The best Squarespace tools for creative businesses
When working on a new website, one of the goals I have for my clients, over an above increasing their enquiries or sales, is that the website will help to make running their business easier in some way. This can be big or small, and it really depends on the type of business and the systems they have in place already, but there is always something we can implement that will have a positive impact on their business running.
Squarespace has a lot of tools and features built in which can help to make things simpler. It could be to streamline your client booking process, it could be to create a membership area for customers and clients to give them a more premium experience, it could be sending a newsletter, creating a subscription service or product…the list goes on!
Below are the tools and features that I use most often to make running a business easier.
Commerce
So the commerce feature isn’t exactly anything hidden or special, and I’ve written a full blog post about using it as a product based business here, but there are some different ways you can use it that you might not have thought of.
If you sell a service, whether that is one-to-one or in a class based format, you can sell it through the commerce platform making processing the order much easier for you. You can take payments easily by connecting your PayPal or Stripe account to your website.
Subscriptions
Taking services even further with the commerce platform, you can offer your services as a subscription. So this would be really useful if you wanted to split the payment for your service into smaller payments for your clients, or if it was a class you were running over a couple of weeks you could split the instalments to tie in with that.
Campaigns
Campaigns is the name of Squarespace’s own email marketing platform. I will start by saying it is definitely not the most powerful email marketing software out there, and if you have big plans for your list (such as creating segments, targeting certain subscribers) then Campaigns won’t be the platform for you. However, if you only want a simple software where you can easily share news, new blog posts or shop products with your audience, then it’s a breeze to use and quite an affordable option.
My favourite thing about Campaigns (and I use it for Kirsty M Design) is that it can pull shop and blog content in directly from your site, no need to add this in manually…it’s so clever! The interface is also very similar to using the Squarespace website builder, so the learning curve is much shallower than using a completely different product.
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Scheduling
Squarespace also offers a native scheduling software directly accessed from the back end of your website. It is powered by the scheduling software Acuity and is perfect if you offer any type of appointments for your clients.
I use it in Kirsty M Design for one to one meetings with potential and current clients. This works brilliantly because it allows my clients to book a time that suits them, directly on my website, and I have already set my availability and synced with my calendar, so only times that suit me are available. This saves so much back and forth by email.
Another great use for the scheduler is that you can create specific appointment types and class types. This works really well if you are a massage therapist, a yoga teacher or even a crafter who offers group or one to one classes.
You can add one off or subscription fees to these appointments meaning there is so much flexibility to streamline how you work with clients.
Member areas
Following up on subscriptions, you can take this a step further by using the Squarespace Member Areas feature. This allows you to create content behind a password protected wall, that only your clients or customers that have subscribed to can access. This can be a free or a paid service and there are so many different offerings you can create using this tool.
For example: A free option would be giving subscribers to your mailing list a password, then offering exclusive content to people on your list.
A paid option would be to create a full online course on your website, that customers can sign up to with a one off fee, instalments or monthly recurring payments.
There are so many ways in which a website can improve your life as a business owner, by making certain processes within your business more streamlined and hands off. As much as we want to make sure the experience for our customers and clients is wonderful, making your own life easier should also be a top priority.
If you’d like to discuss how we can add any of these features to your site, or create a brand new website that includes these features, head over here to get in touch.
