The number of smartphone users worldwide will just keep on constantly growing in the next few years.
People have fun with their phones, they shop with their phones, exercise with their phones, work out with their phones and now also book appointments with their phones – which is what we’re focusing on today.
Smartphones have pretty much become extensions of ourselves and there’s no signs of this trend slowing down anytime soon. Together with the worldwide mobile app revenue consistently growing, businesses are increasingly starting to jump on the hype wagon and take advantage of these two markets by implementing mobile apps to their strategies – and so should your beauty salon!
Today, we explain why businesses like your beauty salon need to take advantage of appointment booking apps, as well as how to choose the best solution for you.
Why does your beauty salon need an appointment app?
There are several reasons why any business, including beauty salons like yours, need modern and digitalised solutions that are available out there: marketing automation tools, email marketing tools, customer relationship management tools and more.
Examples of course also include online reservation apps, which you may want to consider implementing for the following reasons:
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Saved time
An appointment booking app allows you to save time on responsibilities like managing bookings, speaking with customers, issuing invoices and receipts, as well as sending appointment reminders.
Reliable and advanced apps have the power of self-managing particular tasks – all so that you can enjoy focusing on other important aspects of your business.
Apps are also less prone to making mistakes, which makes your business look more professional. This is because there’s a lower chance of letting your customers down with booking mistakes and errors.
Imagine you make a mistake and mix the appointment dates of your customer coming in for their wedding make-up – that’s a ready disaster just waiting to happen. Mobile apps and their systems just can’t make mistakes like this, so you can sleep peacefully.
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more bookings
There are “full package” types of solutions out there in which a mobile app is one of the many great perks available to the user.
Think about integrations like Facebook Messenger and Google Calendar. Moreover, imagine having access to a landing page creator, a website builder, an email notification creator, SMS and push notifications and more.
If you give people access to all these various types of booking methods, what you’re doing is essentially putting your business out there in front of your current and potential customers.
When you do this, your business becomes more discoverable, you build your brand awareness and brand image and, as a result, you get more bookings. Win-win, right?
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24/7/365 availability
Software solutions and mobile applications don’t have ‘business opening hours’. They also aren’t closed during Christmas and bank holidays.
Once they’re up and running, they’re available all the time to their users (except for times like software update, management repairs and more).
Now, compare this to your beauty salon – are you currently giving your customers the option to book their next appointment with you whenever they want to? 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year?
The answer is probably ‘No’ – and it’s totally fine, people shouldn’t expect business owners to be available to them all the time in the blink of an eye.
This is why you need an online booking app – it’s always there, whenever your customers get the sudden urge to book an appointment with you – be it during a Thanksgiving dinner or in the middle of the night.
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access to customer data in one place
Finally, you’ll like this one.
Having an online booking platform, whether mobile-only or accessible on various devices, will give you access to rich and valuable details about your customers, such as:
- how often they book appointments with your salon,
- what their favourite treatments are,
- how much they spend,
and much, much more!
You can use this type of data to take care of your most loyal customers and further drive customer retention – through appreciation, incentives and simply maintaining a good relationship.
How to choose a beauty appointment app? 3 Easy steps
Now that you’re well aware of the perks a mobile reservation app and booking platforms in general offer, let’s get you set up with these 3 easy stages of choosing your best beauty appointment app.
Get to know your customers well
First of all, in order to pick a good mobile app for your customers, you need to get to know your customers first.
Now, we mean data that reaches far beyond simply knowing your customers’ names and favourite beauty treatments.
What we really mean by this is you need to find out whether your current and potential customers will actually even want to use a mobile app.
How can you get valuable information from your customers?
There are a few ways that you can go down to find out the answer to a very important question: Will my customers want to use my mobile scheduling app?
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casual conversations during appointments
The easiest way to approach this is by… simply asking them directly!
As a make-up artist, cosmetologist or esthetician, you surely get numerous occasions to have a little chat with your customers.
Use this time to find out what your customers value the most and whether or not they’d be willing to use a mobile app.
You can explain to them the potential benefits of a solution (such as booking open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week) and briefly describe how it would work.
Remember, it’s always better to ask the way than to go astray!
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incentive programme
If, however, your customer base is too large, changes often or you don’t necessarily want to personally ask your customers about their opinion, you can try your luck with an incentive programme!
This will also be useful if your customers aren’t the most talkative people on Earth, or you get a sense they’d be more honest with their answers when responding anonymously.
Think of a little incentive, such as a discount on a beauty treatment or free product samples in exchange for filling up a short survey.
Incentives are a great way to drive customer engagement and also develop customer loyalty – research shows that even as much as 75% of consumers favor companies that offer rewards. This means your time to shine!
In such a survey you should aim to get answers to your most important question regarding the usability of a potential mobile app: to app, or not to app – that is the question.
Questions to ask yourself before getting an appointment booking app
Here are some useful questions that you may want to ask yourself while you’re debating whether or not you should get an appointment app for your beauty salon.
It’s important that you ask and answer these questions truthfully – it’s the only way you’ll be able to correctly evaluate whether or not your salon actually needs a solution like this:
- Are you usually all booked up a few weeks in advance?
- Are your customers a group of the same, loyal customers, or is your customer base rather varied and inconsistent?
- Is your salon located in a big city or a small village?
- What is the age demographics of your customers?
- Will an online booking app become your main appointment booking channel, or will it be a complementary tool to your other, core booking ways?
- Can you see your business benefiting from a booking platform thanks to saved time, constant business availability and an increased potential outreach?
Once you answer these questions, you should have it all cleared up in terms of getting a booking app – or not.
If the answer is yes – here’s how you can do it:
Choose your app
When you’ve made up your mind and you are now sure you want a booking app for your beauty salon, it’s time to go software hunting!
You need to pick an app that will meet the right criteria for your business. Those can be
Price
Always have a defined budget in the back of your mind. Do some research beforehand and find out the average prices.
Here, you may find websites like Capterra and G2 quite useful – those are software review and selection platforms helping inexperienced people with choosing the best solutions tailored to their businesses.
Things to remember:
- Look out for solutions offering subscription plans instead of fixed contracts that are difficult to opt out from.
- Overpaying for a premium solution may not be worth the money, especially in the early implementation stages.
- Sometimes, going for a cheaper solution may be more profitable in the long run than an expensive one.
Features
You should also get an initial understanding of the variety of features that are available out there when it comes to mobile scheduling apps.
Push notifications, SMS messages, flexible calendar, easy client booking, alerts, email marketing and various payment options are just some examples.
Which features would you like your perfect mobile app to have? Which features won’t benefit you or your customers in your opinion?
Again, do some basic research before to ensure you’re only considering the solutions tailored specifically to your business. Such an approach makes the whole process easier as it really narrows down your search scope.
Thus, remember about this!
Technical support
Once you implement a solution, you’ll probably expect it to run on it’s own. There are 2 aspects worth taking into consideration here:
- First, in order to make a mobile app work with your salon, it has to be implemented and set up.
- Second, once it is running and as your business grows and changes, there will be updates needed.
Now, if you’re not necessarily familiar with things like mobile app updates, software updates and things like that, you may want to save yourself from a complete nightmare and take care of these issues in advance – before they become real issues.
You can do it by only considering those solutions that offer professional and ongoing technical support to their users.
Customer satisfaction
Finally, as a beauty salon owner or employee, you’ll probably agree that the satisfaction of your customers remains one of the top priorities in this industry.
To ensure your customers are happy with all aspects of your business and their customer experience journey, including something seemingly irrelevant like the booking process, you need reliable solutions.
As you can imagine, this also applies to your mobile booking app. You can take care of your customers’ comfort by checking out the reviews of a potential app you’re going to use and by reaching out to current users to see if they’re content with the app.
Many online booking platforms also offer free trials so you can ask a few of your customers (or even do it yourself) to check the user experience and let you know their feedback on an app.
If you make sure to keep all these aspects in your mind when you’re searching for your perfect mobile app for booking and managing appointments, there’s no way you’ll pick a solution that won’t deliver.
Implement and start promoting it!
Finally, imagine you’ve picked your mobile booking app and you’re ready to implement it. Congratulations, well done!
You’re one step away from fully taking advantage of all the benefits it offers.
Your last task to do is to give it some proper marketing and your calendar will be ready for a wave of bookings.
Whether you use social media, email marketing, word of mouth of a different marketing channel (or all of the above combined) – make sure you properly introduce the platform to your customers.
You may even want to consider offering a little incentive to your customers for switching from their current booking method to your freshly implemented mobile app.
Get your beauty salon ready for game-changing mobile app booking
Now your beauty salon and you are ready to start benefiting from more time, more bookings, less misunderstandings and even an increased potential outreach – thanks to the fact a mobile app itself is often a drop in the sea of online booking possibilities.
If you’re looking for a solution that will meet your most sophisticated demands regarding the price, features, technical support and, naturally, customer satisfaction, we have just the right pick for you.
It’s Calendesk and it’s the ultimate solution for enjoyable and hassle-free online booking experiences. It takes care of:
- accepting bookings,
- handling payments,
- generating landing pages,
- serving your customers like a pro
and more – all so you don’t have to!
Calendesk offers premium features at a very affordable price. You can also try before you buy thanks to the free trial.
Check its features out here and get ready for the best mobile booking experience ever – and much more.
Other than that, we hope you found this article interesting and we wish you best of luck with your appointment scheduling management!
