Premier Blog

Premier Software, leading supplier of software to the salon and spa industry, have officially launched their free, cloud-based scheduling system for salons and spa this weekend.

Salonlite has been developed with smaller businesses in mind, who might not need the full functionality of the established desktop-based products such as Premier Spa and Premier Style, and need a fast solution to help establish and grow their business.

Taking the current trend for mobile and tablet portability as it’s lead, Salonlite creates a truly revolutionary scheduling experience by allowing access almost anywhere an internet connection is available.

Premier Software have been creating software for spas and salons of all sizes since 1994, and have drawn on that wealth of experience to create Salonlite, an online scheduling system, which is accessible almost anywhere you have an internet connection.

You can see a full list of the many features of Salonlite on the features page here.

Want to be one of the first to use Salonlite?  You can sign up via the registration page at www.salonlite.com.

Have you signed up for Salonlite? Have you used it yet? We’d love to hear your comments.

We know how important it is to keep in touch with your clients, which is why we provide various methods of communication within your Premier Spa, Spa+ or Style product.   However, we know that sometimes you want that extra level of control that emailing through Outlook just can’t give you.

Mail..chimp?

No, we don’t know why they’re quite so infatuated by our simian friends, but what they are good at is providing a mail service, which lets you track what’s happening with your email marketing.

At this point we should state that we have absolutely no affiliation with Mailchimp – we just wanted to show you another way of getting your message out there.

Step 1 – Getting your Data out of Premier Spa / Premier Style / Premier Spa+

The first thing we need to do is get hold of the list of clients we want to send out our email to.

Fortunately, this is an easy task to accomplish in your Premier software – just go into the Manager, select ‘Marketing’ and add your criteria.

For our example, we’re going to market to men in the closest two postcode areas – the people most likely to have entirely forgotten about Valentines day, who’ll be desperately clamouring for the perfect gift.. which they’re going to find in their email box shortly, thanks to our client records.

Clicking onto ‘Generate Data’ will set the process in motion, and tell you how many clients match your criteria.  At this stage, we just need to get our list in a format Mailchimp will be able to understand – luckily, we have an option for an industry-standard format sitting there on the right, so let’s click ‘CSV Output’.

You’ll get a big long list of fields to include in the CSV file at this stage; we don’t really need all of those, so at this point we can uncheck everything other than first name, surname, title and email (the easiest way of doing this is to click ‘unselect all’, then just mark the fields we want to keep).

Finally, you’ll get a prompt to tell you that your CSV file has been successfully created.

Step 2 – Preparing our Data

The data we’ve created is now sitting in a CSV file, ready to be imported – but due to the rules of Mailchimp, we need to make a slight adjustment to the layout, moving ‘email’ to be the first column.

Assuming that you have access to Microsoft Excel on your computer, you can easily edit the file by going to:

c:\chase\temp

…and double clicking onto the ‘mailmerge.csv’ file there.

You’ll see something like this:

Which we need to turn into something like this:

To move the column, just click onto the heading (in our example, the column named ‘d’) to highlight the entire column, right click over the column name, and select ‘cut’.  This will leave a broken line highlighting the column.

Right click over the first column, and select ‘insert’ (don’t use paste, or you’ll overwrite the clients names).

That’s all we need to do with our data, so select ‘file’ or the office circle, then select ‘save’.

Step 3 – Creating your Mailchimp List

At this point, we need to create a list in MailChimp ready to hold our list of clients.  Head over to mailchimp.com and login (if you don’ t have an account, you can create one for free at this point).

Once you’ve logged in, select the ‘lists’ option from the top of the page, and then click ‘Create List’ (assuming you don’t have a placeholder ‘list’ already created).  This is essentially what we’ll be using to hold the data exported from your Premier software system.  You’ll need to fill in a few basic details and default settings before continuing.

Once the details are on, select the option to ‘import contacts’, select ‘import from Excel / CSV’, and then locate the mailmerge.csv (unless you’ve saved the file somewhere else, it should still be in c:\chase\temp\mailmerge.csv).

Clicking on the ‘import’ button will upload your data – all we need to do now is tell Mailchimp which fields are which by matching them up.

Once you’re done, click onto the ‘All Done’ button.  After a brief delay, MailChimp will email you to let you know that your list has successfully been imported.

Worth Checking…

Make sure your list is okay to send. Generally, clients from your system should be fine, but it’s worth checking against Mailchimps rules here.

What do I do with my list / I need further help

Mailchimp provide varying tools to let you contact your clients.  Most of it is fairly self explanatory, and they do offer online support on their website, and their ‘Getting Started‘ guide will most likely answer any questions.

Please don’t contact Premier Support for Mailchimp assistance, as the support team are unable to provide support for third party products.

Our ever-popular web booking system has been receiving some very positive praise from salons and spas who are currently enjoying it’s benefits – but as always, we’re always listening to your feedback.

After getting some requests for new features, we’ve set our web team hard to work and got them to include some brilliant new features – check them out below!

If you happened to be watching Channel 4′s rather enjoyable ‘The Hotel’ over the Christmas break, you’d have seen a situation occur that you might have come across before.

The hotel owner proudly boasted that the hotel bookings were all made manually in a well-worn book, using “lots of coloured pens and lots of tippex”.  Why was he so proud of his archaic system? Because, in his own words “we never have to say ‘sorry, we can’t book your room because the system is down’ or ‘please wait while we update our system’”.

The reason why he was defending the practice of a scribbled on paper pad?

Because he’d just overbooked one of the guest rooms for a wedding party, much to the anguish of the bride-to-be, and had no clue how to rectify the situation.

If the hotel had a computerised system, they wouldn’t have needed to worry about situations such as overbooked appointments, as their system would have alerted them to their mistake.

We’ve heard a lot of common concerns when computerising your business, and in most instances they’re generally unfounded.

The Main Myths – Busted!

Why struggle with tatty paper client cards and barely legible scrawled history notes?  Spa and Salon software is swiftly taking over as the best way of helping

While we’re obviously (and deservedly!) biased, here’s some tips on what to look for when selecting the software for your salon.