There is great value in communicating with your clients, whether it’s to notify them about changes in their bookings or to remind them about upcoming appointments. Thanks to Connect’s notification settings, we’ve made it easy to keep your clients up to date, prevent no-shows and encourage clients to rebook your services.
Sending appointment confirmations to clients when they book
Clients who book offline and whose appointments are manually entered in Connect are sent emails to confirm their booking with your salon. These emails are also sent automatically for all online bookings (made via the widget and marketplace).
Connect doesn’t just send notifications to confirm appointments however, but we also notify clients about any other important changes, like if their appointments have been rescheduled or cancelled. This helps boost brand awareness of your salon, and provides a seamless, engaging customer experience.
Preventing no-shows with appointment reminders
Reminding clients about their upcoming appointments a few hours before these are due to take place is one of the best ways to prevent no-shows, especially for clients who have booked in advance. And preventing no-shows, in essence, means less forgotten appointments and no more wasting your or your team members’ valuable time.
Our appointment reminders are all set to default times - which we’ve based on our data/insights and best practices, but you can adjust these yourselves on Connect if you like.
Our recommended timeframe to send these out is 8 hours before the client’s appointment, so they have time to see their inbox.
- SMS
We recommend sending these out 4 hours beforehand, as a gentle but often necessary reminder. We won’t however, send SMS to clients who book with less than 24 hours to go before their appointment, to avoid clogging their SMS inbox with unnecessary reminders. This also applies to appointments manually entered in Connect less than 24 hours before the scheduled booking.
To change which mobile number your SMS messages are sent from:
- Go to 'Settings' in Connect
- On the left, go to 'notifications'
- Under 'Prevent no-shows' you'll see a box where you can change the mobile number
Reminder: we don’t like to bother customers after hours, and that’s why SMS are only sent between 8am and 8pm, so we avoid bothering customers in the middle of the night.
- Push notifications
Push notifications get the highest engagement from users and it’s well-known that customers prefer them to SMS. That’s why we’ve made it so that clients who have the App and accept notifications will receive these instead of SMS reminders for all their online bookings.
Top tip: download the latest version of the Connect App now
Building your reputation with review requests
When potential clients search for a salon online, one of the defining aspects that shapes their decision are customer reviews. Reviews are a great way to build trust and ultimately increase the number of bookings you get.
Connect gives you the tools to send emails to offline customers asking for reviews after their appointment takes place. These help foster your online image, whilst telling potential new customers about their great experience.
Encouraging customers to rebook again
We like to encourage clients to rebook (if enabled) with gentle reminders which are based on their previous bookings and are sent a certain amount of time after a specific treatment with you. We can send both emails and SMS about this.