Premier Software

According to Greek philosopher Socrates, “the unexamined life is not worth living”.  Now, we’re fairly sure that the Premier Software Support desk hasn’t been around quite that long, but we can see the mans point – without feedback, we never really know how good (or bad) a job we’re doing.

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.

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 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.