We’ve had a loyalty program in The Spa/Salon Manager for a few years now but I took some time at the end of the year this year to improve it, make it easier to set up, and easier to use. Given these changes I wanted to take a moment to explain how the Loyalty program works.
We’ve designed the Loyalty program with simplicity in mind. You’ll start by going to Maintenance -> Loyalty -> Loyalty Program Settings. On this screen you can choose some basic settings that will govern how your customers accumulate points. We provide separate lines for Service Dollars per Point, Retail Dollars per Point, and Gift Certificate Dollars per Point. If you set those boxes to $20, $10, and $50 respectively customers would receive one point for every $20 of service sales, $10 of retail sales, and $50 of gift certificate purchases. The system assigns points down to the penny so in our example every $0.20 of service sales would give 0.01 points. In addition to these three settings you can assign bonus amounts to each day of the week for the three numbers. Extending our earlier example we could click the Thu box on the Service Dollars per Point line and put in 10 for the percent bonus. Then instead of getting 1 point for every $20 spent the customer would get 1.1 points on Thursdays – a 10% bonus.
If you’d like you can also assign points for money spent on gift certificates using the Gift Certificate Dollars per Point. Keep in mind that the gift certificate recipient will also be receiving points when they redeem that gift certificate for services or retail items so you’ll definitely want to keep this amount small if you decide to use it. You can also award points for referrals with the Points Per Referral setting. If you give $5 per referral you would put $5.00 in that box.
Most salons can ignore the Location line (this only applies to stores that are running centralized gift certificates through us for multiple locations). The last part you need to set up is the method for assigning Loyalty ID’s. If you don’t use the Loyalty program yet we show No Loyalty Program here. Your other two options are to Assign Loyalty ID Manually at Check In or to Automatically Assign Loyalty ID at Check In. If you have loyalty cards that you’ll be giving to the customers (like our plastic gift cards we offer) then you’ll want to choose the Assign Loyalty ID Manually at Check In option. If you’d like to have the program manage the ID numbers for you then you’ll choose the Automatically Assign Loyalty ID at Check In option.
Once you finish on the Loyalty Settings screen the program will automatically add the Transaction Type and Pay In/Out category of Loyalty for you. If you’re out of space and don’t have Loyalty in the system yet the program will warn you and tell you to contact support for help in adding the category. It’s critical that you get the Loyalty option added – customers will use Loyalty as their payment method when using their accumulated points to pay for part or all of a sale.
Our Loyalty program is an ‘opt-in’ program. This means that until you assign an ID# on the Customer Display/Check In screen the customer does not accumulate points. Once you’ve assigned an ID# customers will start accumulating points and you’ll be able to see their current point balance at the bottom of the Check Out screen near the Continue button. It’s up to each salon to decide when you want to allow customers to use their accumulated points. The program will allow you to use them when you’re entering a payment on the Check Out screen but each salon could train their staff to put in policies such as requiring at least $10 worth of points used, only allowing Loyalty as a payment for retail purchases, or any other restrictions the salon wanted to place on these redemptions.
We’ve designed the Loyalty program with simplicity and flexibility in mind. We hope that these few simple options will allow a variety of discount programs for our salons. If you have any questions with how to make our Loyalty program work for you, don’t hesitate to contact our tech support department.