5 business areas you should take care of to effectively manage your salon

5 business areas you should take care of to effectively manage your salon

To successfully run a hair & beauty salon you need more than a nice-looking place and a good pair of scissors. Managing and marketing skills are also highly appreciated if you want your business to succeed. Dealing with the numbers, suppliers, more or less happy staff and of course the clientele is your everyday task. This sometimes is very far from what you really want to focus on. Take a look at some useful tips and ideas to help you better manage your salon.

1. Know your customers

It’s not a big secret that a returning customer is the most valuable customer. The challenge is to build an exceptional customer experience and convince people to keep coming back. Marketing specialists will advise you to understand your customers’ needs and discover their genuine expectations. Only by having this knowledge you can give them what they truly want.

Remember that information is the key. Collect and process client statistics. Use the customer base to store the data about their favourite cosmetics, health problems, daily hair and skin routine, birthday dates or even holiday plans. Having all this information will allow you to prepare personalised and more tempting offers, provide better service and built long-lasting relations.

2. Make yourself heard

Don’t be shy. Tell the world about your great and qualified staff, new or bestselling offers, and customer-focused service. Use email marketing, social media channels and your website to promote your salon and attract new customers. Make sure to keep your customers who had already decided to visit you for the first time.

Top salon software solutions are equipped with marketing automation tools that will allow you to maintain active communication with clients. Predefined, highly effective marketing campaigns will help you encourage clients to book the next appointment. Select software designed for the hair & beauty businesses that is tailored exactly to your specific business needs and your clients’ behaviour.

3. Manage your inventory

Continuous control over stock levels is a must. Probably, as you are a beauty specialist and not an accountant, the inventory management in your salon is not the sort of thing you enjoy. You can solve this problem and find beauty & hair salon software with inventory features that help you to monitor and retain control over all products you have in your salon. A good system will track sales, purchases and the amounts of cosmetics used for treatments. At the right moment, it will even generate for you a list of products running out of stock or show you what products make the highest profits. Knowing these numbers you can simply plan your revenues, reduce shrinkage or avoid unnecessary losses.

4. Know your numbers

All your efforts will be lost without constantly analysing how your business is performing. Keep control over the situation in your salon with detailed reports and statistics. Get to know sales and cash flow statistics. Check your weekly or monthly revenue and compare it with the same period in the previous year to project your future income and expenses. Check your rebooking rate and best performing staff to better motivate your employees.

Specific reports allow you to quickly react if your salon is not going in the right direction. They will also help you to take accurate decisions. Once again, as you probably don’t want to be an accountant, give yourself a good piece of technology that will help you to look after your business and reduce the stress connected with running the numbers.

5. Switch to cloud software

There are numerous benefits of using web-based salon software. You can easily manage all salon tasks mentioned above and many more. Well-designed salon software will organize your day-to-day tasks easier and better. Only imagine a handy marketing tool to improve customer retention, an online booking panel working for you 24/7, automatic appointment reminders reducing no-shows or a complete and accessible customer base with detailed appointment history. This powerful tool will provide you with real-time insights and will create the opportunity to grow your salon.