Salon Tracker's Top 10 Prep-tips for PB North!

1. Travel and Hotels, check! ✔

Traveling from afar? Sorting your travel and hotels early is essential, as you don’t want to get caught up close to the time with expensive train journeys and a hotel miles away from the venue! Not to mention, pricing. Accommodation and commuting services are always so much more expensive around an event, especially in a premium city like Manchester, therefore to secure a good deal close to the event space, make sure you have this booked in good time! 

2. Have a clear plan

Across the whole weekend you only actually have 15 hours in the event space, unless you’re a lucky VIP that is and then you get an extra half hour each day! It is however therefore so important that you plan your time wisely, to make sure that you pay a visit to all of the stands that you wish to see and gather all your required information. Floor plans are available online now, alongside a business directory and therefore you can take a look at these beforehand to start planning where you want to be and when! 

3. Questions, questions??

And no question is a daft question! A trade show is prime time to speak to all the companies you wish to see and ask as many questions as needed. It’s not like you have to wait in a telephone queue with sales teams or that you’re against the clock in a meeting-slot, this is open time for you to gather as much information as possible from the professionals, so use it to your advantage!


4. Go info-collecting ready (we’re talking comfortable footwear, large bag, notebook...)

Trade shows are long days, as the event space is large and can take some time to get around, you’re on your feet all day and you’re gonna’ do a lot of talking! So, to make this experience as easy as possible, make sure you have your comfies on, that you have a pen and pad to take some notes (as you don’t want to forget anything) and also a practical bag to carry any leaflets you might gather. Half of the time, if you’re lucky, some brands actually offer free tote bags for you to take their information, however be on the safe side and come prepared with your own just in case!


5. Plan regular breaks ☕

As we’ve just been discussing that the trade shows are long-days, make sure you plan yourself a few breathers to re-charge! There’s plenty of café’s around the venue and also Costa & Nero are close by outside Manchester Central so you’re never far from a coffee-stop!


6. Network

Trade shows attract thousands from the industry and so this is a great time to meet people with similar interests and learn about their businesses! You never know, you might just learn something along the way or may even get yourself some new business ideas. It’s a great place to network so during your coffee (or prosecco) stops, get talking and socialise with other fellow salon owners!


7. Take your own marketing merchandise

Whilst your networking, give people something to remember you! It’s always handy at trade shows to have a handful of your own business cards, brand merchandise or product leaflets to give out to people. If you think about it, you’ll collect information from lots of businesses whilst you’re there so why not tell people what you have to offer too!


8. Take a look at competition

There will be LOTS of competition at Professional Beauty! There always is at any trade show, whether it be the exhibitors or the visitors, everyone is in competition with someone. Exhibitors will be one of a group of their type of product advertising there, whilst you will be one of many salon owners visiting the trade show for ideas. So, it’s good to see what products other people are looking in to, and also beneficial to look at potential other suppliers that are different to what you are currently using. You always need to be at the head of your game, understanding what else is out there in the industry and potentially what others may already be using that you could always take advantage of. Something to keep in mind! 

9. Samples

FREEBIES! The best perk of the trade show. But not only that, these are also fabulous to take back to your clients at the salon and get them to try out before you sign any contracts. At the end of the day, if you’re buying in to a new beauty brand, which may be a potential replacement for an existing one, you have to ensure that your customers are going to be interested in this before committing money to it. You need to make sure the products will sell and so these tester-samples are the best way to ensure that by getting client approval first.


10. Explore the City!

Manchester, the third most visited city in the UK, famous for its fabulous musicians and culture, a great city to explore if you ask me! So, if you’re going for the full 2 days, make sure you visit some local attractions in the evenings. There’s plenty of great places for food (and cocktails) like Spinningfields, Deansgate or the Northern Quarter; and it’s also fantastic for shopping! So, if you get a bit of downtime on the Monday afternoon, head to the shops or to the Arndale for a bit of retail therapy!

So, we hope this has helped you to get prepped for the show, that you’re all ready and we can’t wait to see you there! We’ll be exhibiting at stand #E67 across the weekend and we have some brand-new stands to give you our software demos on, not to mention plenty of exciting new features! Still need to get your ticket, here’s your last chance to get a FREE visitor pass with us; just head to https://registration.n200.com/survey/3pud1tsgfmxw1?actioncode=NTWO000118SAF and fill out your details for yours! See you there :D


Salon Tracker x

Spooktacular Halloween Marketing

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Halloween is right around the corner again! This is a great chance for you to get your creative brain on and do some Spooktacular marketing 🎃. We’ve compiled together a few ideas that you can use this Halloween, carry on reading to find out all our tricks and treats for your salon marketing! 

SMS Marketing Campaign

Sending out a marketing campaign to your customers is a great way to get them into your salon, so why not give it a good for Halloween this year. If you have Salon Tracker then you can do this straight from your software, as long as you have some SMS credits on your account. Think of a spell-binding offer that you can send out to your customers, for example:

“Show this text in the salon to receive a spine-tingling 25% off any of our Halloween treatments! Hope to see sooooon!🎃💀👻”

Although more than likely you will have to pay to send out an SMS campaign it is a great channel to use, as your campaign is going directly to the customer.

Competition

Hold a competition across your social media platforms, you could do something like “tag us in your best Halloween look for the chance to win a free beauty treatment! 3 lucky winners will be picked!”. Not only would this increase engagement between you and your clients it would also help to spread the word about your salon, and could increase your clientele!

Offers

When I think of Halloween, the first think that comes to mind would be going out trick or treating! Well, why not incorporate that into your salon this Halloween, you could put loads of offers in a pumpkin bowl and let your customers pick one out at the end of their treatment. This will not only get your own customers excited and engaging in your salon, but it will also increase awareness as customers are likely to tell others about the amazing offers you are giving out!

Décor

Why not get into the Halloween spirit and decorate your salon, nothing too over the top, you don’t want to scare away your clients😂. Just making your salon look inviting, so that customers and potential customers want to come in, who knows it could be the difference in a potential customer coming to your salon instead of your competitor down the road!

  

I hope that some of these ideas are useful to you and that you can really boost your engagement and clientele in the upcoming Halloween Season! If you would like to get booked in for a demo and free 2 week trial of our software don't hesitate to contact us on info@salontracker.co.uk or call on 0113 350 8230.

Last but not least, we will be exhibiting at the Professional Beauty North trade show on the 21st and 22nd of October, feel free to drop by we are on stand E67. You can register for your free tickets to the event here https://registration.n200.com/survey/3pud1tsgfmxw1?actioncode=PWEB1

Salon Tracker x

Goodbye Summer, hello cosy seasons!

So, we’ve had the very best of Spring and Summer… sensational football, glorious sunshine and BBQ galore but now it’s time to get the cosy blankets out, put the kettle on and prepare your Salon for the Autumn and Winter months to come.

We’re quickly approaching the joys of spooking Halloween and festive cheer and I think you all know what that means… a busy, none-stop salon most of the time. So, if you’re wanting a few ideas on how to take some of the weight off of your shoulders when it comes to managing the Salon this year… you’re in luck! Below I’ve listed 5 useful suggestions and ideas to get you started.

Upgrading your online resources.

In this day and age, online booking is such an important asset to any Salon. Recent research has discovered that 35% of clients prefer scheduling appointments during non-business hours and 25% of millennial's only book appointments online! That number is huge, think about missing out on 25% off your potential appointments because your online booking isn’t in place or isn’t up to date? That’s 25% of potential profit lost; let alone the 35% of clients that like to wind down with a glass of wine in the evening and then book their salon visits. Here at Salon Tracker, we include online booking in our enterprise package and not only does it allow clients to book outside of opening hours, but we also do not charge any more on commission per appointment booked. What you see is what you get… no hidden charges! On top of this, it will reduce the amount of time your staff spend on the phone making appointments and free up time to spend on other things which will be needed as we approach the busy season.

Training Salon Staff

You may have found yourself losing track of time and completely forgot that your Salon Staff require training, especially if they’re new to the system, Un-trained staff can result in mistakes being made and time being lost. Now is the perfect time to schedule some training for your staff before the calendar becomes full with Halloween fast approaching and then the manic Christmas period. Lucky for you, we offer unlimited free training with ALL of our packages! Just ring up, book your training for a date that suits you and you’re all set to go.

Advertise your offers

Around this time of the year, customers are all about saving a bit of money; with Christmas coming up and all. As a result, when it comes to getting pampered… they’re on a budget. So consequently, if you don’t advertise your offers widely, you’re going to lose out on business. Blast them all all over your social media channels, promote them and make use of your marketing section. Send an SMS campaign out to all your customers including offer details. Many customers have given us feedback and informed us that the money they spend actually sending the campaign is made back just with a couple of bookings. So, if you’re sending out a text to 1000 customers for example, if only 4 of them were to book an appointment, you’ve pretty much made your money back and more!

Create a look-book

Gather together a load of looks you have created previous years and put them in a book to have in the salon. You can also upload them to your social media pages so customers can have a look at what your team is capable of and then refer to the image as being what they want. Which not only makes it easier for your customers but also easier for your staff as they have created the look before so it will be easier the next time. Extra bonus – it increases engagement on your channels and your reputation!

Make use of siteview and mobile web app

It isn’t just going to be your Salon that will be busy these following months, you, also will be busy. Family events, friend gatherings, work do’s, Christmas shopping… it goes on and on. This is where siteview becomes your best friend, out and about and wondering if everything’s going smoothly in the Salon? Log into siteview and have a quick look. Staff want to see what appointments they have scheduled for the week? Log into siteview and they can have a look themselves.

There's our top 5 tips in preparing for the Autumn and Winter Months ahead, I know most of you will still be in shock that i'm even talking about winter yet but i'm afraid it is the 3rd of October! Yes October, yes less than 3 months to Christmas! Yes you need to start preparing now! 

Salon Tracker x 

Improving your Salons Online Presence

As we all know social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are a great way to market your salon. As well as being one of the cheapest forms of marketing, it is also one that reaches a wide audience so more and more potential clients will be aware of your salon. Whilst having social media accounts for your salon is all well and good, the larger your online presence is, the more potential customers will hear about your salon. So, here are some of Salon Tracker’s top tips on growing your online presence!

Competitions

Competitions are also a great way to increase your salons online presence. Recent studies have shown that businesses who run a competition will get more than double the number of clicks and engagements from new or existing customers. This is because customers are more likely to engage with you online if they feel they can get involved or contribute something to your posts. The possibility of them winning a prize is just another bonus for them. They’re also a lot more likely to do things such as tag their friends or share your posts if you’re running a competition. Facebook is a great platform to run a competition due to the large amount of people who use it on the daily. One competition you could run is getting your customers to like share and tag three friends in a picture to be in with a chance of winning free tanning minutes, or a free cut and blow-dry. By having people tag others and share your post it means it will reach a wider audience and therefore help increase your online presence. Twitter is another example platform where you could run a competition. This may involve your customers sharing a hashtag related to your company, along with a photo of your choice to be in with a chance of winning one of your prizes?

Online Reviews

Online reviews are another great way to improve your online presence. There are many different platforms you could ask your customers to leave reviews on, such as Facebook and Yelp. One thing that online reviews benefit towards is where your salon will place on web results. This means the more reviews you get, the higher you will place on a search engine when someone searches for a salon in your area. This will improve your salons online presence due to the fact that more people will therefore hear about you and will be able to view your page. This will then in turn boost sales and increase customers in your salon. You may choose to encourage your customers to leave reviews by offering them small prizes, such as free tanning lotion sachets or 10% off their next treatment. New customers will also be able to look at the reviews and see if your salon is right for them before they come in. Most customers have said that they will trust a salon with a mix of reviews, even if there are a few bad ones, over a salon with no reviews at all.  In order to obtain a positive array of reviews you could target the market of your customers who you ask to review your salon. Directing them towards loyal and frequent customers would increase the amount of positive reviews you got, due to the fact that if they didn’t like your salon or services, they wouldn’t keep returning. This means you can improve your salons online presence in a positive way.

If you’re a user of our system let us know your opinion by leaving us a review on www.capterra.com/p/81148/Salon-Tracker/#reviews to get 1000 FREE texts or a £50 hardware voucher!

If you aren’t a user of our software at the moment and are thinking of looking at getting a package, why not visit us at Professional Beauty North next month, head to https://bit.ly/2KNI1Iu to get your FREE ticket with us! We’ll be at stand E67, hope to see you there!

Or if you’d like a little bit more information, give us a call on 0113 350 8230 or email us at Info@salontracker.co.uk to speak to a member of our team!

Salon Tracker x

What to expect from ST @PB!

Only a month away from PB North in Manchester central, the biggest trade show in the north of England! Here’s what to expect from our Salon Management Software for the end of this year.

We’ve recently updated our subscription software which includes some brand new features, desired by some of our wonderful customers. For the show this year, we’ve had a redesign of our stand and we even have a few new faces!

The New Stand

For this PB show we have redone our stand tables and even changed the layout, with a fairly updated theme. We’ve decided to change from our plain black and pink lotus logo, so keep an eye out for our burnt orange counters! We will be demonstrating a number of the products we sell and giving demos on the software throughout the day on request, showing potential customers our new features. This year our stand is E67 so it’s quite central to the show room, we’ll have a number of our team dotted about the stand so don’t hesitate to come over and have a chat!

The New Features

The tech team behind Salon Tracker Software have developed a number of new features

to add on the program in time for the PB show, so here’s a quick rundown of what we’ve recently added in.

One of the latest features we’ve had implemented is ‘Advanced Deposits’. This is for

when bookings are made and you want the customer to leave a deposit with you, to secure their booking and reduce the number of no-shows in your salon. This is very flexible so you can adapt the feature to suit the way that your salon works which is a great benefit. You can either setup the deposit to be a percentage of the overall

treatment cost, where you can add a set minimum or maximum value or you can set a flat-rate deposit for all services. If it is only particular product groups that require a deposit, you can now also set this up easily with our ‘groups’ feature. For example; if you only wanted to take deposits on hair treatments over £50, this is possible.

Another one of the new features is a signature screen which you can advertise your salon on, through a touchscreen tablet! This is similar to our signature pad feature which enables you to obtain your clients signature, this is for purposes such as patch test requirements or written consent to salon disclaimers. However, it also now allows you to display your company branding, logos and gives you the opportunity to advertise any current offers you may be running, all-in-one!

An additional new feature is a settings icon which can be added on to your Calendar Booking Screen. This features allows you to quickly make any staff unavailable for booking on that day and allows you to transfer any bookings on to another column, under another staff member. Using this feature you can also hide all the unavailable staff for that day, expanding the dimensions of your calendar and only showing available staff.

The PB North Offers

This year we have an entirely NEW OFFER on Salon Tracker Software, this will be available from the 21st of October 2018, the weekend of PB North, up until the 16th of November 2018. This end of season offer will include 30% off all hardware and software for the first 3 months of your subscription. These is an exclusive offer and is only available in the given time period, so get signed up before it ends!

If you haven’t already signed up for your free PB North ticket, you can do that here! https://registration.n200.com/survey/3pud1tsgfmxw1?actioncode=NTWO000118SAF
 
We hope you all enjoy this years show, see you there! Salon Tracker x

September Salon Tracker Feature of the Month: Advanced Deposits

Ever get frustrated with people not showing up to appointments, even when you’ve sent them a text-reminder message that it seems that they’ve completely ignored? Do you think that people would react the same if you added a little upfront pre-pay rule to their booking? We’ve enhanced our software by advancing our upfront deposits system, to help you to clamp down on people missing their appointments once and for all. Especially with Peak season, Christmas, being just around the corner, your calendars are going to be booking up fast with festive appointments and so you really don’t have time to waste with no-shows! That’s why for September we’ve chosen ‘Advanced Deposits’ as our feature of the month! So how do our deposits work?

You have a few different options when it comes to setting the rules for your deposits. So, if you want to take a set value amount for every treatment that you offer, we have a simple way of implementing this. Or if you want to do specific percentage deposits for a certain range of treatments; so, for example say that you wanted to just take deposits for all treatments that are over say £50, we can also set this up as a rule for you using our product-group permissions feature. You can also set a flat-rate deposit, or a minimum and maximum value dependent on the price of the treatment, therefore the feature is extremely flexible depending on how you wish to run this in your salon.

Some of the benefits of having a deposit as well as an appointment reminder are:

- If a client has already pre-paid a small percentage of their appointment then they are less likely to cancel a booking that they have already committed money to

- The benefit to you if the client doesn’t show is that you at least retain the value of the deposit to slightly make up for the inconvenience

- It makes the clients remaining amount cheaper when they arrive for their treatment, which some customers deem as a benefit, as this splits the payment up for them making it seem more affordable

- It gives you and your client a better sense of security for their booking, as for you as salon owner you have the confirmation of the deposit and for the client they have the confidence that their booking is secured with a payment.

What package is deposits available on? We are offering this as an inclusion on both our Professional and Enterprise software packages, as they are part of our advanced management tools which are available on both of these software editions.

For more information or for your FREE demo and trial, please call our team on 0113 350 8230, who’d be more than happy to give you a run through of how this feature can benefit your salon this season.

We are also exhibiting at Professional Beauty North next month, where we will be giving live demos of this feature to anyone who wishes to visit our stand! You’ll find us at #E67 across the 2-day event. Not got your ticket yet? Simply head to https://registration.n200.com/survey/3pud1tsgfmxw1?actioncode=NTWO000118SAF to get your FREE ticket to the show with Salon Tracker!

Hope to see you there!

Salon Tracker x

It’s been a year!

And what a year it’s been! I’m sure we’ve had the privilege of speaking to the majority of our clients already but if you haven’t spoken to us yet… we’re Christie and Naomi, part of the sales and marketing team at Salon Tracker, and degree apprentice students!

Naomi started just over a month before Christie, at the start of August, and this tends to be our more off-peak season; which meant that the first few weeks were focused on picking up the ropes and learning all of the aspects to the job. However, since around the time that Christie started it has been none stop (with it being our peak season) so this has lead us to where we want to be, therefore allowing us to progress and develop further. When we first started we both don’t think we really realised how hard it would be to pick up the role of the job and be able to answer a call without having to double-check answers from our manager Nicki. But once we got closer to the end of September, we found that it was much easier to manage clients of our own and new enquiries, without having to hold to find out more information. We then worked up the courage to deal with more difficult tasks and by Christmas we were flying through our day to day responsibilities.

Shortly after we’d both come to grips with the job itself, we both started University in February of this year. We study at Sheffield Hallam University and are completing a Chartered management degree, both due to graduate in 2021! So, a little low-down on the Uni-work life: Our degree is the equivalent to your regular degree, however the only difference is we work full time as well as attending university for 4 days every 8 weeks. In that small 4-day period, a full module is squeezed in and admittedly, at first, taking everything in was a challenge and it can be quite intense. But with a bit of perseverance it became natural and allowed us to return to work with new information fresh on our minds. We’ve even brought ideas back with us that have been put into place at Salon Tracker, showing that the degree is really bringing something to the business! At times it has definitely been a struggle trying to juggle both work-life and our university course-work, and often we will have to come into work early or stay late to make sure we meet our deadlines. But we are dedicated!

In February, Christie attended her first exhibition at the Professional Beauty London show with some of the team. This is where it really tested her knowledge, as she was often speaking to visitors and giving demonstrations on her own; which although it was challenging, it was exciting to meet current customers and potential future clients. In case you didn’t know… we are attending Professional Beauty North in Manchester this October too, we’ll be on stand E67 so make sure you come and give us a visit!

Overall though, the past year has been a very enjoyable one and despite all the things we have already learnt, we are always expanding our knowledge of new things and loving meeting clients (and getting to know our current ones!) We’ve got lots of exciting projects planned for the lead up to the new year so keep tuned, and if you are interested in visiting our stand (E67) at Professional Beauty North; you can get your free tickets here: 

https://registration.n200.com/survey/1pkbrn40glgdr?actioncode=NTWO000075TWK&partner-contact=1uzk9m0whf61y

We hope to hear from you soon!

Christie & Naomi