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

Salon Tracker’s Top Beauty Picks from Lock down.

 

As lock down comes to an end, one thing that didn’t slow down was new tips and tricks from the beauty world. One of the main sources of these tips was Tiktok, an app many of our sales team spent a little too much time on! As many places are re-opening and life is slowly getting back to normal, we thought we’d share our favourites!

Heatless Curls

One of the hacks our sales team learnt was a new way to do heatless curls, one of the most popular hacks in our office. This is also known as ‘dressing gown curls’ and requires you to wrap your damp hair around your dressing gown cord, gradually adding bits in and then securing your hair at the bottom. You then need to leave this in for a few hours or even over night and your hair will be nice and curled, as though you’ve spent hours on it! This is great as you can do this on a night and by the time you wake up for work in the morning, your hair is basically done, plus you have the advantage of this not damaging your hair.  If you want to see how to do this, here’s a YouTube tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBLpOqGWda0

Fluffy Brows

A makeup hack we learnt from tiktok was a new phenomenon called soap brows. This is a quick trick to give you full, fluffy brows using a bar of soap. Whilst you can get a product called ‘brow soap’ which seems to work slightly better, many tiktok users tried this trick with normal hand soap and it seemed to work nearly just as well. To do this trick all you will need to do is start with clean brows and your bar of soap. The you just need to slightly wet the soap and run your eyebrow brush through it. Then brush the soap through your brows in an upwards motion before shaping your brows to the shape you desire.  This will give you natural looking fluffy brows. Here’s a link where you can buy your own brow soap https://www.beautybay.com/p/wes

t-barn-co/soap-brows/?ctyid=gb&gclsrc=aw.ds&&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIp-mv1fu46wIVCe3tCh2SSgXBEAQYASABEgJkzvD_BwE

Fake Tan Contour

Another trick we have learnt over lock down is how to contour your face (and body) using fake tan.  This will mean that you can roll out of bed in the morning with a nice chiselled look, with no time or make up needed.  All you need to do is do your fake tan routine as normal, but after this is done, you’ll just need to grab a makeup brush. Then you can get your fake tan on the brush and start shading in areas that you’d like a little more definition in such as your cheek bones and nose, we’re even seen some people using this to contour some abs and muscles!

Henna Freckles

One running theme with all these hacks is the ‘no makeup makeup look’ and minimum effort on the day to day. This tip is no different. One of the most popular new trends, that comes and goes fairly regularly is faux freckles.  Whilst many people were blessed with natural freckles, there is a handful of us who are unfortunately not. Whilst there are many makeup products that you can use to create freckles on the day to day, one new trick that has come out of lockdown is henna freckles. This is where you use henna to create the faux freckle look and this will last a few days or even weeks! There are loads of helpful videos on how to do this on YouTube and tiktok but we should mention that you need to make sure that you get a trustworthy henna and do a patch test first. Here are some great temporary products you could use instead of henna or to practice with - https://www.beautybay.com/p/freck/faux-freckle-cosmetics-neutral/?ctyid=gb&gclsrc=aw.ds&&gclid=EAIaIQobChMItIL3g4K56wIVYIBQBh0wXQCUEAQYASABEgKd9_D_BwE

These tips and tricks helped us through lock down so we hope some of these may work for you too!

 

If your Salon has just re opened or if you’re getting ready to re-open and you want to be a bit more organised why not take advantage of our FREE two-week trial? Just give us a call on 0113 350 8230 to get booked in now!

Were also going to be at Pro Beauty London on the 10^th-12^th of October so come pay us a visit there to ask any questions or take a look at our software!

 

Salon Tracker Team x

It's been a year!

It has been a very different year to say the least!




I’m sure I have had the pleasure of speaking to the majority of our clients, If you haven’t spoken to me yet… I’m Halle. I am part of the marketing and sales team at Salon Tracker Software.

I started working at Salon Tracker at the start of August this tends to be our more off-peak season which meant that my first few weeks were focused on learning the software and all aspects of the job. When I first started at Salon Tracker, I found it very difficult to build my confidence which is a natural thing when starting a new job role, I would always double check with my colleagues before answering client’s questions. However, a month down the line I was able to confidently answer client’s questions without questioning myself. Confidence is key and now that mine had been built I was able to take on more responsibilities. I also built my courage through dealing with a variety of different tasks and by the end of the year I was able to carry out my day to day responsibilities without any hesitation.

After time passed, I became more confident therefore I was able to carry out complex tasks independently. An example of this is the education project that I was given responsibility over, I started from scratch and created all the tools and brochures that I needed in order to expand Salon Trackers clientele to the educational sector. I took on meetings with multiple staff members from a variety of colleges and began to develop my knowledge on how the software can be tailored to the educational sector. From these meetings i developed further knowledge on how to deal with our new clientele and what information they needed to know at which stage throughout the process of setting up the software.

I then started to work closely with my manager and fellow colleague to create new and edit already existing brochures. Myself and Naomi began the task of recreating the Salon Tracker Main Brochure which is sent out to all potential clients, this was a very difficult task at first. Once we completed and reviewed the changes both together and independently it became easier to notice the errors that were made and what action was required to correct these.

I also took on the role of creating multiple users guides for specifics features such as our site view and online booking applications as well as creating an overall user guide of the software. Within these user guides there are images and arrows on each page describing and showing the clients how to carry out specific tasks. This idea was an original and came to me when I spoke to customers who struggled with the software and how to carry out daily tasks therefore, I created the user help guides to assist clients with the functionality of the software.

Overall, the past year has been quite enjoyable. Despite everything that I have previously learnt I am constantly looking to expand my knowledge of new things. I am loving getting to know are existing and new clients. I have many projects planned for the near future so keep tuned to see what the Salon Tracker team is up to over the coming year.


I hope to hear from you soon!


Halle.

How to bounce back after Lockdown

I know lock-down seems like it never really happened, and it was all just a bad dream but the reality is that it definitely did happen and your Salons were closed for just under 4 months! That's 1/3rd of the whole year! And that also means 33% of bookings, takings and your day to day social interaction taken from you... so what now? How can you make up for that lost time and come back stronger than ever? Well I've got just the tips you'll need, so keep reading! 

For all you hair, tanning and nail salons, you'll probably have already experienced the initial rush of all your clients going crazy for their first appointment after lock-down to get their short fingernails looking luxuriously long again or more importantly to get their severely grown out roots back a beaming blonde along with finally getting their summer tan and now its been over a month since you opened, you're probably wondering when the next rush will be... well why not try the following:

An SMS marketing campaign!

If you didn't already know, Salon Tracker has a built in marketing suite where you can send your clients a text directly from the software promoting an offer or you can specifically filter out a selected audience of customers e.g customers who haven't visited in a while and send just that group of customers a texts tempting them with an offer of 15% off if they book an appointment in the next month which will bring your clients back in and keep you busy enough too! P.S, if you're not quite sure on how to use your marketing suite, just give us a call on 0113 350 8230 and we'll give you a free training session on it! Or... just head to your Salon Tracker help section and there's a full help video on it.

The classic recommend a friend campaign!

Why not get your loyal customers to rave just a little bit more (than they already do) about your amazing salon but this time do it for a reward! For every friend they refer, why not give them a voucher of £5 to redeem off any treatment or product? This way, not only are you gaining new customers, but you are also encouraging your current customers to visit again! 

Claim that online presence!

In this day and age, having a broad social presence is extremely important as nearly 1/3rd of the worlds population use Social media regularly and social media is the hub of finding a good business, just like yours. Being a young adult myself, I know that all of the places I have ever had an appointment with have been found online - especially Instagram. It is the common trend to get your hair done and post on your feed #newhairday then tag the salon that created this look for you. Not only is this a free form of marketing for you, it is done completely off your clients back shared with all their followers.Their followers will then click on your profile and see all the work you've done and want to book an appointment themselves... which is where having online booking becomes important. Over the past 4 months, our customers upgrading to our online Enterprise package has increased by around 60% resulting in our Enterprise package now being our most popular. You'll find that your bookings will increase dramatically by having online booking as again, the millennial era are much more inclined to book online rather than having to ring up, especially if your social media pages are tempting enough!

For you guys that unfortunately haven't opened yet... beauty salons, aesthetic clinics, lash parlours... we really feel your pain and we are so happy you finally get to open again in a couple of days time! We know you're going to be extremely busy for the next month or so and we know exactly how to best handle it with these following tips:

Make use of your break slots!

Within Salon Tracker you're able to add breaks in not only on the current day but you can also add them in advance routinely e.g 1pm every day meaning that nobody can book an appointment (online and in salon) over that set break which means you'll actually give yourself a break in the busy times to come! To add a routine break in go to Management -> booking items -> click edit on the person you want to put a break in for -> click on breaks tab and click add -> set the type to the desired amount of types you want the break to reoccur. Breaks are essential and you will definitely thank me later!

Encourage your clients to use online booking

Rather than your phone and messages me absolutely bombarded, make it clear that the only form of bookings you'll be accepting is online bookings and send them the direct link making it nice and easy for them. They can also cancel their booking directly from the mobile web app so you can invest all that time into appointments and sorting the Salon! 

Take advantage of the re-book feature

To make sure this big wave of clients isn't just a one-hit-wonder, you should make full use of the re-book button which pops up right after you've confirmed the appointment. You can then book them in for a routine appointment like waxing for 2-3 weeks from the current date and it'll bring you up all the available time slots so there's no room for double booking errors. Better yet, you can print them a reminder in the same transaction! This will put you at ease knowing you're not just going to have one busy month and make it more of a continuous thing.

That's about it for today, if you do have any questions regarding any of the above information then please get in touch on 0113 350 8230 or alternatively email us at info@salontracker.co.uk and we'll be happy to help!

If you do not have the software at all and would like some help managing your busy diary then please do enquire at https://www.salontracker.co.uk/FreeTrial.aspx and a member of the team will be in touch as soon as!

Best wishes,

Salon Tracker x 

Deferred Beauty Salon Re-opening, Leicester and Aberdeen Lockdown

Hi Everyone,

Hope you are all still keeping well!

So another little update from us (Feel like we've been doing a lot of those recently!)

So unfortunately, we received the news that the reopening of contact-service beauty salons was deferred for a further fortnight from the 1st August, and we were given 15th August as the earliest re-opening date. 

And this week we have also seen parts of Leicester have to re-close again, following your re-opening Monday.

Aberdeen also saw a local lock down earlier this week, with salons been forced to close there for a minimum of 1 week too.

Therefore, we just wanted to let all of our clients know that if you are in any of these affected areas, we will continue to, or re-freeze your subscriptions, payments will remain frozen until you can re-open, where we will then credit any pre-paid days for you.

You can still use your software during this time for reports, training and accountancy purposes!

And if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact our team who are happy to help, mon-fri 9-5!

Keep posted on our news page for all updates, where we will also be giving you some tips next week on how to bounceback business post-lockdown.

Until then, stay safe and take care!

Salon Tracker x