As the year progresses, many hair and beauty businesses are feeling the effects of rising costs on materials, rent and wages. You’re not alone if you’re struggling to maintain your profitability while keeping prices affordable for your clients.
Here are three strategies you can use at your salon, spa or clinic to help keep your books in the green.
Increase your salon’s efficiency
As they say “time is money” and that rings true for our industry. One way you can combat rising costs is by increasing your efficiency so you and your team have more time to bring in revenue.
Kitomba Salon and Spa Software has many features to help automate manual processes that can save you time; are you using the below features?
Everyday marketing
Automated marketing, also known as Everyday Marketing in Kitomba, can be a game changer for your salon, spa or clinic. It sends your clients text messages and emails automatically based on the rules you set. For example, you can set up a rule that every client that hasn’t rebooked in 8 weeks, will get sent a personalised message from your salon encouraging them to rebook. Once you set this rule up Kitomba will do that hard work for you and automatically send messages to clients who fit this criteria.
If you spend some time setting up some automated marketing to send out instead of sending them manually, suddenly your team has more time to improve by shadowing another stylist or helping to clean up instead of sitting at the computer sending out messages to your client.
Automatic stock ordering
Did you know that Kitomba has some pretty useful tools, like being able to automate your stock orders to your suppliers?
As long as you keep your stock levels correct in Kitomba, you can run an Automatic stock order each week, fortnight or month to either purchase enough stock to get it to a certain level that you’ve set, or easier than that, tell Kitomba to re-order everything you’ve sold or used in the last month. Suddenly, rather than spending hours looking at hundreds of in-salon retail products and figuring out how much you might need to fill your shelves, you can sit back and relax as Kitomba does the hard work for you.
Online Booking and Online voucher sales
Make sure you promote your online booking site to your clients, as that way you will have less clients calling reception during your opening hours so you can focus on other tasks. Additionally, the majority of people prefer to book online now because they can do it at any time, generating more revenue for you.
You of course want to try to get them to rebook for their next appointment (or even the next years worth of appointments – see Repeat Appointments) while they’re at the salon, however each time someone calls the salon to make a booking, that results in time that your staff are off the floor.
Investing some time now to look at your software and make the most out of it can potentially save you hundreds of hours a year.
Read more: 6 essential automated marketing ideas for salons, spas and clinics
Make informed decisions with data
The word data might seem scary, but I promise you it’s not. Your salon software is tracking all sales made in the system, and therefore when you’re making decisions about the business, it can be the perfect assistant to help you. Using the reporting available to you in your salon software is crucial to understanding where you’re at and what you need to do in order to reach your revenue goals.
Product sales report
Here is an example: You want to run a promotion to drive retail sales for your salon, spa or clinic. How are you currently choosing which product to discount? Are you just choosing one randomly?
Don’t leave the success of your promotion up to chance; run your Product sales report
in Kitomba 1 to show you the top-selling products, as this will show you which products are loved by your clients and therefore likely to be purchased. You can then sort the list by profit margin, to make sure that you can safely decide on a discount that makes the offer attractive to your clients while maintaining a healthy profit for your business.
Business summary variance report
The Business Summary Variance report in Kitomba 1 enables you to directly compare two specific date ranges for your Business Summary report figures in one report.
This allows you to easily make comparisons and see the difference in percentage change for your chosen KPIs, such as rebooking rate, average client spend, service sales, appointment retail sales and more.
The report will display results at both a business level and by individual staff members, making it easy to assess performance and growth, and what areas require improvement.
Motivate your team to success
Your team is the major driving force for the business’s success, and keeping them motivated and aligned with your goals can hugely increase efficiency at your salon and make your staff happy, and happy staff means happy customers!
One way to align staff with your goals and motivate them is by using goal tracking, and the perfect tool is Kitomba Targets!
If you want to increase revenue by improving retail sales or rebooking rates, set achievable targets with your staff so they can work towards tangible goals. By doing this, you show your staff that they’re making a difference towards the overall business’s success.
When you work together towards a common goal it brings focus into your vision of what you want your salon to be, and when you share your success with your team, it makes everyone feel good. This promotes hard-working staff that are happier and boosts the overall salon culture.
So there you have it; 3 ways you can look at combating rising costs and increasing your revenue. By adopting these strategies, you can not only survive but thrive in the face of rising costs and get your business into a healthy position for the future.
This blog was originally published on the 10th August 2024 and has been updated for comprehensiveness and readability.
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