Must Have Features For Your Salons Mobile App
Globally the healthcare & beauty industry is worth close to 4.5 trillion worldwide, and with this technological age we all live in, and powerful platforms like mobile apps are only set to increase the growth.
A mobile app for your salon is surefire way to increase bookings and boost business, with a great increase in overall ROI. It’s not just a way to connect to more customers, but get them actively engaging with your salon, putting you far ahead of your competitors.
Having worked with and built apps for many salons, we wanted to share below some of the favorite features that salon owners are utilizing to maximize their business.
1. Appointment Booking
Simple, but maybe one of the most utilized features for most salons is the booking feature, allowing your users to easily open your app and simple book in an appointment makes doing business a breeze. Additionally, it frees up a lot more time for you and your staff to attend to other aspects of the business instead of manually booking in appointments and entering in long conversations that chew up business hours for a task that can be automated.
In addition, you can get:
- One Tap Appointment Booking
- Email notifications for both you and the client
- Direct Payment on Booking
Any loyalty program can be extremely effective, especially in terms of monetizing current business. Being able to treat your customers with better offers and discounts as a reward for their business will not only increase repeat dealings but also word of mouth.
Some additional aspects of this feature are:
- Digital punch cards
- Scratch and win style programs
- QR code scan
- In app points system, for discounts and offers
Making use of a photo gallery is the best way to showcase your services, and provide social proof to your customers. Simple add a tab or button on your apps home screen, to add and store your images and videos.
Same gallery options are:
- High quality images of past clients or work done
- Service videos, or behind the scenes footage of you and the team
- Image and video share options
- Previous and next navigation buttons
Being upfront and transparent with your services and pricing is important to your customers. Your Salon clients compare pricing with competitors. It’s easier for them to check the service directly from their mobiles by eliminating the requirement of a computer. So, you can let your customers view with an intuitive mobile version catalogue.
You can improve your services feature by:
- Showcasing the service with and image or video
- Allowing direct payment for the service through the app
- Giving combo packages or addons
- Browse and choose a stylist or staff member
Managing staff can be a difficult endeavour at the best of times, and something overlooked a lot of the time is scheduling staff hours, and to have a well-functioning business you need organised and productive employees.
Some great app rostering benefits are:
- Employees and clock in when they are in a pre-defined radius of your business through the app
- Enable photo recognition clock in’s for staff that forget their devices
- Staff can view their entire week or month in advance
- Information is available to view 24/7
Push notifications are an extremely powerful way to engage with your customers. A push notification strategy can also be a great way to remind your users about your app. Although Push notifications should be used in the right dose, having too many irrelevant notifications to often can serve to annoy your customers.
Some benefits are:
- Send individual or group notifications whenever you please direct to your customers phone
- Perfect for special offers or current discount promotions.
- Push notifications instantly pop up on the user’s device home screen
One of the most important things to customers nowadays is being able to easily contact the business there dealing with, your mobile app is an ideal way to create that line of easy contact.
Through:
- In App live chat
- Easy prefill contact forms
- One touch call us button from the app
- Your website link
- Social media links
- Stores locate us address with map
Above are just a few of the many features that you could utilise in your business. Overall, your aim should be to solve problems for you and the customers and when implementing any features that should be at the forefront of your reasoning for using them.
If you are looking to create an app for your business, or have any questions regarding possible features you can implement, contact our professional development team for a free consultation today.
