Guides to grow your business

Give your customers the convenience of paying for event registrations with their credit card. Link your Occasion account with a payment processor like Square.

1. Add your payment gateway (click for details)

To create your first event just choose a template from our growing list of ideas and customize it to your needs. You can then use and reuse your custom template to create new events in just a few clicks.

1. Choose an event template and modify it if necessary
2. Create your first event using your customized template

Once you create your events you should tell the world about them! We give you several unique, customizable calendar designs you can use to showcase your events on your website, or just share a direct link to an individual event on your website or on social media.

1. Add your Occasion calendar to your website
2. Add individual event registration links to your website
3. Post an event registration link to Facebook
4. Email your customers about your new event(s)

Your website is your business’ online home. We’ve developed some tips on how to optimize it so it’s more attractive and it’s easier for your customers to find what they are looking for and register for your events.

1. Organize your website to improve the customer experience and get more sales
2. Promote your website to your customers over email and social media

Finding new customers can be challenging. We empower you with the tools and resources necessary to promote your events on Google and Facebook. You can also get your existing customers to refer their friends to your business and leave public testimonials for others to see – both are proven marketing strategies that work.

1. Publish your events to Google Search, Google Maps and Google My Business
2. Quickly create Facebook posts with links to your events
3. Get existing customers to refer your business to their friends
4. Generate positive public reviews and testimonials from your customers

Getting existing customers to return to your business is one of the best ways to get more sales. We help you get more return customers by making it easy to get feedback on your past events, and giving you the ability to automatically remind customers about your upcoming events.

1. Get customers to complete their registration and recover abandoned bookings
2. Learn how to improve – get customer feedback on past events
3. Save time and send an automatic monthly newsletter with list of upcoming events

Don’t let things get out of hand. You can stay organized by inviting other team members to help you with your Occasion account, and creating separate venues for each of your rooms/locations. You can also ensure your events are not booked at times you are unavailable by integrating your Occasion calendar with your personal Google calendar and activating the Calendar Collision feature to minimize double bookings.

1. Invite your staff and contractors to your Occasion account and control their access
2. Organize your events across multiple venues, rooms and locations
3. Sync your Occasion events with your personal Google Calendar
4. Minimize double bookings with smart handling of overlapping time slots – activate Calendar Collision

Follow simple best practices like publishing a cancellation policy and issuing account credits to ensure minimal impact on your cash flow when a cancellation happens. You can also help cover tips, credit card processing, cleaning fees and more by adding service fees to your event registration price.

1. Issue account credits instead of refunds and improve your cash flow
2. Write clear and concise “Cancellation and Refund Policy” to protect your business from last minute cancellations
3. Add service fees (like tips, gratuities, cleaning or credit card processing fee) to the event registration total amount due

Learn more about how your business is performing by taking advantage of Occasion’s built-in reports.

1. Reconcile your sales with your bank deposits
2. Data driven? Learn from your sales analytics
3. Help your accountant – know and pay your taxes on time
4. Become an intelligent event planner – use data to improve and get more sales

Ensure your customers have a good experience even before they attend your events by setting up automatic reminders and communicating with them ahead of the event with any important information comes up.

1. Send automatic reminder emails to ensure your customers make it to their events
2. Have something important to share with all attendees of an upcoming event? Email or text your event roster