The Booked Solid Checklist: Set Up Your Salon for a Fully Booked Spring

Part 6 of Booked Solid: the 6-week series on filling your salon’s calendar automatically.

Your busiest season is about to book out. The only question is whose calendar it lands in.

A fully booked salon is almost never the one with the best luck or the biggest following. It is the one that is easiest to book. Easy at 9pm, easy from a phone, easy without a phone call, and easy to be reminded about.

Over the last six weeks this series has covered that whole system, one piece at a time. This is the checklist that makes sure every piece is actually switched on, with a link to the full walkthrough for each one.

Read it with your account open. Most of these take minutes.

The fully booked salon checklist

Five things. Work down the list and tick off what is already done.

1. Your booking page is live. Operators displayed online, the services clients can book, prices set, a photo on every operator, and a roster in place so the page knows when you are open. That is the whole setup, and it is the piece everything else hangs off. Part 2 walks through all five steps.
2. Your booking link is everywhere a client might look. In your Instagram bio, on your Facebook and Instagram Book buttons, and, once you are taking payments online, as a Book Online button on your Google listing so somebody searching at 10pm can book without leaving the search results. Part 3 has the exact order to set these up, which matters more than it sounds.
3. SMS reminders are on, with confirm by reply. The single highest-return switch in the account. Most people who miss an appointment are not being rude, they are busy and they forgot, so a friendly nudge the day before fixes most of it. Set it once and it runs forever. Part 4 does the maths on what missed appointments actually cost.
4. Your client list is segmented, and one campaign has gone out. Clients who have not been in for a couple of months, birthdays this month, and your regulars. Send one message to one of those groups and watch what comes back. Or set it to run on its own with Smart Send Plus. Part 5 has five templates you can copy word for word.
5. The rebooking habit. No software required, and no software can do it for you. The next visit gets booked at the basin, while the client is happy and still in the gown, every client, every time. A salon that rebooks 70% of the chair does not need to fill nearly as much of next month from scratch.

If you only do one thing today, do number three. Reminders protect the bookings you already have, they take about two minutes to switch on, and they keep working every day after that without you thinking about it again.

Each one takes minutes. Together they are a booked-solid season

None of these is a project. The booking page is an afternoon at the very outside, and only if you are fussy about your service list. The rest are switches.

What makes them worth doing together is that they cover different leaks. The booking page catches the client who decides at 11pm. The links catch the one who found you on Instagram and would otherwise have sent a message and waited. Reminders keep the appointment that was already made. Campaigns bring back the client who drifted. Rebooking means fewer gaps to fill at all. Part 1 named those leaks; this list closes them.

Do one and you will notice a difference. Do all five and the calendar starts behaving differently, because there is no longer a gap in the chain where a booking can quietly fall out.

Why the seasonal run-up matters

Wherever you are, there is a stretch of the year when the phone changes character. In Australia and New Zealand it is spring: September into the races, weddings, formals and the long run at summer. In the northern hemisphere the same thing happens in the weeks before the December holidays and again in the spring wedding season.

The pattern is the same either way. Demand does not arrive evenly. It arrives in a rush, from people who have decided today and want a time this week.

That rush goes to whoever is easiest to book at the moment the client decides. Not the best salon in town. The most bookable one. Which is why the work is worth doing now, in the quiet weeks, rather than in the middle of the run when nobody has time to set anything up.

The whole system lives in one login

Everything on this checklist is in the same account. Your calendar, your booking page, your reminders, your client list and your campaigns are not five products stitched together, which is why the client who books online at midnight is already in the system that texts them on Thursday.

Pricing is per Bookable Operator, capped at 7, with no hidden fees. Add the eighth, ninth and tenth operator and the price stops moving.

Frequently asked questions

How do salons stay fully booked?

By being easy to book and hard to forget. In practice that means bookings taken around the clock rather than only when somebody can answer the phone, a booking link everywhere a client already is, an automatic reminder before every appointment, a client list you actually message, and the next visit booked before the current one ends. Consistency does more here than any single tactic.

How long does it take to automate salon bookings?

The booking page is the only part that takes real time, and that is an afternoon at most: choosing which services clients can book, setting prices, adding operator photos and putting in the roster. Reminders and automatic messages are switches rather than setup. Most owners do the lot across two sittings.

What should a salon do before spring and summer?

Get the booking page and the links right first, because they are what capture a sudden rush of demand. Then turn reminders on so the extra bookings actually turn up. Then message your lapsed clients, since the run-up to a season is the easiest time of year to get somebody back in the chair. Doing it in that order matters: there is no point driving people to a booking page that is not finished.

Do I need to do all five to see a difference?

No. Each one stands on its own and any of them will help. They compound, though, because they cover different points where a booking gets lost. If you are picking one to start with, start with reminders, then the booking page.

The Booked Solid series

Six weeks on filling your salon’s calendar automatically.

• Part 1: 5 Money Leaks Quietly Costing Your Salon Bookings
• Part 2: How to Set Up Online Booking for Your Salon in 5 Steps
• Part 3: How to Add a Book Now Button to Instagram
• Part 4: The Real Cost of Salon No-Shows (and the One-Text Fix)
• Part 5: 5 Salon SMS Templates That Fill Quiet Days
• Part 6: The Booked Solid Checklist (you are here)

Not with us yet? Everything on this checklist is what you would be switching on, in one account: a booking page that takes bookings while you sleep, reminders that go out on their own, and a client list already sorted into the groups worth messaging. Start a free trial and set up the first item on the list today.

Already with Simple Salon? Then finish your setup. Open the checklist above, find the first thing you have not switched on, and do that one. If it is reminders or campaigns, they are waiting in your Marketing tab and your messaging settings right now.

That is the series. Thank you for reading it. Now go and fill next month.