BEAT THE CHRISTMAS RUSH

The days leading up to Christmas are often the busiest of the year, with clients trying to squeeze in last-minute treatments. Software provider Beu shares five top tips for optimising your salon over the festive period

If you run your own salon business, it’s vital that your clients can book appointments easily and efficiently. Here are five simple ways to optimise your salon and maximise your revenue over the festive period.

1. Get your staff involved

To cope with increased demand during periods of high footfall, ensure your staff are fully involved in salon management. A good place to start is encouraging them to take ownership of their bookings and to learn how best they can cater for clients and deliver on salon service standards. This not only helps improve the customer experience and retention rates, but also helps your staff feel empowered.

2. Think about better payment options

Client checkout can often bottleneck at peak times. If the salon is a mixture of employed and self-employed staff, this compounds the problem – with payment tracking being necessary to ensure money is getting routed to the correct bank accounts.

Beu solves this issue and gives you complete flexibility to manage payment options – you can either take deposits or complete payments in advance of client appointments, protecting your bottom line from the dreaded no-shows.

In addition to this, self-employed staff can add their own bank account – meaning payments can be sent directly to them, reducing the amount of finance admin required every month.

Clients also have complete flexibility with how they pay, either directly from the Beu app or via traditional card and cash methods. This flexibility, and the ability to checkout appointments through each staff member’s phone, dramatically reduces the amount of congestion that can build up around the salon till.

3. Christmas competitions

If you’re looking for a fun and innovative way to get your salon noticed by clients over Christmas, then why not run a competition? One idea is to hold a giveaway and ask fans of your salon on Facebook and Instagram to upload a selfie that includes their latest service.

Make sure they tag their pictures with your salon name and a hashtag so you can easily spot them, then put all these photos into one collage and share it on social media. Not only will this increase loyalty to your salon but the increased activity on your page will help you beat the dreaded algorithm.

4. Introduce a loyalty scheme

Keeping your clients coming back time and time again is an essential part of how to optimise your salon over the Christmas period. A loyalty scheme is a great way to reward returning customers while at the same time gaining valuable insights about what your regulars want from their experience in-salon.

5. Use technology to streamline operations

The Christmas period can be the busiest time of the year for salons, so why not use technology to make things a little easier. Beu is a platform designed for the needs of salons, self-employed therapists and everything in between.

With Beu’s slick web and mobile apps you can run your business from anywhere. Clients can book and pay with the touch of a button.