Clients. Bookings. Coffee. Three things that make your world go round! 🌏 Without them, business wouldn’t be possible. The catch is, to run a thriving (not just surviving) salon you need to know your break-even point – the point where you need X amount of bookings just to stay in showbiz before you can even start to make a profit – and then you need a strategy to make that profit skyrocket.
More bookings X higher value per booking = more $$$ in your back pocket.
But how you ask?
We’re about to help you turn up the bookings dial and get more value from every client to waltz through your door with a few techniques you can implement TODAY 🙌
Get an online booking tool
Optimise your online booking to do all the hard leg-work for you so you can focus on giving your clients the stellar experience they know you for. Trust us, it’s going to help you grow in the long run.
Having online booking running and fully-optimised means that when you open your salon at the start of the workday, you have a bunch of new bookings that have trickled in overnight. It’s one of the lowest-effort ways for you to collect more bookings, since clients can make a booking when and where they like. On the train to work? Check. Standing in line waiting for their half-strength vanilla latte? Check. Sitting on the couch in their fluffy PJs with their French Bulldog, Bertie? Double-check.
If you’re yet to get online booking up and running in your business, check out this page here. It’s available to all Shortcuts’ customers on all packages (ya lucky things!)
Let Related Services sell those add-ons for you
PLUS, we’ve just added fancy-schmancy enhancement to Online Booking. You can now take it one step further to drive up the value of those bookings using the Related Services feature. Related Services enables you to configure your appointment setup so that when a client goes to book a service, they are prompted to add on a required or recommended service. It’s all about helping you create meaningful connections between complementary services to make a client’s booking experience super easy and optimise your appointment book.
👉Click here to learn more about Related Services.
Prompt required service add-ons
A Required Service is (as the name suggests), a mandatory service that is required in addition to a specific service. Think – toner after a full head of foils. The system displays a list of services which your guest must choose from to accompany the selected service. These are set up as rules within Shortcuts, and they tell the system that “whenever this service is selected, the client must also choose a service from this list of other services.” By enforcing the selection of required services (when necessary), it gives you the power to create more sophisticated and tailored service menus that are easy to navigate for your clients and ensures efficient online bookings are always created for you.
👉Click here to learn more about Required Services.
Recommend service add-ons
On the flip side, you can also set up Recommended Services. This works much the same way, however the services aren’t mandatory and a client can complete a booking without having to select another service. Research shows that most clients appreciate the hint and leave the recommended service in place for the booking – after all, who doesn’t want a finishing style to showcase their fabulous cut? Cha-ching – an instant upsell, without the hard-sell.
👉Click here to learn more about Recommended Services.
Upsell, upsell, upsell
Upselling is one of those often-uncomfortable tasks in the salon industry where you feel pressured to take off your hairdresser hat and replace it with a salesperson hat. A sometimes-awkward swapsy. But at the end of the day, your goal is to drive revenue through your business and a simpler way to do that is maximise the value you get from each appointment. AKA upselling.
While upselling should always be a part of your in-appointment practices, using the Related Services feature can help capture those opportunities earlier in the piece when your client is at a different stage of their customer journey with you. For example, a client can easily add a brow tint to their shaping service selection, as the system recommends it to them based on the rules you’ve set, without you having to prompt and sell them the benefits when they’re in the chair. The hard work has already been done for you!
At the end of the day, your business is your clients – they’re the ones who are going to help you grow and scale. So approaching bookings and the increased value you can gain from them with a business aficionado mindset is what’s going to take you from woah to go.
