National Hairstylist Appreciation Day!

I would like to think that you all already appreciate your hairstylists, but on National Hairstylist day you should make sure you go that extra mile. The official day isn’t until the 30^th April, so hopefully this will give you a few days to make sure that you are fully prepared for anything special you might do to show your appreciation. Here are just a few ideas that we’ve put together for both your hairstylists and your customers:

Rewards

If you already have our Salon Tracker software then this would work perfectly for you! Get your customers into your salon on National Hairstylist Appreciation Day by promoting an offer. An example of text that you might a send out would be “We’re celebrating National Hairstylist Appreciation Day, visit the salon on April 30^th for 15% off!”, just a little incentive to get your customers in. Even if you don’t have our software, you can still push some sort of offer, Social Media is a great place to promote any offers, or even just putting something up in your salon window.

Gift Vouchers

Why not treat your staff to a gift voucher, it doesn’t have to be much, maybe just £10-£20 just to show your appreciation. If you know each of your staff’s favourite store then props to you, but if not there’s those ‘One4all’ gift vouchers which let you use the voucher at pretty much any high-street store.

Competition

How about creating a little competition for your customers or a raffle where you can give away products or gift vouchers for services in your salon. It’s a great way to get all of your customers involved and engaging with your salon and with your hairstylists. There are plenty of competitions that you could try out, maybe something like ‘Guess how many hair grips are in the jar’, customers can then pay an entry fee to make their guess and the winner will then receive the money entered.

Staff Party

You could even treat your staff to a team night out, something to give your team morale a boost. It doesn’t have to be an itinerary that’s bursting to the brim, just something to make sure they know that they are appreciated by you.

We hope that this give you a few ideas that you can use in your salon in order to celebrate Hairstylist Appreciation Day! If you need any help sending an SMS from our marketing feature don't hesitate to contact us on 0113 350 8230.

Salon Tracker x

Your 4-week count-down guide for a fully compatible GDPR Salon

We are just over 4 weeks away from the grand release of the GDPR, that’s only 28 days to make sure you are more than ready for it, and don’t end up being charged 4% of your annual turnover. To put that into perspective, if your salon makes £80k a year, you’d be charged £3200 just for making one silly error. That’s not something you want, so here’s how you can avoid it:

• Data must be processed in a way which guarantees suitable security of client’s personal data. This comprises protection against unauthorised or unlawful processing and covers accidental loss, destruction or damage by having applicable technical structures in place and suitable organisational measures. Salon Tracker hides all client data, it needs to be unlocked to gain access and every time it is unlocked it is tracked in the data base.

• Data held on clients must be accurate and kept up to date. Salon Tracker software allows you to view all a client’s data in the same place under one client card. This way, you can put a regime in place to regularly check client’s data when the client comes in and ask if it is correct.

• All data must be kept in a form which allows you to be able to identify how long that data is required for and be able to eliminate that data after that duration or if the clients asks for that data to be eliminated. Salon Tracker will be able to assist you with this and look into the data bases to be able to find out all this information and subtract their data from the system permanently.

• The data you hold must be processed lawfully, fairly and in a clear manner. This means stating exactly why you need the data and how you will use it.

• Data is only collected for specified, explicit and legitimate interest and not used in the future in a manner that wasn’t agreed by the person that the data is given from. This means no selling of client data to other businesses, and no giving out information of clients to other clients.

• All data held on clients must be specified for a reason and limited to what information is necessary for the purposes in which the data is used. Within Salon Tracker, customers have to tick to agree to marketing and text service.

Now hopefully you haven’t miss-judged the time you had left to get prepared for the release of the GDPR, but if you have, and this blog still rings alarm bells for you… don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.


We’ve got 4 weeks to go, that means 4 weeks worth of preparation. We’ve made it simple and produced you a check list of activities you can do each week so you can relax a little.


Week 1

• Create a privacy policy 
• Assign one of your staff members with the responsibility of being a Data Protection Officer 
• Go through your customers and remove customer’s data that is no longer needed. For example, customers who haven’t visited the Salon in over a year. This will make things a lot easier. 

Week 2

• Define an age range of consent, 18+ perhaps? 
• Make sure on your marketing campaigns there is an option to opt out of marketing. 


Week 3

• Give clients the right to be removed from the database.

Week 4 – The final week

• Be prepared for client’s data requests - they are entitled to ask for a SAR report on everything you have on them at any given time. 
• You then have 30 days to retrieve the data. Don’t worry, we’re here to help with that. 
• Relax, if you have followed each step you have nothing to worry about. 4% of your annual turnover won’t be going anywhere 
• Make sure your clients are aware that you follow the GDPR legislation closely, it shows your professionalism. 

Any more questions? Don’t hesitate to give us a call on 0113 350 8230 or alternatively email christie@salontracker.co.uk.


Salon Tracker x

Feature of the Month; Help Videos!

I'm sure you all know the struggle when you just can’t figure out how to do something, or the feeling of not wanting to do something wrong. Well, recently on Salon Tracker we have added a new feature; help videos! We’ve created over 50 help videos that you can watch (as long as you have an internet connection) ranging from just simply adding a customer to setting up your customer discount groups.

To find the help videos, just go to the help section and then click on the help videos tab. They are split into the different left menu options, and within each tab you can watch the related videos. To watch a video, just click on the title and it will automatically play. The videos are simple and easy to follow, and have a step by step guide on how a certain task can be completed. However, if you are struggling or something isn’t working quite right, don’t hesitate to contact our support team on 0113 350 8232 and we will be happy to help you out!

This is just a short example of how the videos work, and if you already have the software you can have a look through them now. They tend to last around 1-2 minutes, depending on the complexity of the demonstration, however for videos such as the 'Getting Started' videos these will be around 5 minutes long. And with all the new features and updates we are planning to do in the future, I’m sure that the list of videos will become even longer.

If you have any further questions or would like to get booked in for your demonstration and FREE 2-week trial of the software don’t hesitate to call on 0113 350 8230 or email on info@salontracker.co.uk.

Salon Tracker x

Marketing your Salon this Spring

Hello, and welcome back! Hope you all had a lovely Easter and managed to have some fun even though Winter decided to hang around, we know some of you even experienced a bit of snow on Bank Holiday! But hopefully that’s the last of it now and we can finally start to get in to Spring-mode. So, speaking of Spring, it’s time we did some marketing and discussed some top-tips on the upcoming events that you can use to ensure you have a successful season.

Online Visibility – Let’s get social! Do you have an active company website and social media page? In this day and age, everything is technological and so if your business isn’t active online, this can be detrimental to your sales. Facebook has vastly become a popular ‘check-point’ for people to identify a business. Where in the past this may have been through your Google listing, or just through word of mouth, nowadays people go to social media pages to look at your businesses recent activity, to determine whether they’d like to purchase/buy a treatment from you. It’s crucial that you regularly update your social networks, to ensure that clients can see that you are current and that you constantly communicate with your followers, as this can help to prove a good business reputation.

Email marketing. Do you have all of your clients’ emails at the moment? Email marketing is such a quick and easy way to market to clients in bulk, or to get a message across speedily! There are also lots of email providers that provide analytics about the open and click through rate of your campaigns, one that I like to recommend is Mailchimp, as it is also so user-friendly you’ll soon get the hang of it. According to Wordstream, ‘email is one of the greatest drivers of customer retention’, in which this is a great stat to go by when thinking about sending regular e-newsletters or product news.

SMS marketing. Similarly, to email, SMS marketing is another direct way to reach customers, and quickly too. When we’ve had a scout about looking in to text marketing, we found that a lot of sites, including Instagiv, state that ‘32% of consumers respond to promotional SMS messages’. This is a very high stat, meaning that over a quarter of your client base are likely to react to any marketing messages you send to them by text. Our software actually has its own SMS marketing suite built-in, to make text marketing campaigns simple and easy to create. We also have our own search filters included in the tool so that you can easily identify and pull out certain customers dependent on the sort of campaign you wish to send. For example, if you want to select your best spending customers, no problem, as with 2 clicks you can have the entire list ready to send a text message to, using our software! Keep your eyes peeled later in the blog as we’ll give a couple of SMS examples to get your started.

So, now that we’ve established a few marketing channels that you can use, let’s take a look at some of the events to look out for this Spring, that you can take advantage of for company advertising and let’s put some of our marketing techniques to practice!

First off, Mayday. Only 4 weeks away and a great opportunity to get some Spring promo ideas together, to get your salon footfall increasing! Closely followed by Spring Bank on the 28th May, 2 Bank holiday opportunities in one month! A good idea to get you started is to do a little bit of research in to the current hair & beauty trends, to identify what the up and coming styles are going to be this Spring/ Summer – and then advertise these to your fellow clients across social media. For example, it could be ‘Get your golden Balayage Bank Holiday Ready with <your salon name>’, then perhaps even bundle a little offer in with this, such as ‘Book before end of April to receive <X % off your chosen product>’. Obviously, there are lots of techniques that you can use social media for, whether this be running a Bank Holiday competition, or even a salon selfie contest for your clients to part-take in after a treatment.

Wedding season. From the beginning of May right up until the end of September, especially if you’re a Hair and Beauty salon, you are likely to see an increase in bridal party bookings. So why not advertise that your salon is doing this now and get ahead of your competition. I mean, the chances are the majority of your direct competitors are also going to be offering wedding packages, so what can you do differently to attract clients to choose yours? What about a free complimentary bottle of Prosecco for the bridal group whilst they have their treatments done? Or even collaborate with another local business if this is possible (such as a café or a local bistro) and see if your clients can receive a little % off voucher for food or drinks if they book a wedding package with your salon? A good promotional technique for both your business and theirs!

Dance school packages. A lot of local dance institutes require salon professionals to attend their shows for hair & makeup prep. During Spring and over Bank Holidays, some dance groups may put on shows, whether this be at theatres or even at school galas. This could be a brilliant opportunity for your salon to get some business and to also improve your brand awareness. Your work will be seen by the audience of these dance shows and if you shout loudly about your salon, perhaps even paying a small amount to sponsor the dance college itself, this provides you with even further publicity. Meaning that you can hope for improved recognition for your salon and hopefully the audiences of these shows could be a large volume of potential customers for the future! A little something to think about this Spring.

School and College Proms. We may be a little early here, however lots of students start their dress and suit shopping around this time and so why not advertise early to ensure that they book your salon for their treatments too. Advertise your prom packages on social media, flyers at schools and colleges and even via email/SMS to your current client base to ensure that your salon is full this June!

You’ve then got your all-round seasonal marketing in general, and we mentioned SMS marketing earlier and how our software has a built-in marketing suite with texting tools. Therefore, below are a few little Spring-examples to get you started off;


Hi <<Forename>>

PAYDAY & MAYDAY! Why not book your appointment early to secure your payday treat and bank holiday slot! Book an appointment with us before 30th April to receive 10% off!

<<CompanyName>> <<CompanyTel>> T&Cs Apply



Hi <<Forename>>

Stepping in to Spring! To celebrate the start of the season we are offering a FREE complimentary gift with every appointment booked in April!

<<CompanyName>> <<CompanyTel>> T&Cs Apply 

Hi <<Forename>>

Get your Trendy Golden Balayage or Fresh Highlights with <your salon> this Spring! Appointments are booking up so don’t miss out! Call up to secure your slot today.

<<CompanyName>> <<CompanyTel>> T&Cs Apply



We hope we’ve inspired you and given you a few little things to think about for your marketing this Spring. With these few fresh ideas, by putting these in to practice your salon should see a seasonal boost, setting you up nicely for the rest of the year. And if you want a little bit of extra advice, no problem, our marketing and sales team are always on hand Mon-Fri to help you every step of the way – just give our team a call on 0113 350 8230! We look forward to hearing from you.


Salon Tracker x