How Salon Tracker Can Help Your Hair Salon!

Here at Salon Tracker we are dedicated to ensuring we can help you run your salon in the most efficient and stress-free way possible. For this week’s blog we decided to put together a list of our most popular and helpful features that our hair salon customers seem to love!

Text Reminders

SMS text appointments are one of our most popular features for all types of salons, not just our hair clients. This feature allows you to choose a time period of one or two days before one of your customers appointments for the software to send out an automatic text reminder, without you having to think about it at all! The message will contain information about the customers booking and who their stylist is. This is also a one-way messaging system so you won’t need to worry about customers constantly texting you back.

Groups

Groups are another, really useful, quite hidden feature. This feature will allow you to only make certain services available to each staff member. For example, if you have staff members with different abilities or different pricing plans, we can help you create each individual staff member their own services group which will mean that only certain stylists and therapists will be able to book in certain services. This works especially well in salons with self employed staff or staff of different abilities, like apprentices!

My Reports

Another feature which is great for salons with self employed staff or even just staff who like to keep a track of their own profit on bookings and retail sales is our ‘my reports’. These reports will allow each individual staff member and stylist to be able to see reports such as booking and retail sales just for themselves. This is great for security and privacy reasons as staff members will only be able to view their own takings, not everyone else’s.

Stock Management

The selling of retail products is a large part of many different hair salons total income. We have incorporated many different small features in order to help your salon manage stock in the easiest way possible. One feature we provide is a stock control, this helps you keep track of how many of each retail product you have in and makes it clear when you’re running low on certain products. This will help ensure that you never run out of anything! We also offer a stock ordering feature which allows you to order and accept stock through your salon tracker. For more information on this feature go check out our October feature of the month blog > https://bit.ly/2S81IS9

Split Booking

The split booking feature is also another that we created with hair salons in mind. This allows you to create a booking and then split them into two halves. This feature is good for things such as colours and highlights as it will allow you to split up someone’s appointment for a development time that works best for you. It will also mean you can fit in other appointments in between the colour and finish, therefore making the most of your time!

Site View

For many hairdressers, having client’s message them for appointments out of salon time is a frequent occurrence. Our site view feature allows you to view your calendars from a tablet, phone or computer so you can check your availability even when you’re not in the salon. You can also view reports on this such as cashing up and the day end report! Salon Tracker site view is now available to download on the app store as well as online! Come back for next weeks blog to learn even more about our site view app.

Commission

Like we said before, we know retail sales are a large part of some hair salons income. In order to push staff to drive sales many salons use commission as an incentive. On salon tracker we have developed a feature which allows you to set up what commission (if any) you want staff members to get on certain retail and booking items. You can set different commissions for different staff members and also different commission rates for different products. You can then run our ‘Commission By Staff’ or ‘Commission Summary’ report to see how much each staff member has earnt, this will mean you no longer have to sit for hours before each payday to see how much each individual staff member has earnt.

If you would like any information on any of these features or you would like to get booked in for your FREE demo and 2 week trial give us a call on 0113 350 8230 or email info@salontracker.co.uk.

Salon Tracker x

How Salon Tracker Specialises in Multi-Site Business Management

Do you own more than one salon? Did you know that you can control all your salons from one main headquarters with Salon Tracker software! As we specialise in the management of multisite salon businesses, there are lots of specific built-in features designed to suit multiple salon environments.

From organising your customer data, where services & tanning courses can be shared across multiple sites, to systemising your stock ordering; our software improves the day to day running of larger salon branches. So, here’s a few simple benefits that Salon Tracker provides to help the overall running of this type of business:

HQ/Marketing from Head Office

In larger organisations, normally there are lots of different departments involved in the overall running of the business. Especially when the salons are based in several locations spread across the UK, it can be hard in these situations for the company owners to be able to oversee productivity at each separate site. With the Salon Tracker HQ, this makes the running of this so much easier; whether it be the Salon Owners, Directors or Area Mangers, they can all have access to one main system that allows control of each location from one main machine. Marketing can also be segmented based on salon location, age of customer, gender etc; and SMS campaigns can be sent straight from the HQ itself. You can then generate reports following sending these campaigns out in order to reflect on how effective these have been based on their message/promotion.

Siteview

This is very similar to the HQ feature in terms of it can be accessed away from the salon location itself, the difference in this however is that this is permission protected, based on user level. Therefore, for staff members, owners might just want them to only have the ability to see their own booking calendars, whereas for salon owners they can see similar reporting and tracking information to that on their HQ, but this time from their smart phone or tablet. A great way to stay in control of business whilst on the move, from anywhere, 24/7!

Sharing Product/Customer Data

Whether your business wants to link all site data, have pricing per area (so this could be services based on geographical location/county) or whether sites are all separate – Salon Tracker enables salons to have the ability to link all customers so that they can use their services at any of your salon locations. Similarly, to the way that a lot of commercial gyms are now set up, where users can go in to any gym location via a pin. This is similar with Salon Tracker, where clients can activate their details at each site using their fingerprint, which is especially useful in the tanning industry due to age restriction.

Reporting

Salon Tracker has individual reporting for every salon, in which there are annual charts that are also generated per site. We have integrated with Microsoft’s power BI software, where charts and heat maps are generated to provide information based on location, average client information, bestselling services and so on. This information is much easier to visualise within Power BI and so this can be used to really focus on data in a certain area, making analysing and comparing of those figures & KPI’s much easier.

Clock in and out

Using Salon Tracker’s fingerprint technology, sites can also track staff shift times by prompting clock in and out for all staff. A great way to keep track of punctuality and also salon security; as fingerprint recognition means that staff can’t then sign colleagues in to cover for them if they are running late, where this may have been possible with password sharing or staff barcodes.

The HQ is available as part of Salon Tracker’s Enterprise package. You can trial Salon Tracker for a fortnight free of charge by simply filling out the enquiry form at https://www.salontracker.co.uk/FreeTrial.aspx

Alternatively contact our sales team on 0113 350 8230 or info@salontracker.co.uk.

Salon Tracker will be exhibiting at Professional Beauty London across 29th-30th March! You can visit us on stand S35 where we will be giving live demos of our software and new features across the 2-day event. Keep an eye out on our news page and social media feeds for a link to FREE tickets for the show to be released soon!


We look forward to meeting you there!

Salon Tracker x

Why Salon Tracker Software is beneficial for Educational Salon Academies

Salon Tracker Software is used by a variety of different clients ranging from tattoo parlours to tanning salons and many more. The software can be tailored to meet the needs of each client type for example T-Max integration applies to tanning salons, where as multi tabs is used by college clients to monitor the different skilled levels and classes that each student is within. 

New features such as split bookings allows hair salons to book clients appointments with a booking in between to allow their colour or toner to dry, allowing them to book pother clients in this gap, therefore are able to book clients appointments when it best suits them.  Other new features includes post delay which can also be used for hair salons as it ensures that when a customer books the appointment online the split between each service will automatically apply.

On the other hand, there are a range of features which can apply to all clients these includes the SMS marketing section which allows salons to market their special offers, for beauty academies it allows them to send alert customers of new students. For example, the training academy may send out an offer to clients stating that ‘Chloe’ has joined the academy and will be offer full set of gels for £10 for training purposes. Stock management is used by all clients and is suitable for training academy’s and the salon within the beauty academy for staff to be able to monitor the stock they sell therefore being able to identify which is there most popular product.

Stock Management

Currently Salon Tracker Software is developing an Educational Salon Software Scheme to help assist and organise beauty academies. The plan for Salon Tracker software is to renovate their current website in order to separate the different sectors including hair and beauty then spa and clinic as well as education. The new page on their current website with the subheading of education will break down the page so that when colleges visit the website, they are able to look into the materials that apply to them specifically and how the software can be tailored to meet their needs.

Academy training centres and the salons within the academy are always busy with new students arriving and each student training to achieve different qualifications, it can become quite complicate at times to keep a handle on each student. Salon Tracker allows staff to create different calendars to organise which qualification each student is on track to achieve. Features such as groups ensures that students aren’t able to carry out tasks they are not qualified to do for example if a student is qualified to carry out eyebrow waxing but not yet eyebrow tinting, they will be restricted meaning they cannot carry out eyebrow tinting on clients for legal purposes this feature can be very beneficial.

If you require more information on the software and the features we offer don’t hesitate to contact us on 0113 350 8230 or alternatively email christie@Salontracker.co.uk

Salon Tracker x

Valentine's Day Marketing!

Although Valentine’s day isn’t the happiest day for everyone, for many people it’s a day to spoil their loved one (or themselves). This is where your Salon needs to step in and make the most of this day, and there are plenty of ways in which you can do so. There a three simple steps involved in in making a success of this day; planning, marketing and selling. So, keep reading to see how you can upsell your treatments and retail products this Valentine's Day.

Planning

Before you can go out and start advertising your deals and offers it’s important to determine which of your services and retail products are going to be most popular for V-day sales. To make your salon more appealing for those looking at treating a loved one, it’s a good idea to bundle a few treatments together and create a special ‘Valentine’s Day Package’. You could do a few different priced packages to appeal to a broader range of people, starting with a couple of services for a lower price and going up to a more premium price and including your more expensive services. The same can be done with your retail products by putting together a few different priced hampers. The key is to figure out which of your treatments will perform best, whether its massages, nails, facials etc.

Another great way to utilise Valentine’s Day is by selling gift vouchers, you could even get specific ones printed for valentines day and give them a bit more of a personalised feel. Gift cards also often result in people spending more as they know they’re going to be getting say £20-£30 off, so it’s a win-win as a salon owner.

Marketing

Once you’ve done all of your planning, it’s time to market it to your customers and target customers. As we all know by now the main place you want to be showing off these deals is across your Social Media platforms, as this will not only help reach your current customers, but it will also help to reach potential customers. Especially with Facebook having an option for customers to share your posts, it will further help to reach a wider range of people. I’d suggest creating an eye-catching post to make sure it stands out amongst others when someone is scrolling through their feed. There’s a great free programme called Adobe Spark which make its super simple to create images from scratch or by using templates that are pre-saved on there. You can then use the same image across all of your social media platforms, and this will help to show consistency. Here’s an example of one that I quickly made by using a template, to show you how easy it is:

You also want to make sure that you make it obvious in your physical salon that there are going to be deals available, for example on your reception desk it would be a good idea to place the hampers in view, along with any gift vouchers.

If you are already a customer of Salon Tracker, then I’m sure you already know about our Marketing suite. If not, this is a great feature built in with Salon Tracker that enables you to send out an SMS message to all of your customers straight from one place. There are plenty of different filters that you can apply in order to target a specific range of customers. I have come up with a few examples of messages you could send out:

Example 1

“Hi <<forename>>

Don’t miss out on our V-Day deals! £45 for acrylic nails & a facial, £60 for a back massage, mani, pedi & facial! Call 0113 350 8230 to book”

Example 2

“Hi <<forename>>

Treat your loved one (or yourself) this Valentine’s Day at <<salonname>> for as little as £20! Call 0113 350 8230 to book before it’s too late” 

Example 3

“Give your partner the ultimate Valentine’s Day treat at <<salonname>> with our V-Day Special! Full Body Massage, Facial & Mani for just £45. Call 0113 350 8230 to book!”

SMS messages have a great open rate of around 98%, so it’s a great way to directly market your customers. By using both the SMS marketing suite and the use of social media, you are massively increasing your chances of having a successful number of sales.

Selling

After all of your planning and preparation I’m sure it will all pay off when it comes to the day. As Valentine’s Day falls on a Friday this week, it makes it an even better opportunity to make the most of it, as you can extend the offers and deals to run until the end of Sunday and ensure that your calendar is fully booked!

I hope these tips will help you have a successful Valentine’s Day weekend in your salon! If you are interested in taking a look at the marketing suite on a free demo and trial then don’t hesitate to contact our team by either emailing info@salontracker.co.uk or calling on 0113 350 8230 and someone will be happy to help. 

In just over 2-months’ time we will be exhibiting at the Professional Beauty Show in London, you can visit our stand S35, meet the team and have a live demo of the software. We look forward to seeing you there!

Salon Tracker x

What is it that makes us so good at Tanning?

Since we established in 2014 our aim was always to specialise in Tanning and get as good as we can be. On our Journey, not only have we mastered the Tanning software, but we also excel in helping Hair Salons, Beauty Salons, Spa's and Barbers all around the world. 

But what is it exactly that makes us so good at Tanning?

First of all, we are one of few software companies that actually provide sunbed timer integrations. We integrate with TMAX and Sigma currently and this allows you to fire off a bed directly from the software without the fuss of counting coins. The customer will come in, tell you their name (or use the fingerprint scanner), you'll deduct the minutes off the account and then it will communicate with the bed first of all sending a dress down time of either 3 or 5 minutes following with the selected time frame the customer has chosen to go on the bed for and finally finishing with a small cool down time for the bed to cool down and reset itself. Perfect for all you Tanning Association members!

Another great feature that comes in handy for all Salons is the new and improved waiting list feature that tells you exactly how long the waiting time is to use each specific bed and allows you to form a Que of people so there's no losing track of who's in turn to use the bed first. Perfect for all you busy Salons out there! 

Worried about your customers ruining your reputation and abusing the Salon Policy? Our system has a set of booking rules that allow you to not be able to put anyone on the bed that has already been in in the last 24 hours, stop anyone that is under the legal age of 18 and limit the bookings per year they have to make your Salon as ethical as possible!

To add further security, we sell Finger Print recognition devices which once the client has initially registered their Finger Print, every time they come in the Salon in the future they can just come in, place their finger on the reader and it will automatically bring their client card up and how many remaining minutes they have left allowing you to directly put them on the bed saving a lot of time and embarrassing moments of forgetting the clients name!

Storing signed disclaimers has never been so easy either. Once you've come up with your Salon policy/ disclaimer in a PDF format, we're able to upload this to the system and the client can read it and sign using our signature pads. A signed copy of the disclaimer will then store onto their client card making it easy to access and without the hassle of getting them lost in the hundreds of other paper disclaimers you keep scattered about the Salon! Furthermore, we sell QR cardboard cut outs that you can place on your reception desk in the Salon and let your clients scan the code to register using their phone which is perfect for all you super busy Salons!

On our Enterprise package, your clients are able to log into the mobile web app and check how many minutes they have remaining as well as book a slot for a bed to save time waiting in a que of people which has proven to be extremely beneficial with our current clients, just see the testimonial below!

“Now our clients have online booking, they know that when they turn up their bed is ready waiting for them, so our customers are a lot happier. Main advantage is that there are no waiting times for customers anymore, so it has prevented us from losing any clients as before there was a long wait. It’s actually helped us to retain customers as they are no longer going to competitors. Our phone used to never stop ringing for bookings, but it barely rings anymore which is so much better and less stressful as it saves us so much time! It’s just so much more convenient as people can book from work or home!” - Annie Whitehouse, Flamingo Bay.

Our software also allows you to place a happy hour discount on the system automatically and completely customisable. For example if you sell your minutes at 50% off for an hour each day to get the clients in on those quiet hours, the software has got it covered meaning you don't even have to think about adding the discount as it is already done for you! And if you're looking for something where you can let your customers know about happy hour, why not use your SMS marketing suite to send out a text to your clients to let them know?

Furthermore, the software measures the lifespan of your sunbeds and lets you know when the beds are ready for re-tubing and servicing which can be extremely useful as it is quite easy to lose track of the last time your bed was service. Each time someone goes on the bed, the counter will increase to show how many hours that bed has done, the service lifespan will also decrease as that means it is counting down until the bed needs a service. All of which can be done from within the software as well as when the bed has been serviced which will then reset the timers!

The software currently has around 30 reports that come with the software, one of which being the 'day end receipt' which pretty much shows everything you need to know about what went through the software that day but the best thing about this report is the Bookable Item Summary which shows exactly how many sessions each bed has had and how many minutes it has done which is great for showing your most popular bed and least popular bed. On top of this, the system monitors and tracks stock of retail products so if you sell tanning creams and sachets, you will always be aware of what products you have in stock and what you're running low of as well as the ability to accept stock orders from the HQ which you can read all about in this blog http://bit.do/stock-ordering

These are just a few of the features that can benefit your Tanning Salon, but instead of reading about them... why not see them for yourself? Call us on 0113 350 8230 to get booked in for a free demo and 2 week trial, you won't regret it!

Salon Tracker x 

Feature of the Month - Our New Features!

New Year, New Features!

To start off the new year right we have a brand-new release packed full with new features that you, our customers, have been asking for. For this month’s feature of the month we have decided to give you a quick rundown on all the exciting new features you can expect.

Split Bookings Online

A highly requested feature that is new to Salon Tracker is split bookings online. We created this specific feature with hair salons in mind but this can be easily altered and adapted to work in other types of salons. What this feature does is it allows your customers to split up a booking, to for example, allow room for a development time if they’re getting their hair coloured. This feature allows you to set a development time for certain services which will automatically be added in if any of your customers book a hair colouring online.

Double Payment Sense Terminals

A new feature for our payment sense using customers on the professional package and up is you can now link two card terminals to your salon tracker rather than just one. You can give both terminals names and have them linking to different bank accounts. Then when it comes to a customer wanting to pay, you can select which card terminal you would like to send the payment to. This could work well for many different scenarios for example in a tanning salon who may rent a beauty room out to a self-employed beautician who both use the salon tracker but require card payments to go into different accounts.

View Customer History

One new slight tweak to the system that has been requested from some of our clients is that you can now see a customers recent booking history from the booking calendar. This means you no longer have to go into the customer card to see any recent visits they have had or what service they were booked in for last. This will be especially useful for busy salons on days where all you need is a quick look at your customers details before completing their service.

New Waitlist

A new feature available on all three of our different packages is our new and improved tanning waiting list.  Though our original waiting list will still be there, we have added a new one especially for customers who use the timer view for their sunbeds.  Instead of being at the right hand side of your screen, you are now able to add waiting customers to a list below a specific bed and once its time for them to go on the bed, all you have to do is click a button to move them up to the bed. This allows you to be more specific when giving customers waiting times for each bed.

Double Calendars

Another new feature available on our professional and enterprise package is double calendars. This means, for example, if you’d like two tanning calendars this is now possible. This will be useful for large salons with many sunbeds or salons spread over two floors. This will just help to ensure that calendars aren’t too full and will try to help stop confusion.  As well as being useful for tanning salons, this could also be a useful feature for different salons such as hair and beauty.

If you have any questions on our new features or would like any form of training on these please don’t hesitate to get booked in.

If you’d like a FREE demo and two-week trial please call us on 0113 350 8230 or alternatively email us at info@salontracker.co.uk

Salon Tracker x

2020: The Start of a New Year & New Decade!

Happy New Year! 2020: Not only the start of a New Year, but a new Decade too. Bring on the Twenties!

Our Salon Tracker team would like to welcome you back! We hope you’ve all had a fabulous Christmas and enjoyed the festivities with family and friends.

But now, it’s another blank canvas, a fresh start and a New Chapter! And we all know that January can be a bit of a quieter time for a lot of businesses, but this only provides some extra breathing space for you to be able to spring clean the salon, re-organise your strategy and maybe think about your marketing for this year too. So, it’s time to take down the remaining Christmas decorations and refresh any old stock that you may have lying around and start this month fresh, with a clean new start!

January is also a good time to have a sit down with your team and discuss how the last year went, make sure all of your staff are happy and then make adjustments for anywhere where you think there may be room for improvement. This also then gets all of your staff members involved in ensuring the business is just as successful this year as the last. But not only that, it also ensures that they are happy in the current work environment too, boosting team morale! It’s great to keep your team involved in how business is performing, maybe even create a fun little presentation to talk through how your staff have helped you to achieve success.

A marketing and sales strategy is also great to have, as this is something that you and your team can work towards, and this then provides you with something to measure performance against at the end of 2020! If you need a bit of help with your marketing tactics, our sales team have lots of tips and experience to be able to help you with some campaigns, and if you are a follower of our blog, we are always offering our best advice and promotional ideas. So keep posted on our news page https://www.salontracker.co.uk/News throughout the year for some new tools & tips!

We are releasing a new software version also next week, therefore for any of you that are already users you will be automatically get the new version through auto-updating, so get ready for this in a few days! However, for anyone that is thinking of trialing our software out, keep posted next week on our news page as we’ll be showcasing what our new software has to offer. January is a great time to improve organisation of your salon, and so why not try our software out for a fresh new management system this year. Salon Tracker is FREE to trial for a fortnight, to give you a feel for the system before you make a decision on any packages.

So, we hope that 2020 is a successful year for you and we’d love to help you to boost profits & performance! And so, if there are any sales, marketing or organisation structures that we can help you with along the way just call our team on 0113 350 8230 or drop us an email at info@salontracker.co.uk.

We look forward to working with you, let’s have another great 12 months!

Salon Tracker x