December at hair and beauty salons can be quite hectic. You know it well from your own experience - year by year, you start preparing for the winter holiday season as early as October, hoping that a well-established plan will help you get the most out of this busy time. And year by year, you barely make it out alive. So, what is the culprit and why didn't your careful planning help you spot any flaws?
Stop blaming yourself. Truth be told, the holiday season madness can be simply too much to handle for one person, even if you are extremely well-organised and focused! Now, prepare yourself a good cup of hot cocoa (don't go easy on marshmallows!) and let us help you with things that can truly get overwhelming in December.
You don’t blame your clients for it, but let’s face it - they can be all over the place when booking their December appointments. The holiday season is a time when most people are in a rush, and trying to fit their busy schedule to your salon's busy schedule is not an easy task. You know how it goes - one of your loyal patrons calls and asks for “something in the afternoon”, so you offer them next Wednesday, 3.30 pm. After 15 minutes of going back and forth, you settle on Thursday, 5.15 pm. They are happy… for an hour. An hour later they call you again to reschedule, as they’ve just realised they have places to be on that Thursday. Another 15 minutes of back and forth and you reschedule to Tuesday, 2.30 pm. A week later, the same client calls because they were assigned an important task at work for that specific Tuesday and will not be able to make it. No other free afternoons left? They will, unfortunately, have to cancel. Two days after that, they call to tell you they have one morning free on Friday. You settle on 11.30 am. An hour later, they call again. What about Wednesday, at 3.30 pm?
After a few days of getting such clients, your appointment book starts resembling a very messy battlefield. With every change, you become more and more prone to making a mistake. Double bookings, overbookings and other terrifying problems of this kind are very typical for busy seasons. And they become even more painful then - you can lose a client over a double booking a week before Christmas (they won’t find a backup salon!) and every empty slot, caused by an oversight, will equal a financial loss you won’t get over easily. Is there anything you can do to prevent such things from happening?
The best way to make your appointment book foolproof is to take it to the digital realm. Booksy offers you a digital appointment book feature that is not only intuitive and easy to use, but also keeps a careful watch over your schedule. It immediately acknowledges an attempt at double booking and lets you know, so that you can correct it. You can make and reschedule appointments in a flash with drag and drop, and add numerous details and custom settings to the planned visit. Multiple services? Not a problem. Recurring appointments? Could not be easier! Any additional notes? We’ve got you covered. Appointment reminders are launched automatically and your employees have access to their work schedules on any device with access to the Internet. It’s the best, safest and most efficient way to manage your appointment book. With such a powerful tool, you can flawlessly handle any number of rescheduled visits that will come your way!
Many far-sighted business owners plan their holiday marketing activities in advance. They decide what their special offers are going to be, what and when to publish on social media, and some even prepare content in advance. Everything is going well… until the December rush hits you. You’ve done everything in your power to prepare yourself, but now you are booked from the break of dawn to late night hours and you physically have no time to take care of anything marketing-related. Absolutely exhausted, you drop onto your couch sometime around midnight and publish a photo with Santa on your salon’s social media fan pages. The caption asks happily: “What do you wish to find in your stocking this year?” and you have to stop the urge to answer it yourself: “A few additional hours a day, a gallon of coffee and marketing campaigns that send themselves.”
We may not be Santa, but we can make one of these wishes come true. Booksy is well-renowned for its advanced communication features. Among others, you can send bulk email, push and text messages - just a few clicks and all (or a select group) of your clients receive your special holiday offer. Forget about using unreliable apps or struggling to send everything manually - Booksy gives you everything you need to reach your clientele. With advanced filtering of your customer base, you can pinpoint your target groups and prepare different messages to all of them. The best part is that once you prepare the message (or take advantage of one of our samples), the process takes just a few seconds - you adjust your delivery method and timeline, and voila – the good news is preached!
December is a month of higher demand for everything. Suddenly, your working day doesn’t have enough hours to fit all of the customers who want to book with you and your inventory gets empty very quickly. Customers want MORE - more ideas for gifts, more time at your salon, more assortment to choose from… You are trying your best to keep everyone happy but it’s not an easy task - if you order too many retail products and inventory, you’ll be left with a painful financial loss. By not having enough, you waste an opportunity to make a profit and may even strain your relationship with clients.
It’s a complex issue, but you can absolutely win this round - you just need to think holistically. Convoluted problems require advanced solutions. Begin with analysing statistics - they are always the best starting point. Booksy delivers you a number of inventory reports that allow you to see a peak in demand for your products in a given time period. By generating reports for an entire year, you can notice your clients’ spending trends and assess how much stock you will have to order for the busiest season. Additionally, the system will automatically create a list of low stock level products, letting you know which items need reordering. It’s extremely helpful, especially if you have best-selling products that your clients simply adore - you can’t risk going out of them during the holiday season!
Once we have that settled, let’s establish how you can meet the increased demand for your services, especially now, when you have to be very strict about the number of clients you see every day. You most definitely shouldn’t overbook - it may seem like the right thing to do, to just “suck it up” and keep going, but your health is far more important than any earnings. Don’t exhaust yourself and don’t “cut corners” by shortening your much-needed breaks between appointments. You do not only need to disinfect everything - you need to take care of yourself, too!
What you can do instead is take advantage of Booksy’s feature that allows you to keep selling outside of your regular working hours! Let’s talk about online gift cards. Thanks to this feature, your clients can order a digital gift card from your salon - either as a holiday present for someone or a “pampering promise” for themselves. It’s a win-win situation - your customers can purchase a fantastic gift without leaving their own home and you fill your appointment book for the slowdown after December. And by taking the whole process to the digital realm, you reduce the risk of a coronavirus outbreak! It’s important to notice that selling vouchers online is a great way to keep making a profit regardless of the circumstances - should another lockdown come our way, you are well-prepared.
When it comes to handling the wild days of the holiday season at your salon, even having a good strategy may not be enough. However, pairing it with a set of very powerful salon management tools is your path to success. If you want to test-drive Booksy this holiday season and see for yourself how much more you can get from the busiest time of the year, start your free trial today!
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