Beauty Salon Marketing

As more and more of our Salon Marketing Toolkit customers are asking us to re-design their salon website, we are increasingly being asked about online appointment booking systems for beauty salon websites, beauty clinic websites, and hair salon websites. These are systems that allow new or existing customers to book an appointment directly from your salon or spa website, without needing to phone you.

We’re investigating several options before making a recommendation. One of the main issues is that many salon owners already have a salon software system that manages appointments. We haven’t yet found an online appointment booking system that integrates well with existing salon software systems.

In our ongoing search, today we came across a new online appointment booking system that is probably the most fully-featured we have seen so far - HourTown Online Scheduling Software (found via Local Marketing Expert Greg Sterling’s blog)

HourTown is a subscription-based service, based in the USA, starting at $19.95 per month. They also offer a free service, but it would only be useful for an initial test as you can only take 2 bookings a month with the free option. It is not clear whether it is only available to US businesses, or whether all the options would work outside the US (eg. integration with Google and Yahoo! advertising, or the SMS text messaging features).

From their home page -

FIND NEW CUSTOMERS ONLINE
HourTown combines Internet advertising with online scheduling to help your business fill your open appointments - with minimal effort. Every business has open time slots in their appointment book but how do your customers know about them? HourTown Advertising Blasts^TM put your open time slots on the web and attracts new customers to schedule with your business.

ONLINE SCHEDULING SOFTWARE
Have you ever missed a customer opportunity because you were away from the phone? A national research study indicates there’s a good chance you have. HourTown makes it easy for your business to accept online appointments from new and existing customers. Simply describe your services and tell us how much they cost. We’ll use your info to build a customized online scheduling system for your business - instantly.

IT CAN WORK FOR YOUR BUSINESS
There are approximately 15 million personal businesses that provide services in the United States. HourTown is used by massage therapists, music teachers, fitness trainers, accountants, golf instructors, contractors and realtors.

Some of the features that make it stand out from the other online appointment booking services include -

• Multiple Provider Scheduling - separate schedules for multiple therapists or stylists in your salon, or for different treatment rooms or salon equipment
• Advertise Your Service Locally - creates online adverts with services like Google and Yahoo
• Collect Reviews from Satisfied Customers - you can’t beat the power of a good testimonial, as we cover in-depth in the Salon Marketing Toolkit

HourTown’s system also seems to have been designed with flexibility in mind. As they say on their blog, there are two ways of using the online appointment scheduling system -

When you setup an HourTown account you have a couple choices in terms of how your business accepts online appointments, “request” mode or “guaranteed” mode. What’s the difference? When your account is in “request” mode, your customers request appointment times with your business and you are given the option of approving the requests, or suggesting an alternative time to the customer, if that’s the case.

Imagine you are planning to leave the office a bit early on a Friday afternoon to start your weekend, but a lone customer has scheduled your last time slot of the day. Greeaatttt… You can avoid scenarios like this with HourTown online appointment software in “request” mode. We keep you in control of your schedule by making it a snap for you to suggest an alternative time to the customer in a friendly and professional way. This is the favorite option for HourTown merchants.

With “guaranteed” appointments, when your customer makes an appointment, it’s instantly confirmed and you are agreeing to honor the customer’s request for a specific time slot. This scenario is best for your customers. They see a time they want, they book it, they’re done.

If you are in the US and looking for an online appointment booking system for your salon website or spa website, it looks like it would be worth taking up their free trial offer to test it out. For those outside the US, we will try to find out if the system is available, and fully featured, for the rest of the world!