employees it would be a struggle to run your salon successfully, if at all. Whilst it is important to hire staff that are experienced, knowledgeable and qualified it also pays off to hire up and coming apprentices with little knowledge and experience. These people will be itching to learn and will most likely carry your Salon into upcoming trends and styles.
Salon Tracker Software- Designed to win you customers, grow your business and improve your profits!
8 Sept 2021
Why hiring apprentices can benefit your Salon!
employees it would be a struggle to run your salon successfully, if at all. Whilst it is important to hire staff that are experienced, knowledgeable and qualified it also pays off to hire up and coming apprentices with little knowledge and experience. These people will be itching to learn and will most likely carry your Salon into upcoming trends and styles.
1 Sept 2021
How to Retain Clients
Customer retention, or customer loyalty, is an important
part of running a salon especially due to the current climate due to COVID-19
and salons having been closed for so long. This week we decided to put together
a blog to share our best tips and tricks to keep clients coming into your
salon.
Social Media
One of the best, and easiest, ways to keep your clients
coming back it to utilise social media. Regular posting of your work and other
post relating to your salon means that your customers will keep seeing your
posts and this will remind them to keep getting booked in with you. Social
media is also a great way to connect and communicate with your clients too.
Clients are more likely to return to a salon where they feel comfortable and
communicating and interacting with them over social media is a great way to do
so. If you would like some ideas on how
to manage and run a social media account effectively for your salon go to www.salontracker.co.uk.news and
see the many blogs we’ve written about this. P.s drop us a follow @salontrackersoftware
SMS Marketing
Another way you can keep your customers coming back to your
salon is by sending them text message marketing campaigns. The great thing
about this is it could be anything you want.
Salon Trackers ‘Marketing Suite’ gives you the option to filter out
specific groups of customers to send messages to directly from your system. For
example, you could filter out all your best spending customers for that month
and send them a text to try and encourage them to get re booked into your
salon. Here is an example of an SMS that you could send:
Hi ‘FORENAME’
Thank you for being one of our most loyal customers! As a
thank you here’s your voucher for 10% off your next visit!
See you Soon!
YOURSALONNAME YOURSALONNUMBER T’s&C’s Apply
Loyalty Rewards
One thing that customers will always love is to be rewarded
for their loyalty. One way you could do this is set up a loyalty scheme or loyalty
groups. For example, one way that you could work this is have different
packages all depending on how many appointments that they have had with you. You
could have gold, silver and bronze packages all which have different levels of
rewards for your most loyal customers including discounts off treatments,
retail products or even exclusive access to new treatments before your other
clients. Having a reward scheme like this will encourage all your customers to
stay loyal to your salon and keep coming in as much as possible. Salon Tracker
gives you the option to manage this with our groups feature and this means you
can just put these customers into the correct rewards group and Salon Tracker will
manage this for you!
If you would like any more information on any of these
features or would like us to help you get them set up, please give us a call on
0113 350 8230 or drop us an email on info@salontracker.co.uk
for any help or training!
Salon Tracker x
26 Aug 2021
How to establish your new and upcoming salon
Business plans are essential when starting a new salon, you must be prepared and organised for any situation that may come your way when preparing for the launch of the salon. Things such as a grand opening should be organised to spread the word of your upcoming salon within the community, within this party you can display products that you offer as well as offers.
It is
important to plan out what services will be provided within the salon, to do this you must take into consideration what treatments are most desirable within your target
market/audience. As the owner of the business products and services you supply
to your clients should be under constant review as trends are forever changing
therefore people’s preferences of treatments will vary dependent on the season
and the trends throughout the year.
One major aspect in promoting your newly established salon is your social media presence. It is important to have a business account on a variety of different social media platforms so that you are able to reach out to a range of different clients. To be able to retain and attract new clients you must ensure that you are constantly posting on each of your social media accounts, posting at least twice a day as a minimum on each account at the correct times during the day. For example, most individuals check their social media pages during their lunch break at work and on a night after work therefore it would be logical to post at these times of a day as people are more active on their social media accounts. The times may change dependent on your client basis taking into consideration factors such as if the majority of your salon clients are full time stay at home parents. The content you post is of high importance especially when you’re a new salon, content such as before and after images are a great way to promote the upcoming salon as clients love to see the process you make. It allows them to build a confidence bond between the client and your staff member as they have been made aware that the staff are very much capable.
For your
salon to be able to develop a solid client base it is important that the
customer experience starting from when the client enters the salon, walking into
reception to when they pay for the service and leave must be impeccable. This means
that the environment must exceed customer expectations in terms of cleanliness
and decorativeness as clients are more likely to recommend your salon to
friends when they have been built a personal relationship with the staff
members within your salon from them providing an excellent service (including
aftercare) and interacting with the client. Word of mouth is essential and
helps to spread awareness of your salon and its services.
When starting a new salon owners like to offer discounts to entice customers to the salon. There are variation of different discount methods that you can use to entice clients to book at your salon such as referral discounts and start up offers.
These are just a few tips on how to establish your new salon within your community, follow our blog updates every week to learn the tools you are able to use to promote your business and maintain a strong client basis.
Salon
Tracker. X
18 Aug 2021
Unknown Beauty Hacks you just need to know!
11 Aug 2021
Utilising Pinterest for your Salon
When running a salon, social media is one of the most useful tools on offer. Pinterest is one of the world’s biggest social media platforms, with over 416 million monthly active users, but it is often overlooked. Here at Salon Tracker, we believe that Pinterest is useful in so many ways, such as: finding inspiration, showcasing your work and selling your retail products.
Finding Inspiration
Not only is it useful for finding inspiration for your
treatments, but it is also useful for the interior inspiration for your salon.
Whether this is a full salon makeover or simply a bit of seasonal décor, there
is bound to be ideas on Pinterest that you can use.
Another way in which you can use Pinterest to benefit
your salon is that you can create ads. These can be done in a few ways such as
a quick ad, which is a one-off payment that pushes one of your pins to a wider
audience. Another way is campaign creation which is a more in-depth way, in
which you can set daily amounts you wish to spend advertising.
Showcasing your work
As well as being able to save other people’s pins, you are able to create your own and share your work. You are able to upload a photo, which you can then add details to, such as what products you have used, and you can also link your website to the pin so that if they click the pin, they can be linked directly to your website. When posting, you have the option to post now or post at a later date so that you can post at times you know that people are more active.
Other image-based social media platforms such as
Instagram, Facebook and Twitter do not have a very long post life, meaning that
the posts do not stay on peoples feeds for very long. Pinterest however has a
much longer post life and can see businesses getting leads up to 30 days after
an initial post.
If you don't already follow us on Pinterest already, go give us a follow @salontracker and check out the different boards on our page for some inspo!
If you have questions, feel free to drop us an e-mail at info@salontracker.co.uk or call us on 0113 350 8230.
Salon Tracker X
4 Aug 2021
Things from the lockdown that are here to stay!
Appointment Only Salon
Before the lockdown, quite a lot of our salons offered a walk-in service, especially in the tanning and barber industry. Following reopening, a lot of salons had to operate as appointment-only, to ensure that social distancing was adhered to and for the government track and trace programme. However, for a lot of businesses that began running this way, they realised that for marketing purposes it’s much better to offer an appointment only service, as clients this way have to register to make a booking as a pose to just walking-in. So, this is brilliant for data capture and also client retention, as you can re-market to these clients to remind them to book their next appointment. It’s also brilliant for reporting purposes, as you can also see which clients are re-visiting and also what your most popular treatments are with certain age groups or demographics!
PPE/Sanitising Station and Screens
Even though the mask-wearing requirement has now been dropped by the government, a lot of our salons have opted to keep this requirement for the time-being, to ensure maximum safety within the workplace for both employees and customers. As the months go on and hopefully, as we begin to see the end of the pandemic, even if many of you decide to then stop the mask wearing, a few salons have said that they will ensure sanitising stations stay around the salon and also will keep their Perspex screens up at reception. These are just simple safety tools that will help to protect staff and clients in general and just improve the overall hygiene within the salon!
Online Registration and Online Booking
Digital Disclaimers
Most of our salons have terms and conditions that clients have to read and agree to before they are able to have a treatment. However, a lot of salons used to provide a paper copy of this to customers to keep as a reference of the salon’s t’s & c’s. Throughout the lockdown, we saw many businesses opting to have these added to their online registration page, or as a PDF link within their salon app, or simply as an email link, to stop the handling of paper documents during this time. But again, not only does this improve client safety, it also allows the salon to go paperless, saving on resources and meaning the client can now access these documents digitally on their phones or tablets!
App Ordering
For some of our salons, especially if they are in hotels, many have coffee bars or cafés attached on their premises. So, throughout the lockdown, some of you were offering app ordering as a takeaway solution. Now even though these premises are allowed to re-open properly, many of you have said you will keep the app ordering and QR scan at tables for online menu viewing, as this not only again improves hygiene, it also saves on paper menus and client queues at the till area! Many of you also operated as a card-only business throughout the lockdown, with a lot of businesses still operating this way until we know that the pandemic is over, to stop the multi-handling of cash.
So it seems that the technological advances have really proven to be beneficial to our salons over the past few months, as many of you are opting to keep your online features and appointment-only way of operating. We’re so glad that the last few months have been busy and successful for you and if there are any further promotional tips that you would like help with, our sales and marketing team are always on hand to help you. Just give us a call or drop an email to info@salontracker.co.uk and we’d be happy to book a free marketing session with you.
Not a user of Salon Tracker yet? Simply head over to www.salontracker.co.uk/freetrial.aspx to get your free 2-week trial of our software! See how we can help you to further boost your salon business!
Salon Tracker x
28 Jul 2021
Our New Dojo Payments Integration
We recently introduced our new Dojo Payments Integration into Salon Tracker making it even easier to
take your card payments. Since COVID many of our customers have seen an increase in card payments rather than cash, so we wanted to make this as easy and seamless as possible.
There are so many benefits to the Dojo card machine: serve your
customers quicker, get paid faster, protect your income and there’s no long
term commitment. The biggest benefit of all is being able to connect your Dojo
machine straight to your Salon Tracker Software. With the integration setup,
the payment amount is sent directly to your Dojo card machine making it so much
easier for staff when taking payments, especially when you’re busy! Here’s just
a few advantages the Dojo integration could bring to your salon:
Reduces Staff Error
Security
Similar to the reduction in staff error, the integration also
helps to make your payments more secure. As the payment amount is automatically
sent through to your payment terminal, staff members are unable to change the
amount once it has been sent from Salon Tracker. This means all your reports on
Salon Tracker should match the receipts from your payment terminal, as staff are
unable to purposefully or accidentally change the amount the customer is
paying.
Reduces Customer Waiting Time
As the amount is directly sent through to your Dojo machine,
this will also help to reduce customer waiting time as everything will be seamless
from when you confirm the payment on Salon Tracker.
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