When it comes to efficiently managing a beauty salon, the primary aim of every salon owner or manager is to ensure sales and improve profitability. After all, aside from providing unparalleled guest experience it is the profitability, which ensures the cash flow required to both run and grow the salon business. Thus, it is hardly surprising that salon managers, world over, are constantly look at newer and innovative ways to engage with clients and in this blog, we share 6 proven tips that will help you manage your salon business by improving your sales, and consequently profits in no time.
Pricing Makeover
We know that this is both a no-brainer and the trickiest one to navigate, however, it is definitely an important one. If you haven’t reviewed your pricing strategy for a considerable period of time, chances are that the fear of losing clients is making you offer silent discount to your clients. So, with a cool and calm mind, run your numbers. While navigating this terrain is difficult, we suggest that you start with the standard thumb rule, “If your profit margin is below 10%, increase prices”. One of the ways to ensure that you’ve got your math correct is to rely on technology. A salon business management software is a great tool to help you compute your numbers. By tracking and analyzing every minute direct and indirect expenses, it can easily compute the costs that you incur towards rendering a service.
Product Explanation
Explain your products. As a business strategy, you have chosen to use the best products. Therefore, go all out to explain how these products benefit the client. From back wash to styling after cut, train your team to extoll the benefits of the products. For instance, if you’re using a certain product as a part of hair color process, you may say, “I recommend using this product as it helps the color last longer”. Better yet, allow your clients to read the product details, and touch them. Soon enough, your clients would be seeking to buy those products from you, and thus increasing your sales and revenue.
Superior Online Booking Experience
Believe it or not, but surveys have shown that one of the reasons why one time clients do not come back is because they find the process of getting an appointment too cumbersome. About 40% of the salons surveyed have indicated that have lost new clients because of their appointments system being either too slow or having too many steps. The survey results are a clear indication that the modern day clients expect a both swift and seamless experience for the entire journey. Did you know that Zenoti salon business management software allows clients to book appointments in just about 4 clicks?
Staff Incentives
Most of your staff aren’t natural salesperson. Sales doesn’t come to them instinctively. However, the softer skills that they’re really good at is speaking to people, and relating with their stories. Perhaps, this is one of the primary reason that clients keep coming back to those stylists because they build a personal bond. As a business strategy, it is time to train your staff to upsell products and services by offering them incentives and teaching them to build upon their friendly relations. A healthy commissions and incentive plan can do wonders for your sales.
Loyalty Program & Referrals
For any high volume business, including salons, loyalty programs are a must have tool for converting one time clients to regular patrons. A loyalty program is a polite way of expressing gratitude towards your patrons. These programs help in bringing a paradigm shift in client perception and portray each transaction as an investment instead of inconvenience. Alongside a loyalty program, a referral program is also a great tool to organically acquire new clients. Often your best ambassadors are your loyal clients. So, encash on your goodwill and offer your loyal clients and the new guests that they bring in special incentives such as one time discount for every new client, and in no time you’ll be increasing your sales.
Personalized Marketing
Let’s face it. We all love to be pampered. The clients are and will surely be budget minded, however it doesn’t mean that they would mind spending a little extra on something which takes their fancy. One of the ways, you can achieve that extra sale is by leveraging technology in the form of salon business management software, which analyzes the client profile based on past purchase history, and recommends both products and services, which are likely to find higher acceptance. One of the forms of personalized marketing is to offer customized bundled services. For instance, if a client is coming in for a trim and blow dry, and you know that he or she also opts for hair color services, then you can offer them a combined deal for all 3 services at some discount.
A well- crafted game plan, when implemented with the right tactics and tools will ensure increased sales and profitability. Most modern salon business management software come with robust advanced features, particularly reporting and analytics to help you record and analyze the outcome of your plan, and assist you in taking data driven decisions. So, here’s wishing you happy growing!
Aside the above basic features that you must look for in your cloud based spa software solution, some cloud based spa software also have additional nice to have features such as employee management, marketing management, customer loyalty management etc. As the cloud based spa software is designed to work organically, you can always choose to add other features based on the dynamically evolving business requirements. Amongst the key players in the cloud based spa solutions such as Zenoti, Vagaro, SimpleSpa, MindBody, Salonist and Klickbox, we love Zenoti for its meticulous details, easy scalability, transparent pricing, and unique features that allow the business to grow organically and grows with the business.