Growing your business is an ultimate goal for every salon, but gaining insights on how to do this with a consistent approach is not always easy. Here are 5 tips from Square to help you.
- Provide your customers with an easy online booking solution
Create your own personalised booking website with Square Appointments. This allows clients to make appointments on the go. Through automated email and SMS reminders, clients will be advised to confirm their appointments, helping to reduce cancellations and no shows.
Social integration is also available through Instagram, Facebook and Google, so that you can share the booking links via your social channels and business listing. Just add a “Book” button on your Instagram and this will take your clients through to your booking system. This ensures a seamless transition from client discovery of your business to booking.
You can optimise your bookings by adding a recurring appointment option to make it easier for your clients to return. If you have multiple locations, Square Appointments can also help you manage bookings across all your locations.
- Increase your clients’ salon visits
Focus on your marketing. Create, send and track email marketing campaigns in minutes. Using Square’s email marketing software (Square Marketing), you can easily design custom emails, set up automated campaigns and see how your marketing efforts affect your bottom line by viewing results on your Square Dashboard.
Square Marketing can be used to target existing customers, new customers, and lapsed customers. Email marketing is a great way to create tailored marketing campaigns with promotions and discounts to help drive business growth and repeat visitation.
Collect email addresses at checkout and ask customers if they’d like to join your mailing list. You can download a prebuilt QR code poster and place it anywhere in your shop for customers to scan. You can also upload pre-existing lists to your Square account (if you’ve already received consent).
- Review your prices
Inflation, rising interest rates and energy bills, may make you nervous as a business owner. These pressures make it even more important to review your situation regularly taking into account any increasing costs so these can be factored into your prices.
What is your pricing strategy, market-based, value-based or tiered? Whatever your strategy, be consistent with your approach. While pricing can just be the amount you charge for your services and products, it can also be far more than that. Think of it as one of your most important signals to your customers about how you value your brand and where you believe it sits within your market. Choosing your prices is a critical tool for pushing or pulling different customers towards your salon – so it’s worth putting thought into.
Ultimately, the features of your pricing strategy will depend on the services and products your salon provides, your marketing strategy, your eCommerce landscape and even your physical location.
- Stay on top of business performance
Real time reports give you a live view of your business. More business intelligence tools means you can import groups of items for easy inventory management and set employee permissions.
The Square Dashboard provides quick insights and advanced sales reports. This business intelligence software comes free with your Square account. This is your chance to keep your eyes on the bottom line by seeing all your transactions and deposits easily.
- Set incentives for your team based on their performance
Focusing on your team and highlighting and understanding individual performances, helps you develop incentives that will make a difference to your bottom line and your team. Square Dashboard analytics allows you to view sales by employee and shift to see who is selling the most, and who could use support in upselling or retailing. Team performance reports also allow you to view how your business as a whole is performing, as well as individual staff members, in terms of client retention and pre-booking rates.
Viewing employee activities is simple with Square. You can monitor actions taken by individual team members through the Activity Log, such as refunds, discounts and voided transactions, as well as insights about appointment bookings. Filter by team member or action type to review activity.
Simplify your business analysis, take online bookings, run your email marketing and keep track of sales reporting all with Square. For further information about Square Appointments POS, go to: https://squareup.com/au/en/appointments.
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