10 Ideas on How to Prepare Your Salon for the Christmas Season
Diana Muresan
The holiday season is a busy time of the year for many salon owners. With so many people looking to get their hair done, it can become an overwhelming period. But if you prepare your salon correctly in advance, the holidays will be less stressful and more profitable for you!
Christmas decorations are going up, and clients are looking to book their appointments as early as possible. Hence, if you need a little help, it’s important to prepare your business for the upcoming months.
In this blog post, we’ll go over some ways to make sure your salon is ready for the holidays. To make the most of this Christmas season and get your schedule fully booked, read below the salon owner’s guide to a stress-free holiday season.
How to prepare your salon for Christmas
Have your bookings in advance
You can decorate your salon, get into the festive spirit and make plans to work hard, but without your schedule fully booked, who are you preparing for?
The first thing to do when you want to get your salon ready for the Christmas season is to promote your booking website and let people know that you’ve opened your appointments list for Christmas.
What better way to encourage people to book in advance than taking advantage of the late autumn offers? Be it Halloween, Black Friday, or Thanksgiving, now is the right time to encourage your clients to book an appointment with you for Christmas.
Not only you will have your bookings in advance, and your appointment calendar will be safe for December, but your clients will be safe too, knowing that they’ll get spoiled by you before the holiday.
Organize your schedule
Remember that chaos from last year when you were trying to organize all your appointments in your paper agenda? This Christmas is time to upgrade and get organized. 🙂 Many salon owners choose to use a salon booking app to organize their appointment calendar, so why wouldn’t you do the same?
For example, with this appointment scheduling app, you can send confirmation and reminder texts to your clients, book and manage all your appointments, stock your client’s information, see financial reports, take deposits or full payments online or contactless in your salon, and so on.
So, if you don’t know how to prepare your salon for Christmas and organize your schedule, here’s the trick: download Goldie from the App Store or Google Play and make scheduling easy.
Tip: Experience the ease of taking payments with the Goldie card readers in your salon, designed to keep the checkout process swift and secure. With Stripe’s reliable technology, you can accept payments effortlessly through dip, contactless or swipe, ensuring your customers enjoy a convenient and protected payment experience every time. Check the Goldie card readers here.
Take online payments
Taking payments online will not only save you a lot of time but will also guarantee your income and will reduce your no-shows. In the bustling season of festivities, embracing online payments can be a game-changer for your salon. This modern convenience fits into the lifestyle of your tech-savvy customers who are in search of efficiency and ease. Moreover, it paves the way for a structured and stress-free booking experience, which is a significant perk during the holiday season. There are many payment solutions out there; find your favorite one and give it a try.
Decorate your salon
If we talk about getting into the festive spirit, let’s not forget about the Christmas decorations that everybody adores. On Amazon, you can find many Christmas decorations at a reasonable price, just perfect for beautifying your salon with some lighted elves and snowflakes. If you’re out of inspiration when it comes to decorating your salon for Christmas, here are some ideas:
Stock products
Product stocks are an essential aspect of managing a salon, and they can have a terrible impact on your business if you don’t manage stocks correctly.
To meet your client’s needs this Christmas, make sure that you will have in your salon all the products you need for any service you provide. It is probably better to order more products and not consume them immediately than to run out of your essential ones.
Anyway, when you order your products for the holiday season, analyze your actual inventory and calculate approximately what and how many products you need. As some products need to be stored in special conditions, you’ll not want to run out of space or deposit them the wrong way.
Motivate your salon staff
In our previous article about the best ways to motivate your salon staff, I’ve already explained the benefits of a motivated salon tea and how to stimulate your team well.
The truth is that all of us need a motivation boost or instant gratification to keep working hard. However, some days, things are more challenging than others, and that’s exactly when we need the most to remember why we started.
Whether you choose to motivate your salon staff with an incentive like extra money or teambuilding, make sure that you communicate your intentions and why you are offering them something. People love to feel valued and appreciated at work, and that’s why your team will always need to know what you love the most about them and how much you want them to stay motivated at work.
Stick to your Christmas marketing plan
You already have an idea about preparing your salon for the Christmas season, but did you implement your marketing strategy yet? If you didn’t, here are 10 Christmas marketing ideas for salons.
As a salon owner or simply a professional, you have to know exactly how to bring your salon friendly, fun, and attractive for your clients around the holiday season. From social media posts to freebies and discounts for clients, all of them can be part of your holiday marketing strategy, ready to boost your sales this Christmas.
Treat your loyal clients
Building a loyal customer base is essential for all businesses to have financial security every month. Simply put, customers are devoted to your salon when they keep choosing you over your competitors.
How can you get your salon ready for the Christmas season? Simple: print some of these free loyalty cards for your clients and reward them with a considerable discount for their Christmas appointment.
Clean and disinfect your tools
Before Christmas and New Year’s Eve, your salon can be overcrowded, and you will not have enough time to sterilize all your salon tools after every client. Anyway, it is essential to maintain proper hygiene in your salon, protecting their health. A great way is to always have by hand a Barbicide spray and use it on your tools before and after an appointment.
Barbicide is a popular disinfectant solution, often used in beauty salons and barbershops. It is a fast working substance that kills germs and funges and effectively against HIV-1 and hepatitis. Therefore, Barbicide remains one of the best ways to disinfect your salon tools, especially in overcrowded seasons when you don’t have enough time between appointments.
Keep in touch with all your clients
Your clients love to know that you care about them, especially around celebrations like Christmas. So if you’re using an appointment scheduling app like Goldie, you can send a bulk text message to all your clients with a lovely Christmas wish or even an update about your holiday working hours, discounts that you offer, and so on.
Make clear your no-show or cancellation policy
This is an actual fact: clients missing their appointments cost the hairdressing industry around 1.2 million pounds every year.
Some clients book an appointment and totally forget about it or simply don’t let you know they want to cancel or reschedule. Unfortunately, these situations are translated into severe financial losses for your business and a lot of time wasted. To avoid no-shows and last-minute cancellations during the Christmas season, inform your clients about your cancellation policy and ask for deposits via Paypal or Revolut for every appointment booked. If you want to know more about this, here are 8 effective tips on reducing salon no-shows.
And you, how do you prepare your salon for the Christmas season? We’re waiting forward to seeing your tips and tricks written in the comments section below. Until then, I wish you all a happy pre-Christmas appointment scheduling! 🙂