CRM, or Customer Relationship Management is the top software market globally, with $40 billion in revenue and 16% yearly growth. But chances are, if you’re the owner of a local barbershop or hair salon, you never even heard the term “CRM” until the past few years. Although 9 out of 10 companies with more than 11 employees use CRM software, only 1 out of 3 small businesses do.
However, as the digital revolution has hit Main Street, a small number of software companies have developed CRMs aimed at the unique needs of busy small business owners like you. The right CRM can level the playing field against the big corporate hair salons and barbershop chains by allowing local owners to know, market to, and retain their customers— thus increasing revenue.
Womply has built the first true CRM specifically for busy small business owners like you. Learn more, plus get free reputation monitoring and customer insights when you sign up for Womply Free!
Before we talk about the key features that make a CRM vital for any small, local business like yours (including hair salons, stylists, barbers, spas, and anything in between), let’s talk about the main customer relationship issues small businesses face— issues that any CRM intended for small business must solve.
- Local hair salons and barbershops don’t know who their customers are, other than a handful of “regulars”
- Local hair salons and barbershops have difficulty collecting customer contact information and attaching transaction and communications history to customer records
- Local hair salons and barbershops struggle with segmenting customers into appropriate categories to enable effective marketing campaigns.
On top of all this, owners of local barbershops and hair salons are among the world’s busiest people, and don’t have time to manage a complicated CRM platform. Although there are now several CRMs claiming to be built for small businesses, many are actually designed for “small- to medium-sized businesses”— medium-sized businesses have over 100 and up to 999 employees— which really makes them irrelevant to truly local shops like yours. So what are the key features that make a CRM right for you?
The best CRM for barbershops and hair salons must fit a small-business budget
If you’re a local stylist or barber living on slim, 2-3% profit margins, you obviously can’t afford to pay thousands of dollars a month for a CRM platform built for gigantic corporations. The best CRM for your small business will be affordable and provide immediate benefits.
“Enterprise-level” CRM platforms were built for huge businesses with tons of working capital and endless marketing budgets, and many of them have complicated pricing structures. Any good small business CRM must be built from its foundation with a fundamental understanding of your small business’s unique needs and budget constraints, rather than as an “me-too,” watered down version of a large enterprise CRM.
The best CRM for hair salons and barbershops must be simple to use
Enterprise-level CRMs like Salesforce and Oracle usually require one or more full-time staff members whose sole job is managing the software and interpreting data for the company’s marketing and customer experience management teams. Does that sound like something a local hair salon owner has the time or resources to do? Um, no.
What’s more, even many CRMs “built for small business” require you to spend hours and hours every week gathering email information, manually inputting customer addresses and other relevant data, and managing loyalty marketing campaigns. Busy barbershop and hair salon owners need solutions that simplify their lives, not something that makes their time deficit even worse.
The best small business CRM software for local barbershops and hair salons should automate most key tasks to keep user inputs to an absolute minimum, thus saving you as much time as possible. It stands to reason that any software “solution” that requires huge amounts of time and effort will simply not get used.
(Hint: Womply’s CRM software has been shown to save the average business owner 10 hours every week. Imagine what you could do with an extra 10 hours per week!)
The right CRM for your hair salon or barbershop will automate nearly every task.
The best CRM for local barbershops and hair salons will be “pre-populated” with useful data
The main problem local businesses face when managing the customer relationship is simply that they don’t know enough about their customers. Big companies use multimillion-dollar systems and sales processes that allow them to collect and collate customer names, contact information, credit card info, email addresses, and more, but local salons and barbershops may only know a few “regulars” and have no real way to collect, organize, and update customer data. This is what Womply calls the “zero data problem.” Womply has solved the zero data problem by building the first and only pre-populated CRM in the world.
When a customer conducts a transaction with your hair salon or barbershop, Womply CRM automatically creates or updates their customer profile, drawing on a proprietary database of 200 million consumers and more than $1 trillion in transaction data. The benefits to your business are twofold: First, you get a comprehensive customer list that gets even better the longer you use it, and second, Womply enables you to easily encourage repeat visits from those customers through automated email marketing—even if you don’t have your customers’ email addresses. (Remember, email marketing is hands-down the most powerful, effective, and efficient marketing tool for small businesses.)
See if Womply CRM is right for your hair salon or barbershop
In creating Womply CRM, we went down a very different path from traditional CRMs. To best serve small businesses, we boiled CRM down to its most essential components: automatically creating customer profiles, appending critical customer transaction and revenue history, and enabling automated loyalty marketing campaigns. Anything that didn’t solve one of those problems — and couldn’t do so nearly automatically — didn’t make the cut.
Womply CRM’s AI-powered software leverages multiple data sources to:
- Automatically create and update customer records
- Append contact information, transaction data, communications records, and more
- Use customer information to segment customers and send timely, targeted marketing messages
Bottom line? Womply businesses get 22% more repeat visitors, 20% more revenue, and as noted above, save 10 hours per week. If you can track every customer interaction and keep in touch with them after they leave your salon or shop, that’s the essence of CRM—and a true game-changer for some of the busiest entrepreneurs in the world.
We’re excited to bring CRM to Main Street. Learn more at Womply.com/CRM, plus get free reputation monitoring and customer insights when you sign up for Womply Free!
Read more about the launch of Womply CRM in this article from our founder, Toby Scammell.