Loyalty Program

We’ve had a loyalty program in The Spa/Salon Manager for a few years now but I took some time at the end of the year this year to improve it, make it easier to set up, and easier to use. Given these changes I wanted to take a moment to explain how the Loyalty program works.

We’ve designed the Loyalty program with simplicity in mind. You’ll start by going to Maintenance -> Loyalty -> Loyalty Program Settings. On this screen you can choose some basic settings that will govern how your customers accumulate points. We provide separate lines for Service Dollars per Point, Retail Dollars per Point, and Gift Certificate Dollars per Point. If you set those boxes to $20, $10, and $50 respectively then customers would receive one point for every $20 of service sales, $10 of retail sales, and $50 of gift certificate purchases. The system assigns points down to the penny so in our example every $0.20 of service sales would give 0.01 points. In addition to these three settings you can assign bonus amounts to each day of the week for the three numbers. Extending our earlier example we could click the Thu box on the Service Dollars per Point line and put in 10 for the percent bonus. Then instead of getting 1 point for every $20 spent the customer would get 1.1 points on Thursdays – a 10% bonus.

Most salons can ignore the Location line (this only applies to stores that are running centralized gift certificates through us for multiple locations). The last part you need to set up is the method for assigning Loyalty ID’s. If you don’t use the Loyalty program yet we show No Loyalty Program here. Your other two options are to Assign Loyalty ID Manually at Check In or to Automatically Assign Loyalty ID at Check In. If you have loyalty cards that you’ll be giving to the customers (like our plastic gift cards we offer) then you’ll want to choose the Assign Loyalty ID Manually at Check In option. If you’d like to have the program manage the ID numbers for you then you’ll choose the Automatically Assign Loyalty ID at Check In option.

Once you finish on the Loyalty Settings screen the program will automatically add the Transaction Type and Pay In/Out category of Loyalty for you. If you’re out of space and don’t have Loyalty in the system yet the program will warn you and tell you to contact support for help in adding the category. It’s critical that you get the Loyalty option added – customers will use Loyalty as their payment method when using their accumulated points to pay for part or all of a sale.

Our Loyalty program is an ‘opt-in’ program. This means that until you assign an ID# on the Customer Display/Check In screen the customer does not accumulate points. Once you’ve assigned an ID# customers will start accumulating points and you’ll be able to see their current point balance at the bottom of the Check Out screen near the Continue button. It’s up to each salon to decide when you want to allow customers to use their accumulated points. The program will allow you to use them when you’re entering a payment on the Check Out screen but each salon could train their staff to put in policies such as requiring at least $10 worth of points used, only allowing Loyalty as a payment for retail purchases, or any other restrictions the salon wanted to place on these redemptions.

We’ve designed the Loyalty program with simplicity and flexibility in mind. We hope that these few simple options will allow a variety of discount programs for our salons. If you have any questions with how to make our Loyalty program work for you, don’t hesitate to contact our tech support department.

New Feature - Stored Reports

Did your printer run out of paper? Did you forget to print a report? Or did you just want another copy of a report later but not want to wait for the program to create the report again? Our new Stored Reports feature does all that and more!

Owners can access the Stored Reports button under the Reports section. It’s a new button on the left where we list the different types of reports (Receptionist Reports, Manager Reports, etc). Once you’ve updated your system to a version of the program with Stored Reports we will store any Mailing Reports you pull up from that point forward for quick access later. We automatically keep the last 90 days worth of these Mailing Reports. Better yet, you can select any of those reports and click the Save Report Permanently option to keep it even after the 90 days are up.

In the future, I’ll be adding even more reports to this section as well as looking for ways to have certain reports get stored automatically at night, but for now I hope everyone enjoys this new feature!

Online Gift Card Sales

As I wrote back in June, the Spa/Salon Manager program makes it easy to sell gift certificates to your customers without dealing with the per-transaction fees that banks and credit card processors charge to load and redeem their gift cards. We have extended that same ability to your website allowing your customers to print beautiful gift certificates directly from the web. Best of all your employees don't have to handle the checkout process or the shipping!

To make all of this work you'll need a few services in place first. Online gift certificate sales are part of our Online Booking service so you'll need Online Booking to start selling gift certificates online. You'll also need a shopping cart account from CartManager - we'll help you get signed up for an account with them, get everything set up correctly, and you're ready to go. Finally, you'll need a way to process the payments that come in to CartManager - Accelerated Payments/X-Charge is a great choice that also integrates with the Spa/Salon Manager point of sale features.

Once you're set up with these three pieces in place we'll work with you to prepare custom artwork for your printable gift certificate. It's even possible to use more than one gift certificate picture which allows you to switch up your artwork with the seasons or with special offers that come up. A good web developer will be able to design a site for you that includes different gift card packages with different artwork for the cards or you can have us make your web site for you.

We also offer the ability to sell discounted or bulk gift cards. You could set up a sale of five $20 gift cards for $80. You could offer a free $20 gift card with the purchase of a $100 gift card. The system is flexible enough where you just decide a final bill amount and a face value for each gift certificate and your web developer can easily make that special available to your customers.

Call us today to get started with Online Gift Card Sales.

Getting More with Less Paper

Our owner Kent's wait for his new electric car got me thinking about ways you can use features in our program to cut your paper use, help the environment, and at the same time make it easier to use the program. We have a lot of features that help reduce paper usage - I'd like to cover some of them here.

We have many salons that print a Close Day Summary every day. You can print these reports at any time though - there's no need to print the report for a paper record. Also, our Cloud owners could get access to the report from their home computer any time from any of their connected devices. While it's just one piece of paper a day it's one piece that a lot of salons end up throwing away once they print it.

Printing work tickets takes a lot of paper. Some salons will want to continue printing these as they do provide valuable information. However, it's possible to work around the need for these work tickets - especially if you have extra computers on the floor for staff to use. Rather than using the work tickets to look up customer history, employees could use an extra computer on the floor to look up information as they need it. In addition, the Pre-Price feature allows service providers to enter any add-on services or pricing changes from a walk-up computer instead of writing them in on the work tickets. It saves paper and prevents mistakes at the front desk.

Printing schedules takes up a lot of paper as well. We offer a few ways you can do without paper schedules. First, walk-up stations allow employees to see their appointments - including new changes that a printed schedule could miss - without paper and without walking to the front desk. In addition, the Paging feature of the program allows employees with text-capable phones to receive notifications for any schedule updates. Finally, both the Cloud and Online Booking features allow employees with smart phones to see their schedule directly on their phones. These options are far more powerful than a printed schedule and give another opportunity to cut your paper use.

Lastly, the powerful Send Email feature in our program can help you cut both costs and paper usage by replacing some of your print advertisements with email marketing. You can easily send out your email marketing to all customers with email addresses and then target your print marketing to only go to people you couldn't reach by email.

These are just a few ideas off the top of my head for reducing paper usage with the program. There's so much you can do now without using paper. Between our Online Booking, our Cloud program, and the Paging feature you can extend access to the program to a variety of devices which will reduce your reliance on printing. You'll save money and in a small way help the environment as well.

SpaSalon Manager - Now on Facebook!

Ever since we rolled out our new website back in May we've been looking to put more and more information about our program and our company where our customers can see it.  We want you to get to know us as well as how the program operates. That entire time we've worked hard on something behind the scenes and I'm very happy to announce that we're now ready to unveil our company site on Facebook!

When we first discussed creating a Facebook page we were hesitant. We have so much great content on our new web site that there were questions about whether we could create something for Facebook that could add anything to what we already had. Once we got started though the answer became clear - we had a lot to say that didn't lend itself well to showing on a traditional web page.

Our Timeline page allowed us to tell the story of our company in a way that a simple web page could not. You can see the story of our company from its founding in 1985 to the present day illustrated in pictures. We have our newsletters, pictures of manuals and other materials from the early days of the business, as well as pictures of our employees and business owners that worked with us at our trade shows. They work together to tell a complete story of our business as it grew from Kent Crabtree writing a program for his parent's salon in 1985 to the business it is today.

Our Home Page section pulls together parts of our current web page like the blogs, the sign-up for a free trial, and links to our support and sales pages. This should make it easier for everyone to find exactly what they need. In addition there is a Training Videos section there where we give the same type of step-by-step support we offer over the phone to everyone on Facebook. Our growing list of videos give simple instructions that both teach new users how to use the program as well as show what each part of the program can do for you.

I hope you enjoy our new Facebook page! Give it a look, Like us, and feel free to leave comments! I'll personally be very active on the site and look forward to hearing from you there.

Last minute addition: We now have a business twitter account, @spasalonmanager. Feel free to contact us there!

New Email Feature - Email Footer

The Send Email feature of our program has always allowed you to send links and pictures. With a bit of work outside the program first you could even send full web pages. What the program lacked though was a way to automatically include certain links and pictures on every email that you send out. That's why we've added our newest feature to email - the Email Footer.

The Email Footer page, which is available under Maintenance -> Internet Marketing, makes it easy to create an attractive email footer. First, we've given you space to type in a slogan, extra information, current specials - whatever text you'd like to add to every outgoing email. Next, we've pulled together a custom set of logos for various social media sites - Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Yelp, and LinkedIn - as well as logos for your Home Page and Online Booking. These logos are all sized so they can fit together on a single line and link to any of these sites that you use. You enter the address for each desired site and the Spa/Salon Manager takes care of the rest. Finally, we added space for up to three text-based links. These could be links to other partner businesses, your own newsletters hosted on the web, or any other links you'd like included at the end of every email.

With just a few minutes of setup you'll be sending attractive emails that tie your social media presence directly to your emails as well as providing more options and information to your customers. Best of all, this is another free service included to all Cloud and Maintenance Contract customers! As always if you have any questions don't hesitate to contact support.

Aveda Master Spreadsheet

Filling out paperwork takes up a lot of time for most businesses. There are tax forms, employee reviews, accounting information, as well as information required by various partners and distributors. We're always looking for ways we can save our customers time in that area. That's why we're very excited to unveil the Aveda Master Report.

We created the Aveda Master Report to make filling out this important information for Aveda much easier. In the past getting the information on this report required several different reports from our program as well as several different time frames for each one. It also required manually entering this information into Aveda's spreadsheet. With the new Aveda Master Report you just need to select your dates (Aveda requires a full year, 1/1-12/31), click Continue, and wait for the program to generate the data for the Aveda Master spreadsheet. When it's finished generating the data the program will pop up instructions for getting the results to the Aveda Master spreadsheet. Basically this just involves opening the Aveda Master spreadsheet, selecting the Paste Here tab at the start, clicking on the first cell (A1), and clicking Paste. Once you paste the information the Aveda Master spreadsheet will automatically fill in all the information on the DATA Entry Page.

If you don't have the Aveda Master spreadsheet available when generating the report our non-Cloud customers can use the file c:\salon\aveda0.xls on their main computer to do the same steps. Our Cloud customers can email themselves a copy of the file from the Send button under Customer Display by choosing Attach File and selecting aveda0.xls from the file list.

Whatever steps you use, our new Aveda Master Report will save you a ton of time! As always, don't hesitate to contact support with any questions.