Salon Online Booking: Stop Losing Clients When You Are Busy

Part 2 of Spring Sorted: the 8-week series on getting your salon Christmas ready.

Salon online booking exists for one reason: the busiest hour of your week is also the hour you are least able to answer the phone.

Picture the middle of a Saturday. You are elbow deep in a colour, the basin is running, somebody is waiting at the desk, and the phone starts. You glance at it. You cannot get there. It rings out.

Most owners file that under normal, because it is. What it is not is free.

The quiet leak in every busy salon

Here is the thing about the client who could not reach you. They were not testing your loyalty. They had a gap in their week and a thing they wanted done, and when your phone rang out they did the ordinary human thing and tried the next salon. Some of them ring back. Plenty do not, because by then the problem is solved.

You never find out about those ones. There is no missed booking report, no little note on the calendar saying a client came to the door and left. The leak is invisible, which is exactly why it survives year after year.

It is worth being clear that this is not a staffing problem and it is not a sign you are doing anything wrong. A salon that is flat out is a salon that is working. The phone is simply the wrong tool for the job, because it demands that two people be free at the same moment, and during your best hours one of you never is.

And it gets worse precisely when it hurts most. The busier you are, the more calls ring out, and the busier you are is the run to Christmas.

The maths

Put a number on it, gently. This is illustrative, not a promise, but it is the shape of the thing.

1 client a day books elsewhere  .....  $85
x 5 salon days  .....  $425 a week
x 13 weeks to Christmas  .....  $5,525

So: if just one client a day books elsewhere at $85, that is $425 a week walking out the door, and $5,525 over the 13 weeks to Christmas. One client. Not five.

Use your own average visit value if you know it and the number moves, but the conclusion does not. The quietest loss in a salon is the booking that was never made, and it is the easiest one to fix.

How salon online booking works in Simple Salon

Online booking is a page of your own that clients can book from at any hour, reading straight from your calendar. It knows your services, your prices, how long each treatment takes and which operators do what, because it is the same system you run the salon on rather than a separate diary bolted on the side.

Which means it does not guess. It only offers times that genuinely exist, and the moment somebody books, the appointment is in your calendar. Nobody has to transcribe anything.

It is also working at the hours you are not. A good share of salon bookings are made in the evening, on the couch, after the kids are down, which is a time when nobody was ever going to ring you. The client who decides at 9:40pm that they need a cut before the work party can simply have it.

There is a second thing it quietly fixes. Every phone booking is a small act of transcription: you hold a name, a service and a time in your head while you finish what you are doing, then write it down. Most of the time that works. Occasionally it does not, and the client arrives for a cut you have written in as a blow dry. Bookings that clients make themselves do not have that failure mode, because nobody is remembering anything.

It is built into Simple Salon and ready to switch on. The full overview lives here: Online Booking Overview.

Put your booking link everywhere clients already look

Switching online booking on is half the job. The other half is making the link impossible to miss, because a booking page nobody can find books nobody. Four places to start, and none of them take more than a few minutes.

• Your Instagram bio. This is where people land after they have seen your work and decided they want it. Make the next tap a booking rather than a direct message you will answer at 10pm.
• Your Google Business Profile. When somebody searches your salon name, or hairdresser near me, this is the panel they see. Google lets you add booking links to it directly, and their help centre walks through adding one.
• Your voicemail greeting. Twelve words at the end: if you cannot reach us, you can book online any time at, and then your address. This one catches the exact client this post is about.
• Your email signature. Free, permanent, and working on every email you send.

Do one a day this week and by Friday your booking link is everywhere a client already looks for you.

Questions salon owners ask about online booking

Do clients actually use salon online booking?

The honest answer is that it depends on how easy you make it to find. Salons that put the link in the bio, on Google and on the voicemail see it used steadily. Salons that switch it on and never mention it see very little. The feature is not the thing that works. The feature plus the link in four places is the thing that works.

Will online booking double-book my team?

No. It reads your roster and your existing appointments, so it can only offer time that is genuinely free. That is also why getting your roster right is the step before this one.

How do I add my booking link to Instagram and Google?

On Instagram, edit your profile and paste the link into the website field. On Google, open your Business Profile and add it as a booking link. Both take about a minute, and both work for you every day afterwards.

What does online booking cost with Simple Salon?

It is included, not an add-on. Simple Salon is priced in AUD per Bookable Operator and capped at 7 operators, so a larger team never pays more than the cap. Starter is $25, Pro is $45 and includes 200 SMS per operator each month, and Max is $55 with 300. No hidden fees. Full pricing is here.

The Spring Sorted series

Eight weeks, one simple step at a time, until your salon walks into December completely handled.

• Part 1: How to Set Up Your Salon Roster for the Christmas Rush
• Part 2: Salon Online Booking: Stop Losing Clients When You Are Busy (you are here)

A new part lands every Monday until 9 November.

Close the leak this week

Already with Simple Salon? Switch it on today. Turn on online booking, then put the link in your Instagram bio, your Google Business Profile, your voicemail and your email signature. Start with the Online Booking Overview.

Not with us yet? Online booking comes with every plan, reading from the same calendar your salon already runs on. Start your free trial and have your booking page live this week. See what it costs, or browse what else is built in.