Email in The Spa/Salon Manager

We've added several new features to The Spa/Salon Manager lately that need email support. When I went back in to look at our records though we had many salons that hadn't taken advantage of everything our software offers to people with email accounts. This seems like a good time to explain how our email service works, how to tell if you have email set up through us, and list many of the great features that our email service can open up to your business.

Email support within the program is a free service we offer to all customers that have either an active Maintenance or Cloud Contract. In order to allow you to send emails to your entire customer list at once we create an email account on our own email server. This prevents issues with various email providers refusing to send out your emails due to some arbitrary limit on the number of people you can send an email to at one time. We set up each business with an email address that ends in @spasalon.com and then offer a choice of either checking that email address directly or having all responses forwarded to one or more of the employee's current email addresses. Your customers will see the emails coming from your business name @spasalon.com and can reply to those emails. It's a seamless process that ties our software's email capabilities to whatever email addresses you plan on checking.

Checking whether you've set up email with us already is an easy process. Simply go to Maintenance and then hit More Choices until you see Internet Marketing. If you have the Internet User Name complete then you're ready to try your email. To test whether your email is functioning correctly you can go to Customer Display, pull up your own name, make sure your email address is on the correct line, and click Send Email on the screen. You'll then be able to write an email to yourself and check your email to verify that Spa/Salon Manager is sending the emails successfully. If you're not yet set up or have any problems sending the email contact our support department and we'll be happy to get you ready!

The Spa/Salon Manager has an extensive list of features that it now supports for our email-enabled customers. This list keeps growing as we see further opportunities to use this no-cost feature to improve the way our program helps you manage your business.

• Email marketing is a snap with Spa/Salon Manager. You can easily send emails out to all of your customers with email addresses. Adding a picture is as simple as clicking a button and selecting the picture from your computer. You don't need to export customer lists, integrate with other products, or place extra phone calls to another company. Simply click the Send Email button, select Send Email to All Customers, and click Continue...then you're ready to create your email!
• Our email marketing also uses our powerful Mailing Reports to make it easy to do targeted emails. It's easy to create an email list directed to one specific group of customers based on a variety of filters.
• Spa/Salon Manager sends many emails out for you automatically. You can set up the program to send nightly emails including appointment confirmations, reminders, birthday greetings, new customer thank you's, and text message reminders for appointments.
• Once you've set up an email address with us it's easy to start using our paid service Email Artwork by IBCS to send out professional quality advertisements to your customers.
• The Paging section of Spa/Salon Manager (discussed in the first part of this blog post) offers the ability to use employee's existing cell phones to create a robust paging service that replaces expensive pagers or mood-killing audio paging systems.
• For our online booking customers a variety of emails will now be sent out directly from the online booking. This includes messages to the customers to confirm successful booking of appointments as well as full integration with the paging system. For all of our Cloud customers we've already set this up for you. For our non-Cloud online booking customers please contact our support department so we can ensure you have these new features available to you.

As you can see, the email features in the Spa/Salon Manager program offer a lot of powerful tools to your business. It's included with your Maintenance/Cloud Contract, it's easy to set up, and there are no per-email fees associated with it. It's the perfect way to stay in touch with your customers while saving money. If you haven't already set it up call us today to get started.

Touch Screens and Spa/Salon Manager

I just finished my first cut at a standing desk and the process of working on putting together a comfortable and easy-to-use workstation reminded me of an important point we don't spend enough time talking about - from the very beginning we designed the Spa/Salon Manager program to work well with touch screen monitors.

Now any program will 'work' with a touch screen monitor. A touch screen simply allows you to replace the motions and left-click actions of a mouse by touching the screen with your finger. A mouse allows for far more control than touching a screen allows though. The design of Microsoft Windows itself shows this expectation of control - small buttons, tiny drop-down menus (File, Edit, View, etc. along the top). Most Windows versions of salon software follow that same model - they're designed to look like a Windows program. That means that unless you're very careful it's easy to miss what you're trying to click with a touch screen - the buttons are just too small and touching the screen too inexact to make the touch screen a time saver or even a comfortable option at a standing work station.

Our program isn't designed following those Windows standards that are unfriendly to a touch interface. We used a button-based menu system for all of our screens rather than Windows drop-down menus. All of these buttons are far larger than you'd find in a typical Windows program. We've made sure to avoid any small data entry boxes and as often as possible have offered drop-down boxes as an alternative to typing in information. The effect is that our program not only makes it easy to use a touch screen in place of a mouse - for many operations we avoid a need for a keyboard as well.

So who should use a touch screen? The same people that are trying to do what I'm doing right now - standing at a desk rather than sitting. While reaching toward a touch screen while seated can be cumbersome, reaching toward a touch screen while standing is often easier than using a mouse would be in that same position. I've seen some wonderful ergonomic desks built to use a touch screen - one even had the touch screen built in to a slanted standing desk similar to a podium! However you set up your ideal desk though our program is designed to make it comfortable and easy to touch the screen.

Storms - Another Reason for Cloud Software

In my previous posts Why Cloud? and Switching to Cloud I covered quite a bit of ground about our Spa/Salon Manager Cloud software. The recent rash of storms have illuminated some other benefits that I didn't cover though that definitely deserve attention. Specifically, I'd like to take some time to look at how a Cloud salon would deal with the storms versus a non-Cloud.

When the power goes out for a non-Cloud business there's only one option available - move the main computer to somewhere that has power. Sometimes this is feasible. Occasionally it's possible to use a generator or UPS power backup device to power the main computer temporarily. Beyond that though there would be no Online Booking access for customers, no Employee Access for employees, and no way to send out an email to customers letting them know that your salon is closed due to a power outage. As a best-case scenario you would keep your power to your main computer long enough to write down phone numbers for customers, then call them back with a cell phone to let them know you're closed. As a worst-case you would have no access to your information.

When the power goes out for a Cloud business you have many more options available to you. Because your main computer does not store your information it's still available to anyone that still has working internet. This could be an iPad, Android Tablet, or even a smartphone. Worst-case you could call us to have us look up your information for you. If you needed to send an email to customers notifying them of a closure you could do it from anywhere and even if you had no access we would be able to send the email for you.

We just had this exact situation come up on a tech support call yesterday. We had a customer that had no power and wanted to let their customers no they would be close through Thursday. Unfortunately, we couldn't help them. They didn't have Cloud, we didn't do Online Backups for them, and they couldn't bring a copy of their backup to a computer that had power. Because we had no access to their current information as we would have with Cloud or even a copy of their information as we would have with Online Backup there was nothing we could do to help.

These situations are obviously rare. They're a small part of the decision-making process when it comes to choosing the right software option for your business. But when the lights go out in your salon, knowing that your software will still be running will make the entire situation less stressful and give you one less problem to fix.