Why Are Reviews So Important To Your Salon?

How much more likely are you to try something because your friends recommended you it, or because you’ve read some good reviews about it online? Well, I know I am! Knowing that people have had a good experience somewhere always gives people the confidence that they will have the same good experience too. For the most part, getting reviews from your customers will only boost your salons overall profile, however there can be the occasional one that will do the opposite, but don’t let this worry you, there are plenty of ways around these. But let’s start off with why reviews are so important to boosting your salons footfall…

In the last 5 or so years, the way we search for salons has massively changed. The first thing most people do is Google a salon and have a look at their social media, Facebook and Instagram being the main two. In fact, around 75% of people will go online to find a business before deciding whether to visit it or not. Facebook in my opinion is definitely the best place to market your salon to both your customers and any potential customers that are interested in your services. It not only gives you a platform to post any updates, pictures and offers, but also is a place for your customers to leave reviews (hopefully positive ones) on their salon experience. There are also the classic review pages like Yelp, Yellow Pages and Google. Although the perfect scenario would be that you have tens or even hundreds of 5-star reviews, this will more than likely not be the case. If anyone does leave a negative review regarding your salon, it’s essential that you reply to this to resolve any issues asap and make it known to any potential customers that it has been resolved.

The main reasoning behind making sure that you are encouraging your customers to leave reviews, is to show any potential customers that you have a positive reputation. Making them more likely to be inclined to visit your salon. According to a survey, 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, this statistic alone should already be enough to convince you that reviews are one of the best business tools. So, if you don’t already, you need to start encouraging your customers to leave reviews, especially on your Facebook page. It’s best not to ask every client who visits your salon to leave a review, you want to hand pick ones that you think are going to leave a positive review. These being your most loyal and friendly customers. When you do get a nice review, reply with a thank you message so that not only your customer feels appreciated, but also so that any potential customers can see that you have a good bond and connection with your current customers. You could also repost some of the great ones on your social media platforms, to spread the word even more. Every so often, you should think about thanking your customers who have left a review by giving them some sort of reward, discount or a free retail product, again just to show that you do appreciate them.

Make sure that you always listen to your clients feedback, both positive and negative. Even if it is something that you don’t agree with, check that there isn’t anything that you could be doing better. Or if it’s positive feedback, make sure that you continue to work in that way so that you can please all of your customers.

One feature that we do have on Salon Tracker is the ability to send out a direct text

message to specific customers asking them to leave a review at your preferred review platform, this being your Facebook, Yelp, Yellow Pages etc. You can also set a delay, to make sure that you’re not being too over the top and sending the message as soon as

they’ve left the salon. It’s better to wait a day or so before sending out the text message, so the customer has more chance to reflect. You can also set a warn period, this prevents you from over sending review requests. I mean, if someone was asking me to review something every time I visited the salon, it would put me off going. So, this will help to prevent you from doing that.

Hopefully this will have helped you to not only understand the importance of reviews, but to also get a better understanding of how you can get more reviews online. The more you have, both good and bad, will help to increase your footfall and give an overall better representation of your salon. We do offer a free 2-week trial, where you do get 50 free SMS credits, so you can give our review feature a go. Call us on 0113 350 8230 or email info@salontracker.co.uk if you are interested, and we can get you booked in for your free demo and trial.

Salon Tracker x

Reviewing Business for the past 6 months, Mabo Client Conference and how we utilise training days to impact the workplace!

We’re almost at the end of the first half of the year. How has the last 6 months been so far for you? We know that it’s a bit different to last Summer, where we had scorching temperatures from early on, this year’s not been so good weather-wise but hey ho hopefully it’ll pick up! Has this affected your business differently though and meant that you’ve seen a bit more footfall than you’re usually used to over Summer?


Anyway, as we’re nearly at the end of June, we always think that this is a good time to reflect on past business and work on how you can continue to improve aspects of the workplace over the second half of the year

So, what are good things to track and keep an eye on?


Well, the first thing obviously is your KPI’s and customer sales. How have you performed from Jan to now against your targets? If you haven’t quite met those or are not where you forecasted to be right now, what improvements can you make to ensure that you are prepared and set for improvement for Q3 & Q4?


Sales are one of the main contributions to your business turnover and obviously improving your company profits. And evidently, you rely on your sales for being able to put more money in to your business, in order to continue your growth. If you are a user of Salon Tracker currently, you’ll know that we have an extensive reports section that tracks everything from your sales revenue to stock management, your busiest times of the day to your best-selling product categories. You can actually run our reports for the last half of the year collectively. So, this is a great reflection of how business has performed since Jan and also helps you to forecast for the rest of the year.


Something we like to do after the first half of the year as a business is determine where we are against our targets, and also reflect on the client feedback that we have had. As often, this feedback generally can then contribute to your targets for the rest of the year. And these don’t just have to be sales focused, this can be regarding your salon décor, new products or features you may wish to introduce. Or, it could even be employee related, regarding recruitment or improving staff morale. Whatever this may be, now is the time to reflect on business to ensure that by the end of December you are closer to where you anticipated to be by the end of 2019.


As a business, we send client feedback questionnaires and feedback forms after 6 months, in order to establish how they have found our service and what improvements they are looking for from us as a company. By reviewing these forms, this has helped us to ensure that we are working on the development of required features and following up on all client feedback. So, maybe as a salon this is a good time to sit down and run through any reviews that you had on Facebook, or maybe you use Google reviews? Whichever review service you use, this is a good evaluation to determine what your clients have had to say about your business and how you can use this feedback smartly to impact your salon positively going forward.


Something else we like to establish during our mid-year review is, how are all of our staff getting on and is team morale where it should be? Especially if you have recruited recently, it’s a good time to ensure that staff feel that they have progressed with your company and to make sure that they feel they have had adequate training. So, maybe plan a staff night out or a little team meeting one afternoon, to make sure that you have a happy workplace! We had a little meeting recently with our sales team and discussed where we think we could improve on certain areas of our job roles. We have then planned a few team-workshop days in, to make sure we are building on our skills and also to ensure that we’re having a bit of fun whilst doing this. So, if you feel that there are areas of your salon business where staff could learn a few extra skills, maybe have a little training afternoon or book out an evening one night in the next few weeks to have a bit of a fun activity-based workshop. Get a few refreshments and nibbles in and keep it light hearted, to ensure that the team actually enjoy the workshop too.

We were also recently invited to a Mabo media client conference day, which was a fantastic insight in to how another business has evolved over the past few years, and how they ensure that they keep their team motivated.

There were a few good pointers taken from this conference that we feel are relevant to a half year review, so here’s a little break down below of what we learnt and some new useful ways of thinking for your forward plan in to the next half of the year.


Team Building – Training:

Mabo explained how they implement a 9-month full training programme for each of their team members and how this really helps to ensure client retention is guaranteed. As obviously, the more trained a member of your team is, the better service they are likely to give your client – which then has a positive knock on effect on the reviews that will be generated from their great service. So, if you feel that a member of your salon team could benefit from a bit of training, or you don’t currently have a set training programme in place for new team members, this is a little something to think about.



KPI’s

Following on from team building, the more experienced your team is and the more they enjoy their role within your company, the better the sales performance is. It’s so true that a happy team = happy customers, which evidently means that your company profits will continue to improve if you have a content team, that are experienced in delivering a good service. So basically, your team is the fundamental factor to ensuring client retention and business success.




Recruitment – The right team member

A really interesting statement was made about recruitment. Obviously, lots of us when advertising job vacancies state required skills and preferable experience – which there is definitely a level of experience or interest required from a candidate who is applying. However, Mabo advised to not necessarily hire based on experience alone. So, for example, say you have 1 candidate with 5 years’ experience, and someone else with 1, don’t necessarily disregard the person with less experience, as sometimes it’s about the right person rather than who has the most knowledge. They explained that each company is different, and therefore as long as the candidate has the minimum skills required, it may be that they are a better fit for the role, as their passion for the job and will to learn your companies way of working may be higher than say someone with more experience. This was speaking theoretically, however was quite interesting so wanted to share with you all!



Company Feedback

Obviously, we all know that reviews are the new research methods when someone is deciding whether to purchase from you or not. Your company Facebook page is the new Google! So, it’s a good time to ensure that you have as many recent and positive reviews as you can on there. If you look over this and feel like your reviews are lacking a little, maybe this is a good time to run a client-feedback campaign, or invest in a reviews company service – where the companies can help you to gather real reviews for your business. However, if you’re on a bit of a budget at the minute, even just something as simple as running a salon competition and anyone who leaves you a review automatically gets entered, could be an idea? Great social engagement for your salon then too!



Social Content and how this can help your Social Media Strategy

Social media has evolved over the past 10 years massively, in which Mabo introduced a speaker from Google who provided some great facts! At current, millennials are 24% of the population. In 6 years’ time, millennials will be 68% of the population, which means the latest technologies and social media will be part of day-to-day life for the majority. Therefore, now is the time to ensure that you have active social platforms, that you update regularly. Some other great stats that we were given were, 2 Billion people have an active Facebook account and are actively using the app on average for 35 mins per day. Instagram has 500 million active accounts, with 64% of those users being aged between 18-34, meaning this is a huge target audience for salon owners. Therefore, if you aren’t actively posting on your social media, taking these facts in to account, it is definitely time to review your social strategy from the last 6 months and look at what you can do to improve your content for the future. One good tool that we would offer is, have a weekly blog or maybe weekly style advice? This not only gives you a purpose to actively share something on your social networks, it also gives your customers an insight in to what your business is doing week-to-week and also what your latest trends are.

So, we know that’s a lot of information to take in! However, we hope that there’s something that we’ve talked about today that really helps you to evaluate and forward plan for this business year. We look forward to hearing how you get on!

Salon Tracker x

Feature of the Month - Siteview on Holiday

As we enter the prime holiday season, I’m guessing that many of you will have a holiday up and coming?! Although when you’re on holiday you want to be away from all of the busy work stress, there must be part of you still that wants to know what’s going on in your absence. So, for this feature of the month we’ve chosen Siteview! For anyone who isn’t sure on what Siteview is, it’s a great feature for salon owners as it gives access to the systems reports, the calendar and the overall dashboard.

One of the main benefits of Siteview is that it can be accessed anytime, anywhere, as long as your device has an internet connection you will be able to login to your account. This is great for those of you that are going on holiday this summer, as many phone carriers now allow you to use your data abroad, meaning that you should be able to check on your salon whenever you want to and make sure that everything is in order. You’ll be able to look over your takings for the day/week, your staff takings and see how many new customers have signed up. With Siteview you can also look at your calendar, so you’ll be able to see which customers have been in etc. By just looking at the dashboard on Siteview, this will give you a pretty good overall for the day you have selected. So, if you just wanted to look at the dashboard it would only take you a matter of seconds to check this, and then you can go back to relaxing! It’s also great for your staff, as they can check their schedules for when they’re returning back to work from their holidays. You can set permissions for them so they are only able to access certain areas, for example, you can make it so that they can’t see any reports or the dashboard. 

Even if you’re not going on holiday Siteview is still a great feature for not only you as salon owners but also for your staff. Especially, during these busy summer months, it means that instead of having to stay late at the shop and sorting through all your end of day admin, you can just easily do this at home instead. And again, for your staff, it’s and easy way for them to check what time they’re working and what appointments they’ve got booked in, so they make sure that they’re prepared for them. Siteview is password protected, so you don’t need to worry about your staff or anyone being able to log into your admin account. It uses the usernames and passwords that are set up on Salon Tracker and these can only be changed from within the software, making it very secure. 

Our Siteview feature is available on our Enterprise package, we can show this to your over a demo if you would like. Feel free to contact us either via our email info@salontracker.co.uk or calling us on 0113 350 8230.

Salon Tracker x