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!

Pay By Paypal

Paypal is a well-know, secure way of making payments over the Internet, without the trouble of having to store credit card information yourself.

To enable your clients to easily pay for their appointment in advance, we’ve added an option to pay via Paypal as the appointment is booked.

Maximum Outstanding Amount

For added security, we’ve included a ‘ceiling limit’ for the value of appointments booked by an individual client.  Once the client has reached their limit of unpaid bookings, web booking will no longer allow them to add any further appointments.

First bookable day

Allow people to book appointments for today.. or can they only book appointments from tomorrow, or the day after.. up to 2 weeks

Available staff

In some instances, you may wish to only make specific staff available for booking via the website.  You can now configure this directly in the software, giving you complete control over which members of staff appear to your client.

Search +/-

You can now set the number of minutes that web booking will search for if the exact time your customer wanted isn’t available.

If you haven’t got your web booking set up yet, and you hold a current support contract with us, please feel free to get in touch – our webteam will be happy to help you get up and running!

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!

The computer will crash and we’ll lose all of our information!

How easy would it be to take a copy of a thick, heavy paper appointment book? Or worse still, the reams and reams of client files that you have stored away?

There’s a number of simple, quick ways of making a copy of your data these days, whether that be backing up over the internet or onto one of the inexpensive portable USB drives available almost everywhere these days.  It’s a great relief for most people to know that, should the worst happen and the  computer be stolen or damaged, all the information can be brought back almost instantly – unlike a hefty, manually written appointment book.

We’ll make mistakes on a computerised system

I’ve seen manual systems before, where receipts are stapled to client cards to prove purchases, and numbers of courses are scribbled on in pencil or changed under layer after layer of tippex.

No matter how good your staff are at keeping records, it’s easy to be sidetracked from updating information correctly by a ringing phone or a client who needs attention, and this inevitably leads to mistakes which are then hard to find.

Most computerised systems verify information as you enter it (Can I book appointment a with staff member b in room c?  Is the equipment needed available at that time? Does the client have a course of this treatment?), and even in the instance of a mistake being made it’s much easier to spot within a dedicated software package.

Our manual system is quicker / easier to use

Computers are everywhere these days, from the usual desktop machines to laptops, netbooks, tablets (like the iPad) and even mobile phones, and because of this nearly everybody is at least comfortable using a mouse and a keyboard.

Now, when making a booking, you don’t have to worry about availability of staff, rooms or equipment. You don’t have to manually count up receipts at the end of the day to see what’s gone through the till, or pore over sheets and sheets of a book to try and add up how many hours your staff have worked.  Stock is automatically deducted, ordered and tracked in the system.

In short,  rather than trying to consolidate shreds of paper and ten different styles of handwriting,  you can get on with running your business.

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.

Cost is always a fundamental when selecting a system, especially in times like these where money needs to be stretched a long way.

Checklist:

• Is the software yours at purchase, or are you tied into a hire purchase or other scheme?
• Do you need to purchase any ‘bolt-on’ items to allow you to have the full power of the software?
• How established is the company you’re purchasing from?  Experience is usually worth the price.

What features does the software have?  Every system should be able to store client record cards and allow you to book appointments, but does your software contain the features you really need?

Checklist:

•  Are you able to easily produce text messages and emails to your clients?
• Can your clients book appointments over the internet?

The whole idea of purchasing software to run your salon or spa is to take away the stress of admin, and to let you get on with providing the best possible service to your clients.  Computers, and software, can occasionally go wrong, or you may just need some help, so you’ll want comprehensive help without having to spend too much time dealing with support.

Checklist:

• What’s the cost of support, and what does it include? As an example, our software support includes free updates to your system, so any new features or software patches are automatically made available to you.
• Is there any cost to contacting support (e.g. a premium rate number)?  Our support line is free to call from a landline, so there’s no extra hidden charges to get in touch.
• Can the support team connect into your system to aid in assisting you?
• What availability does the support team have?  If you’ve purchased a system that isn’t UK based, can you contact them during your working hours?

One of the reasons why twitter, facebook and all the other social media networks have taken off is because it’s a natural human response to want to share the interesting or funny things we come across everyday, and these websites let us update everybody almost instantaneously.

The question is, how can we share something that’s interesting enough for others to be interested in what we can provide?

In Sao Paolo, a vintage fashion store made themselves stand out by taking live photos of their collections using an iPhone and the Instagram app, displaying then in real time  to show off an instant, virtual catalogue (click for the full article).

It’s an interesting concept – normally these kind of high-fashion events are the realms of high-spec, SLR cameras, taking glossy images of models that can then be sent out on paper catalogues or printed flyers.  Which is fine – but this way creates something unusual, which can then be shared instantly, and distributed without any real cost.

Why not try grabbing your iPhone, download instragram and try it?  We’d love to see whatever images you make to help promote your business.

Here are a few that we found:

image by thatgirl71

image by my_p_p

image by my_p_p

In these times of increasing competition, it’s always worth testing new and interesting ways to provide an incentive for your client to return back to your spa or salon.  If you fancy taking advantage of peoples natural tendencies to turn things into games as part of your retention strategy, then geolocation services might just be the answer.

If you’ve ever seen Facebooks ‘places’, or used the foursquare app on your phone, then you’ve probably already used geolocation.  Essentially, when your client is at your spa or salon, they can ‘check-in’ to their location, which (at least in foursquare) gives them points.

So How Can that Help Me?

With foursquare, there’s a naturally competitive element built in (sometimes called ‘gamification‘).  Each time you check in, you score points, which you can then check against your friends.

Whenever somebody checks into your spa or salon, they’ll gain points against their friends – but, more importantly, it’ll usually appear on their Facebook wall or their twitter feed.  Why is this useful? In these instances, it means that your clients friends know about your business, and it also acts as a kind of automatic recommendation: my friend is at The Beauty Spa?  Well, if they go there, it must be good!

King of the Hill

With foursquare, there’s a couple of other interesting elements as well.

If the client checks in a number of times, they can become the foursquare Mayor of the business.  In realistic terms, it’s just another way to keep people playing the game – you want to keep hold of your position against your friends – but if you claim your foursquare venue page, you can set up special deals to reward people who consistently return.

If you have a number of sites, you might want to go a step further and create a foursquare business page, which allows you to control a number of venues - check out Mashables guide here.

Thanks to Guy Christian for the original idea for this blog post.

According to Professional Beauty, online health and beauty sales have ‘experienced a year-on-year increase of 53%’ over the last year, which just shows how important the online world is.

For the second day of Christmas, we’ve given you a few tips on how to improve the online profile of your spa or salon.

Get Involved

Social media is almost impossible to ignore these days, and sometimes – especially when you’re trying to run your business – it can seem like yet another thing that’s trying to get your attention.

To try and save your sanity, we posted this quick guide to getting your business up and running (and seeing results) on the most popular social networks within a week.

Get Online

These days, people are working longer and longer hours, and suffering more and more distractions as part of their hectic lifestyles.

The good news is that these people need your relaxing, pampering services more than ever.  The bad news? If they’re working all day, when do they have time to call up and make an appointment?

Premier Softwares web booking service means that your reception can effectively be open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  Your clients can quickly login, book an appointment and even pay for their treatment, all without having to call.

Why not try it out for yourself? Just log in with:

Username: demo@pswb.co.uk

Password : demo

Get More Bookings

Yapps.com is a free online booking service, which lets people discover your business, book an appointment and rate their experience, all from a single site.

Registering for the site is easy – click here, fill in the fields, and you’ve created another way for clients to find you.

Years ago, in the days of our youth (stop laughing at the back), there was an advert where Bob Hoskins infamously used to say “it’s good to talk”. It’s still good to talk, but now nearly everybody has a mobile phone, sometimes it’s just as good to text.

It’s hard to ignore the familiar buzz / beep of an incoming message, so here are our quick tips for getting the most out of SMS within your Premier Software.

Set up Automated Text Messages

If you’re using our Premier Spa or Premier Style software, you can set up your system to automatically send appointment reminders to your clients by text.

This simple step will dramatically reduce the number of ‘no shows’, so that clients won’t miss their appointments, and you won’t miss the opportunity to provide your services.

Communication in an Instant

Want to quickly and effectively promote a new stock range, or a particular treatment? Using the marketing button in the Manager part of your software, you can easily send out messages to targeted groups of clients.

This means you can specifically select people who you know would be interested in your offer, providing a good service to your clients while keeping your marketing costs down at the same time.

Keep it Personal

Your software not only lets you do batch messages easily and simply – it also lets you send single, personalised messages to a client to quickly let them know anything you wish.  Want to send a quick thank you, or a reminder that they’ve left something?  You can, direct from the client card.

Don’t have an SMS account set up with us yet? Get in touch, and you can be adding value to your business within 24 hours.

It’s coming up to Christmas, and it’s fairly likely a few lucky people will be on the receiving end of a shiny new iPhone or iPad.  Want to know what apps you should get?  We asked some of the Premier team what their ‘must have’ apps were (and also got a sneaky view of the new iPad / iPhone booking web app).

Robert Miles, Managing Director

Robert has been a long time fanatic of Apples gadgets, and is often seen around the office clutching his iPad.

“Flipboard, a ‘social magazine’, automatically aggregates lots of information, so I can see what’s going on all in one place. The new voice activated organiser, Siri, makes life so much simpler. New ideas and innovation are always important, so it’s great to catch up on TED lectures via the TED app, and Twitter is a brilliant way of keeping up with whats happening as it happens.

And of course, Angry Birds, for those few snatched moments of peace!”

Simon Park, Senior Trainer and Installer

Simon is one of our ever-busy training and installation team, and lots of travel means his iPhone can be a lifeline

“Documents 2 is a great way of editing spreadsheets on the move – very useful for tracking company car use! We get a lot of installations around the London area, so TubeMap is a must for helping navigate around the city. As a bit of a petrolhead, I love F1, so the official F1.com app helps me keep up with live timings during the F1 season, and Eurosport to keep up with sports news. Finally, Facebook and Twitter help me keep in touch with everyone back at the office”.

Conner Evans, Support Analyst

Conner is one of our newer members of the team, and can be found flying pretend aircraft on his iPad during his lunchbreak

“MyPad is an important social tool for me, as it integrates Facebook and twitter into one flowing stream, and it’s better presented than the official Facebook app. I have an addiction to second-hand shopping, so eBay is a must.

I love to read, and iBooks is a really good way of carrying around an extensive library all on a single device.

Stephen Wileman, Head of Development

Stephen has been involved in the development of Premier products for well over a decade, and in his spare time is an avid retro gamer.

“iRepton and Angry Birds are current favourites for gaming.  As far as apps, I tend to stick to the inbuilt default ones – not many people seem to remember that the iPhone is actually a phone, and can send text messages and emails!”

Ashley Cresswell, Head of Support

Ashley heads up our busy Support department, and likes to have a mixture of fun and business apps on his iPhone.

“Autodance is brilliant for creating hilarious (and often embarrasing) videos of friends and family dancing away.  Worms, a classic turn-based game with lots of explosions is always good to relieve some stress.

“Media5 VOIP is a good, free voice over IP app which means I can move around the office but still be contactable on my desk extension, so I’m never out of touch with my team.  I’m often running late when I should be leaving the office, so the Sky+ app means I can always record the TV shows I might have missed, and Shazam – a music discovery app, that ‘listens’ to a track and then tells me who sang it is great for finding new music.”

Did you know you can also use your iPad to control your Premier software, via our web booking system?  Just imagine, sitting at home, full of Christmas Turkey – and happily checking out all the New Year bookings your business is making without even moving.

You can check out some of the screenshots below or, if you really want to test out your new techie skills,  try scanning the QR code with your iPad (you’ll need an app!) for a live demo – just enter the password as ‘test’ without the quotes, and leave the username blank.

If you want more info on web booking or our web-app, then please get in touch with us.

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