications. After you have copied this, follow the succeeding steps:

• Go to Settings
• Go to the Appointments Settings. By default, you will find the %appointment_date_time% placeholder. This placeholder will only show the time and date of all appointments.
• Paste the %recurring_appointments_details% placeholder from the notifications page. Now you will see all details of your recurring appointments in your Notifications.

How to Book a Recurring Appointment

After you have set up all the options described above, clients will be able to book recurring appointments.

The option for booking recurring appointments will appear after the client selects the time slot for his first appointment in the appointment window. He will need to select the Repeat this Appointment box and then Continue.

When the Repeat this Appointment box is enabled, clients must follow the instructions given above in the subheading Creating Recurring Service, bullet point five. These steps are necessary to complete the setup of the recurrence of future appointments.

After the client has chosen how the appointment recurs, he will see a list of the repeating events. At this point, the client can still edit this list of recurring appointments. He can edit the time slots or delete them as desired.

The booking application will suggest a new one if a certain time slot is not available. It will show the deviation and the customer can choose to accept it or not.

How to Use Coupons with Recurring Appointments

Clients can use coupons to pay for their appointments, in full or in part. You do have to make sure that you use the right options in the Coupons settings.

You can choose to set a large coupon limit and no limit per customer. Customers can then use their coupons for the services they wish to purchase. They can pay for everything or only for the upcoming one.

You can also set a limit to the use of coupons. When a customer reaches the set limit, Amelia will show a message that the coupon limit has been reached. It will also show for how many appointments the client used a coupon.

Conclusion on How to Set Up a Recurring Appointment in Amelia

Business experts know the value of returning customers. Spending time on keeping customers is an investment that will pay off.

Keep them satisfied, happy, and motivated to come back and spend more money in your business. Provide them with outstanding customer service. Focus on how you can create that exceptional customer experience. A good experience will make people come back.

Amelia is one of the best tools that will help you as a business owner to provide outstanding service for your customers. One of the features that will help you to do that is the recurring appointment option. Your customers can enjoy their favorite service when they want.

If you enjoyed reading this article about setting up a recurring appointment with Amelia, you should read these as well:

• New useful features in the latest Amelia releases
• What is New with Amelia: The Latest Features Added to Your Favorite Booking Specialist
• Amelia 5.0 update – a Brand New Version of the Booking Form