How to market your salon during the Halloween period with the circumstances which is Covid-19

This year has been extremely different for everyone, from how we carry out our daily activities to attending the shops and salons. It has also changed how we are able to spend our beloved holidays, including Halloween, the festival second to the Christmas holiday season. There are still certain restrictions in place which prevent us from attending Halloween events, such as parties and this means that people aren’t attending appointments to have their makeup done for the evening events - therefore there may not be a Halloween rush as large as last years. To prevent these restrictions from affecting your business, it is essential that you market other options to your clients and keep them up to date with any changes in regards to what services you are able to carry out, or if you have to close temporarily. Whether you have our Salon software or not, the ideas listed below will be relevant and worth a try!

In order to maintain functional operation of the salon it is important that the ambience within the salon is high priority, as it can help prompt consumer buying habits. Due to all the distress of the current situation which is Covid-19, doing a good dead such as offering free retail products or when it is Halloween, all employees could wear fancy dress, to lift the spirits of the customers to help create an uplifting atmosphere. Focus on window decorations, make sure there is a theme behind each one and this will ensure that clients are aware you are still able to offer Halloween treatments that oblige by the current legislations.

Offering exclusive offers just for Halloween is another way to promote your business during these difficult times. Promoting these products and services allows you to maximize your salon and its assets, an example could be promoting longer lasting treatments such as facials, manicures, eyelash treatments and many more. Instead of prompting Halloween nail art, you should promote autumnal artwork and colours as these are longer lasting because they apply to more than just one day.

Another technique to marketing your salon during the Halloween season should be to upsell retail products, as all salons and high street stores will be competing to sell out their remaining Halloween products. How can you make your salon stand out? A fantastic idea would be to market your products in a more visual way, as we say “a picture paints a thousand words”. An example of this would be to create a photo book showing the Halloween services you have carried out through the years and list the retail products that were used within this treatment.

Display tables are another crucial aspect in promoting your salon, arrange these so that they show the retail products and gift packages that you offer and surround them with Halloween accessories. The way you decorate your display tables is important, it must have a theme that is carried throughout.

Social media is the main tool to promoting anything that happens within your salon, an idea could be to do a raffle were the winner receives a free treatment of their choice and where all the money is donated to a charity that is suffering during these horrible times. Communicate with your clients show them the decorations and offers that you have in place!


If you’re looking for a software to help you manage your business this festive season don’t hesitate to contact us on 0113 350 8230 and we will be happy to assist.


Make the most of this year!


Salon Tracker X

How Enterprise Upgrades Helped Our Clients

I can’t believe that it’s now October! Where did time go? This weeks blog is going to focus on how our customers have benefited from upgrading to our Enterprise Subscription. For those of you who aren’t aware, our Enterprise Subscription includes our Online Booking and Siteview features. Over the course of the last few months we have had numerous customers upgrading to the Enterprise package, specifically for the ability to use Online Bookings, which is perfect for adjusting to the new normal.

Since the reopening of salons, we have seen a huge spike in the number of online bookings being made, with many salons introducing a booking only system. Online booking offers customers the flexibility of being able to book an appointment at any time of the day, whilst ensuring that restrictions are in place to follow the Government Guidelines. One of customers has seen a significant growth in bookings since getting the online system, with almost 8,000 bookings being made since the reopening of their salon! With such an increased demand for our online booking feature, we introduced a booking delay time to make sure that with each booking there was extra time being added to allow for cleaning and to adhere to the social distancing guidelines.

There are several other benefits of introducing an online booking system, such as reduced phone calls and emails, as customers are able to book at their own accord instead of contacting you and your team. For those of you that own Tanning Salons, customers are able to see how many minutes they have remaining on their account. Customers also have the ability to see your opening hours and an interactive map view of where the salon is for those that may not have visited before.

Our Siteview feature is one that has been available for the last few years, however given recent circumstances we realised this needed to be modified in order to make your salon life easier. Hence, we introduced Editable Siteview, allowing users to book, edit and cancel bookings straight from their phone. As well as having the ability to view customers booking history, remaining services and details. This feature is perfect for all salons, so that if you get messages away from the salon you can still book clients in. Even more so, for anyone with self-employed stylists or beauticians, as it can be set so that they can only view their own columns on the calendar, ensuring that double bookings aren’t being added. The calendar view will also allow employees to view their working hours, this is great for those of you that work in a rota format, as employees can quickly and easily check what days and times they’re working. The Siteview app is ideal for taking a quick overview when you’re away from the salon, enabling you to look at a dashboard of the days takings, bookings and customers, as well as being able to see the reports.

If you would like to take a look at our enterprise package in further detail don’t hesitate to contact us to get booked in for a free demo and trial on 0113 350 8230, or alternatively you can email info@salontracker.co.uk.

Salon Tracker x

How to make this Autumn your best one yet!

I know you'll all be just as shocked as I am when I say that Summer is officially over and as of last week, Autumn has officially begun! Last week also marked 6 months since the UK was put into full lockdown and everyone's world was turned upside down. Now you are open and in full swing, how about we make up for all that lost time and make this your best Autumn yet? After all, the autumnal vibes are our favourite!

 

Lets start with a start with a few marketing tips:

Back to School Bundle 

This is one for the Mums and Dads that suddenly have a lot more time on their hands! After 6 months of no school I think all those Mums and Dads out there deserve a bit of a treat... A back to school mini bundle could be a great idea for your salon. For example, offering a package deal with some mini treatments, such as lash and brow tints, could increase your profit and help you gain a selection of new clients that you may not have previously had. Pairing this with a ‘back to school’ pamper day including a range of the different treatments you offer would be a great start as it really encourages them to book for a relaxing day after 6 months that properly felt like a decade for them!

Halloween

Although Halloween may not be the same this year, it's still a Holiday that everyone loves and why not make the most of it? Advertising early your Halloween makeup pictures will get people interested and make them want to plan ahead. You could even do a petrifying package deal such as Makeup and spooky hair for a set price and why not throw in a Halloween goody bag full of Halloween themed treats or retail products? 

What platforms can you use to get the message out?

Facebook and Instagram

Facebook and Instagram are the top social media platforms to advertise your business on.
Most importantly, they are free! Just a simple post on facebook advertising what you are going to be doing this Autumn will go a long way, followers of the page will see it and following that they may be inclined to share it with Family and Friends which could reach 1000's of new clients. Similar to instagram where you can carry out interactive stories which will engage your followers. You could do a vote story or an answer box story with the caption 'what would you like to see from this salon this Autumn' then not only are you drawing the readers in, but you are also finding out what your target market would like to see! All this client research for free - you can't go wrong. 

TikTok

Now i'm sure you'll already know that whilst boredom was taking over in lockdown, TikTok the video app became very popular and people all over the world were doing dance routines and make-up tutorials. This extremely popular platform would be a great way for your Salon to advertise their services such as autumnal nails, Halloween makeup and hair styles due to the sheer popularity of the app. I'll work a treat!

SMS Marketing

The advantage of SMS marketing is that you can target specific customers or audiences. For example, if you wanted to target customers who haven’t visited in the last 3 months, you can do this through our filters. Our software has a built-in marketing suite which gives you the opportunity to easily use SMS and email marketing. You can choose client groups or make your own in order to send out your message to the group of people it was intended to. For example: 

Hi << Customer Forename>> 

We miss you! Book in advance for a space for your new Autumn look! 

<<Company Name>><<Company Contact Details>> 

As you see, summer finishing may put a frown on many faces but with these tips you could turn it into an incredible opportunity for your salon and help you get back on track before the year is out!

If you're looking for something to help manage your Salon this Autumn enquire at https://www.salontracker.co.uk/FreeTrial.aspx for your free 2 week trial!

If you already have the software and would just like a bit of free training please feel free to give us a call on 0113 350 8230 and we'll be happy to help!

Make the most of the end of this year!

Salon Tracker x

Feature of the Month - Editable Siteview

As things are slowly getting back to normal in salons, we thought we’d bring back an old favourite, ‘Feature of the Month’. This month out feature of the month is a new, highly anticipated, one. Editable Siteview.

Whilst siteview has always been a very popular feature on our enterprise package and has been around for a number of years, over lockdown we have finally made it even better! We previously made this available as an app, you can now add bookings in from your phone, tablet or a computer away from the salon.

For those of you who don’t know what siteview is, this is a feature that is available on our enterprise package which allows salon owners and their staff members to view their calendars and reports from home or out and about on a phone, tablet or a pc out of the salon.  This allows you to keep track of everything going on in your salon no matter where you are.

After a lot of development and testing, we can finally offer our customers an editable version of this. This will allow you to search and view your customers on your app and you’ll also be able to put bookings in for them from this feature.

This is great for a lot of different types of salons. One type of salon that has found this especially useful are the ones where their stylists or beauticians are self-employed. This means that they would all have their own log in and only be able to see their own calendar and takings. They will then also be able to put bookings in their calendar when they’re away from the salon.  This however is a feature that will be useful for all types of salons however and this is shown in the wide variety of our customers who are already using this!

 As well as this new feature, there are many more existing features on our siteview that you can use. On top of being able to view all your calendars you will also have access to view all your reports from this app. This means you can keep an eye on the salon or on top of all your finances from home or anywhere. There is then also the dashboard. This gives you a quick overview of the day including how many bookings you’ve had, how many retail sales and also your cashing up figures for the day. Perfect for when you have a day off but just want to have a quick check on your salon.
 
If you’re and existing customer with the enterprise package or even someone who is wanting to upgrade or get set up on this package please give us a call on 0113 350 8230 or email us on info@salontracker.co.uk and a member of our sales team will be happy to help!
 

Salon Tracker x

Updates for our Salons on new Coronavirus Government Safety Regulations

On Thurs 10th September, it was announced that it is now illegal from 14th September for groups of more than 6 to meet and socialise anywhere in England.

By Friday 11th September, the government also introduced some extra safety measures that apply to all salons, from this Friday 18th September. For all of our clients, we can already cater for the new regulations using the software, as you have the ability to take all details, including contact number/email fields and also the ability to book them in for their appointment (which then tracks the duration of the time they will be in your salon). We are however, in line with these new changes, going to be creating a new report that will outline all individuals that have been in to the salon in any given period, should you be required to contact these clients inline with the current track and trace programme.

The updates rules as published on the Government website https://www.gov.uk/guidance/working-safely-during-coronavirus-covid-19/close-contact-services are as follows:


1. Complete a COVID-19 risk assessment. Share it with all your staff. Find out how to do a risk assessment.

· Communicate and train. Make sure all staff and customers are kept up to date with how safety measures are being used and updated. 


2. Clean more often. Increase how often you clean surfaces, especially those that are being touched a lot. Ask your staff and your customers to use hand sanitiser and wash their hands frequently.

· Keep music and other background noise to a minimum to prevent people from speaking loudly or shouting.


3. Ask your customers to wear face coverings in any indoor space or where required to do so by law. That is especially important if your customers are likely to be around people they do not normally meet. Some exemptions apply. Check when to wear one, exemptions, and how to make your own.

· You must also wear a visor and mask. Encourage practitioners to wear both a clear visor or goggles and a Type II face mask to keep their clients safe. Provide training on how to wear face masks safely.


4. Make sure everyone is social distancing. Make it easy for everyone to do so by putting up signs or introducing a one-way system that your customers can follow.

· Keep clients apart. Consider how many people can be in the space while remaining socially distant. Rearrange waiting areas so that clients can stay apart. Use floor markings to manage queues.

· Help your staff maintain social distancing. Consider using barriers between workstations, introduce back-to-back or side-to-side working, and have staff work in the same team each day.


5. Increase ventilation by keeping doors and windows open where possible and running ventilation systems at all times.


6. Take part in NHS Test and Trace by keeping a record of all your customers for 21 days. From 18 September, this will be enforced in law.


7. Turn people with coronavirus symptoms away. If a staff member (or someone in their household) or a customer has a persistent cough, a high temperature or has lost their sense of taste or smell, they should be isolating.


With this updated guidance, where before we have said to all of our clients, we would encourage you not to use the walk-in client, and always schedule/take details for appointments, this is now mandatory by law from Friday 18th September. Therefore, you must not use the walk-in client from there forward until we have more information form the government.

You must now also ensure your staff members all either wear a visor, or a mask and goggles at all times, to further protect themselves and your clients from the virus. All clients (unless exempt for medical reasons) must also wear a face covering by law.

Our current action log and booking summary reports can provide all information of clients that have visited your salon that day, and the appointments in which they have had, including duration so that you are aware of their entrance and exit times. As earlier mentioned, we are working on a report that we aim to roll out as fast as possible, to make this tracking much simpler and easier for you, should your business have a request for information due to coronavirus cases.

If you have any questions or wish to speak to us for any further advice on how to continue running your salon in a Covid-safe way, please don’t hesitate to contact us on 0113 350 8230.

We continue to help you as best as we possibly can to manage your salon during these unprecedented times!

Salon Tracker x

Social Media Tips For Your Salon!

Despite everything that’s happened this year, it’s still flown by with Autumn right around the corner. So, it’s time to gear up for the end of year rush and make sure that your calendar has no blank space! I’m sure you all know the huge benefits of using social media to promote your salon and your services, so today were going give you our top tips for maintaining your social media presence and increase your client base.

Facebook

As a salon owner, Facebook is the perfect platform and tool to promote your salon, its ideal to stay connected with your clients, as well as enabling you to reach out to new customers. Setting up your salon Facebook page is just step one of successfully promoting your business, the key thing is to stay consistent with your posting. You don’t want to go too long without updating your clients, but you also don’t want to post too much that those following your page become annoyed with your spam, it’s all about finding the perfect balance.

A great feature on Facebook is the scheduling tool, this is perfect for getting ahead and ensuring that you aren’t forgetting to post, and you can plan for things such as offers or days you may be closed. When posting, you want to think about when your clients are likely to be on Facebook and scrolling through their homepage, early mornings, lunchtime and evenings are often the best with the typical 9-5 working schedule.

Sprout social found that the best day to post is Wednesday, and looking at the engagement it their research suggests that late morning/early afternoon will result in the highest engagement. However, its always best to base it on your followers, maybe try out a few different times and see which performs best. You also have the insights feature on Facebook, allowing you to view the performance of your posts, on all posts you can see the number of users it has reached and how many users have engaged with the post. Again, this is perfect to track how well your posts are doing, allowing you to improve certain types of posts if you notice the statistics are lower in comparison to others.





Despite being a newer feature, Facebook Stories are also a great tool, as they will always show at the very top of the customers Facebook home page. This not only means that they’re more likely to see your salon name popping up, but it’s also great for posting opening times, any booking openings from cancellations and any limited time deals as the stories will only remain posted for 24 hours.

The next thing you want to focus on is the content you post, you want this to be unique and different from your competitors, this will make your posts more eye-catching, hopefully resulting in new and existing customers clicking through to your page. There are plenty of great pages that you can create posts on, such are Pixlr (https://pixlr.com/) and Adobe Spark (https://spark.adobe.com/sp/). Adobe Spark has hundreds of templates that you can redesign to be more suited to your salon.

Instagram

Instagram has become another great platform to grow your salon business on, making it the perfect platform to not only post before and after images, but also fun and relatable content for new and existing customers to enjoy. With it being owned by Facebook, there are a lot of similarities that can be found, making it easy to switch between the two and keep users up to date across both platforms.

Similar to Facebook, and maybe they work even better, is Instagram Stories! Again, these only last for 24 hours, so they’re great to post the any daily updates on appointments, offers and even resharing posts of your customers that have tagged you. Stories can also be shared between users, giving the opportunity for one of your followers to easily spread word of your salon by sharing a post to their friend(s).

Unfortunately, Instagram doesn’t have a built-in feature to schedule posts, like Facebook does, however there is a great third-party alternative. The app ‘Later’ (https://later.com/) links straight to your Instagram page, allowing you to schedule posts for weeks and months in advance. This is a great tool to use during a quiet period, in order to ensure that you are ahead on your posts before you’re too busy and don’t have the time to do it. If you wanted to schedule all of your social media platforms in one place, Later enables you to do so, this may make it easier that having the separate scheduling on Facebook, as you won’t need to keep switching in and out of apps whilst planning your posts.

To grow your page to a bigger audience, hashtags are the ideal method, as this helps non-followers find your page and images, the more hashtags you use, the more users will see your post. It’s important that the hashtags relate to the image and to your salon, using local based hashtags is also a great idea as this will result in people in close proximity to the salon viewing and finding your page. If you don’t want to include hashtags in the caption of the image, you can always add them into the comments after you have posted. It’s also key not to use the exact same hashtags in every image, these should be changed and tweaked depending on the image you are posting in order to reach the best target audience.

Finally…a theme! Although not super important, it does always look nice for customers viewing your page. It may be best to stick with the colours that can be found within your salon, then everything is seamless both in the salon and across your social media platforms.

Hopefully these tips have been helpful for you, in order to maximise your social media presence! If you are wanting to take a look at our Salon Tracker softwae, we do offer a free demo and 2 week trial, so don’t hesitate to contact us to get booked in! You can call us on 0113 3508230 or catch us via email at info@salontracker.co.uk.

Salon Tracker x

Supporting Our Salons During Covid-19

Supporting Our Salons During Covid-19

The recent and ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has been a really unprecedented time for us all, especially for the salon industry, as you were forced to close for almost 4 months. This has taken a huge toll on the financials of businesses, with the immediate pause on appointments not being able to take place, and with no forewarning.

When the government announced that all salons had to close, we were all already aware of the ongoing harrowing Covid-19 pandemic, however weren’t all necessarily prepared for the affect that it would have on local businesses as the lockdown lasted for several of the following months. 

For businesses especially in our salon sector and also for the hospitality industry, who rely solely on customers for their income, this took such a large toll on your businesses. And so, from the outset, we wanted to support you (our clients) as much as we possibly could, to ensure that you were able to sustain as much income as possible whilst the pandemic continued. We instantly froze all client’s subscriptions from 23^rd March, as it felt morally wrong to charge for a service that you were unable to use, even if that did mean that as a company we also took quite a large hit with income too. But we wanted to do what felt right, and look after our clients which always has, and always will be our number 1 priority.   

We left all payments frozen for the duration of the lockdown, until the government gave the go ahead for salons to open again. Dependent on type of salon and local area, the dates alternated for different salons, however we only resumed payments for each individual business when they themselves were actually able to open their doors.  And with the local lock downs, the subscription freeze remained in place, where we would only charge our clients when they could legally open their doors to trade.

Following that, we wanted to further support as we know currently footfall in salons has not returned back to the usual, first of all due to social distancing regulations and secondly, as the public are still apprehensive about visiting places. So, to alleviate the stress a little we have also offered all clients 50% off their next 3 months after they were able to re-open. We wanted to support during the aftermath of the lockdown, whilst appointment capacity is currently reduced meaning a lot of our salons are running on a reduced number of bookings compared to what you maybe typically used to. Evidently meaning there could also be a reduced income when you still have employee wages to pay!

Aside from supporting with subscriptions however, we also introduced some new features to the software, to help manage the new social distancing measures and make the organisation and running of our salons as safe as we could.

We saw such an increase in demand for our online booking over the lockdown, as a lot of salons opted for no walk-ins. So, for anyone that offers online booking within their salon, we introduced a booking delay time so that for every booking made, an instant gap was placed to allow for essential cleaning and also to adhere to social distancing, ensuring the previous clients had exited the premises before the next client arrived for their appointment. 

We also advanced our Siteview feature, to allow the adding, editing and cancelling of client bookings to be completed using a mobile app, instead of therapists needing to use the main Salon Tracker PC itself. Evidently, this was to stop overcrowding at the main salon reception desk and to allow employees to manage their bookings using their own devices.

And then, for anyone who wanted to trial our software we also extended the same offer to them too!

Then we also offered support & advice on cleaning measures, and to ensure masks/visors are worn (which is now since a government legal requirement). But with the cleaning, we can also ensure that the sunbeds cannot be set for a new customer until it has been deep cleaned with our 'dirty-bed' mode, that stops the integrated timers from being set until the bed has been set as 'clean'. With the cleaning for beauty/hair/nails, we can add any relevant amount of time automatically to an appointment, even if it is booked online, to allow for sufficient cleaning between customers. We then advise where you can you run a 1 way system, with separate entrances and exits to the salon if you can, and also try to get disposable towels (or ensure that after each client you wash towels/gowns on a high degree anti-bacterial wash, as a renewable option).

For any further advise on salon safety or if you would like to discuss any queries you may have, we are always on hand to help, or if you are new to us and are looking to trial the software now back to school is here, get your FREE trial in time for autumn by heading to www.salontracker.co.uk or call our team on 0113 350 8230!

We're so happy to be working with you again and hope the re-opening of your salons has been successful.

Salon Tracker x