An age-old headache across the salon industry has been no-show appointments, which often take a chunk out of your ROI and cost the industry billions of dollars per year. Especially for smaller businesses in the beauty industry, fewer missed appointments translates to better use of time, not to mention increased profitability. And in a vocation in which a stylist may have to pay for a space or a chair just to access clients, missed appointments can make the difference between paying rent, making a profit, or being driven out of the industry altogether.

How to Reduce Salon Appointment No-Shows

The modern world is a busy place, and during the current holiday season – when so many people are scrambling to squeeze in shopping and travel, as well as find time to get themselves done up for parties and get-togethers – there are perhaps more appointments being made and more that are getting missed than at any other time of year. It may feel like an entrenched problem that just comes with the territory, but there are certain steps salon professionals can take to help alleviate the issue and maximize their income.

Get Customers to Check Their Calendars

Sounds both absurdly simple and utterly impossible, right? Why not just ask a client to fly their Prius to the moon while they’re at it? According to Pew Research, nearly every American adult (97 percent) uses a cell phone – that’s more than 330 million people. Assuming most of those are cell phones, this means they automatically have access to convenient digital calendars. . Clearly, if simply asking salon customers to consult their calendars was a viable tactic, the problem of missed appointments would already be solved.

But there’s another way to view this approach: Rather than asking clients to check their calendars, get their calendars to check in with them. Analog tactics such as verbal reminders or a physical card may go in one ear and out the other or between the car seat and console. These reminders require workforce and financial investment that eat into profits, and because they are shots in the dark that work no better now than they ever have, they are bad investments.

Instead, salon professionals would do well to lean into the hand-held “calendars” that are almost always within reach and are consulted dozens of times a day by their clients. Especially for smaller salons and independent contractors that may be using out-of-date technology or for whom other tactics aren’t viable, calendar and email reminders can pay big dividends in terms of reducing missed appointments.

Considerations for New Reminder Technologies

There is no cure-all for missed appointments, whether in the salon industry or anywhere else. But some tools are more effective than others, and what works for one business may not for another. Here are a few key pillars to keep in mind when evaluating new reminder technologies and considering the best tactics for your salon business:

• Keep it simple. Customers don’t need much from a reminder. A date and a time. Possibly a name and an address. Any other clutter could risk shrouding the key objective: getting your client to show up. 

• Strike a balance. Too few contacts and your reminders don’t get the job done. Too many means potentially irritating and driving away clients. A mix of calendar alerts and emails is often most effective and offers the flexibility of additional marketing opportunities (which are less intrusive and more at home in an email). In any case, always track the effectiveness of your digital reminder campaigns and adjust as needed.

• Remember ROI. Whatever specific tool (or tools) that you use, be sure to weigh their cost against those of other tactics – as well as the cost of lost business from missed appointments if you were to use nothing at all.

For some independent contractors, a manual email or text may have some success in mitigating missed appointments – but most of us don’t have the time or wherewithal to make that approach worthwhile. But there are affordable and easy-to-use calendar and email tools that can optimize and automate your reminder campaigns and deliver maximum ROI with minimal hassle. You’re a professional. You’re good at what you do. But tech solutions aren't your vocation – and you’re just as busy as your clients. Research and identify the tools that are most suitable for reliably getting your customers into your chair on time and the ROI will follow.