How to Use Business Management Software to Grow Your Beauty Business
Most salon businesses are owned by technicians and stylists who are highly passionate and skilled in matters of hair, beauty, and fashion. Making people beautiful comes naturally, but using business management software, not so much. For them, the responsibility of building an effective management system of staffing, inventory management, client retention, and marketing is always a tall order to fill. Learn how to use business management software to grow your beauty business.
7 Ultimate Ways to Grow Your Beauty Business with Business Management Software
If you are like most salon business owners, you and your beauty business could benefit from salon management software in a big way. Business management software will help you exceed client expectations and manage your staff more efficiently. Information technology is changing organizations by provides the efficiency, convenience, and inspiration that your workers and clients demand. Stick around for 7 ultimate ways that salon software can help you reshape your beauty business.
Streamline Booking
If salon software is good for only one feature, then that feature has to be online booking of appointments. You would be surprised by the huge number of your social media fans who don’t live in your salon’s neighborhood but wouldn’t mind traveling back and forth just to be served by you. The only reason they aren’t going to your salon is its lack of a secure and convenient booking system.
There also are potential clients in your neighborhood who can walk in to book appointments at your front desk, but they choose not to for their own personal reasons. What’s more, when given the option, even your regular walk-in clients would prefer the convenience of booking appointments from their phones. Bottom line: Your beauty business loses far too many potential clients when you operate without an online streamline booking system.
Online booking drives same-day appointments. Clients can see openings in your schedule and book an appointment instantly. It allows them to peruse your calendar in their own free time and pick out the most appropriate appointment time as per their own availability. And if you prefer to rebook clients before they leave, which boosts sales and client retention, your management system will come in handy. Another big win is for solo artists who don’t have the time or the manpower to talk to clients over the phone or respond to SMSs.
Improve Employee Management
Implement best practices in human resource management in your HR department or business to improve consistency and reduce HR risk.
For starters, your management system can help you reshape how you manage staff schedules. Online booking alone is enough to help you map out employees’ duty roster for a whole week. You will know when and where to fix walk-in clients in the appointment schedule, give employees off-days, and reschedule appointments in case of unavoidable changes in your calendar.
Another way a salon management system can assist with improved employee management is through accurate and comprehensive reporting. It will break down the profitability of your beauty business and tell you which employee makes the most sales, has the most bookings or has the most re-bookings. It will even analyze your revenue generation and report on the revenue each staff member brings within a specified period of time. And if you choose a system with integrated reviews and feedback tools, it will give you real-time client feedback on the experience they have in the hands of your staff. You, therefore, know which employee to reward, retrain, call back to order, or let go.
If you struggle with payroll and commission calculations, your business management software can help you with that too. It will help you design your commission structures, track hours worked, generate payslips, and streamline everything payroll-related. Some systems come with a “staff goals” tool that you can use to define your most valuable KPIs, set individualized targets and goals that align with those KPIs, and track their progress in real-time.
Boost Your Inventory Management
Don’t waste too much of your daytime tracking your inventory manually across your salon’s supply chain. An inventory management system can help you automate every step from order placement to suppliers, deliveries to clients, or to in-house inventory management. It will notify you in case of overstocking so that you can find solutions for the excess inventory — maybe use it as giveaways or discounted promotional products for marketing purposes. It will also notify you if there’s under-stocking so that you can reorder in good time.
Boosting your Inventory management systems can also help you with:
- Demand forecasting based on past purchases.
- Products’ grouping based on their components and specifications.
- Barcode scanning for instant identification and labeling of retail products.
- Sales report and purchase orders’ generation.
- Multi-location management in case you have multiple salons or point-of-sale (POS).
Speed Up Check-ins
Beauty clients love to be pampered right from the minute they step into a salon. They will be frustrated if they have to queue at the front desk. The frustrations quickly morph into heartbreaks if your receptionist “needs a minute” to find a client’s file. Your salon management software will turn check-in hassles into a breeze.
It will help you store clients’ info in an easy-to-access database so that your receptionists can smile more and search less during check-ins. Apart from saving time, fester check-ins also give your staff a good platform to upsell your add-on services and retail products. Well received and pampered clients need little to no convincing at all to order second or even third add-on services.
Automate Your Marketing
The success of your marketing campaign is dependent on how well you know your target client and how personalized your marketing messages are. Salon management will help you on both fronts. Automation will help you know your clients better by collecting, analyzing, and organizing their data (preferences, photos, payment methods, hair and skin types, and contacts, etc.). Automated marketing data also helps you personalize your messaging.
You can then use the software to automate:
- Appointment reminders.
- Happy birthday messages.
- Personalized thank you messages
- Appointment follow-ups
Improve Your Customer Experience
Beauty businesses are people-based. The more information you have about a client, the better your service delivery will be, and the greater your customer satisfaction will be with an improved customer experience.
Your software can help you improve your customer experience in several ways:
- Tracking a client’s service specifics. Your staff will prepare better for appointments, and that enhances customer satisfaction.
- Giving you the perfect ice-breakers. It will tell you the favorite appointment day for a given client or what they do with their hair for special events. You can even keep records of what they do for a living. That way, you always know the perfect topics to bring up when they come in.
- Ensuring that clients have all the products they need through automated inventory management.
Streamline Loyalty Program Management
Your software will track retail purchases, referral points, and loyalty points for you. And because the marketing system analyzes customer data for you and ranks clients in terms of the business they bring to your salon, you are able to organize your loyalty programs in a truly mutually-beneficial way.
For example, streamline loyalty program management can:
- Provide discounts to first-time clients to incentivize them to come back.
- Introduce do-good loyalty programs for clients who are passionate about eco-cosmetics. Most of these people will willingly spend more money on your business if you promise to invest in environmental conservation, for example.
- Gamify your loyalty programs. You can, for example, offer increasing deals as a client gets more referral points.
- Offer VIP memberships for VIP clients. VIPs get more specialized treatment, but they in most cases give bigger tips than regular clients.
Grow Your Beauty Business with Business Management Software
Reshaping your business is easier than you probably thought, all thanks to salon management technology. It is your job now to grow your beauty business with business management software that is the best for you based on your business needs. Hopefully, this article has given you an idea of the impact business management software should have on your beauty salon operations.
Hey there! One of my ex-classmates has been considering making hairdressing as his full-time career starting next year. I found it really helpful when you stated that implementing technologically advanced services such as cashless payment is a great way to bring our companies one step ahead of our competitors. I’ll ask him to consider this option when he starts his business later.