Kitomba blog

We know how important your clients are to the success of your salon, spa or clinic. You focus on providing them with the best service. You focus on remembering the details like their favourite hot drink and that they’re excited for their holiday next week. But there’s another way you can focus on your clients which will grow your business – by looking at the numbers.

Read on to discover the client metrics that can make a massive difference to the growth of your salon, spa, or clinic, and how to improve them.

Client rebooking rate 

When we talk about the client rebooking rate, it’s classified as a future appointment made by a client within 24 hours of the previous appointment. 

You should be aiming for a rebooking rate of 75% and above, however, New Zealand’s average rebooking rate is 52% and Australia’s is just 47%.

Focusing on rebooking is crucial for your salon as it’s a strong indicator of business performance and the easiest way to secure future revenue. It also shows you’re providing a great client experience if your clients are remaining loyal and rebooking so quickly after their appointments.

It’s also beneficial for all stakeholders of your business:

• For your team, it ensures a pre-booked appointment book, job security and motivation from constantly being in demand! It also allows them to build strong relationships with their regular clients. 
• For your business, you’re securing future income so you can make important decisions with confidence. You’ll also see an increase in visit frequency and a reduction in time, energy and money spent finding new clients, resultingin boosted profits.
• For your clients, regular visits mean you’ll develop better relationships, they’ll get appointment times that suit them and overall their hair and beauty maintenance will be improved.

Expert tip for increasing client rebooking rate: 

Get your team onboard and work towards a common goal! Set targets for either your staff individually or for the salon as a whole. Think about incentivising specific targets by offering a team lunch for morning tea. 

Use your salon and spa software targets feature to set goals for your staff to work towards: How to set targets for your salon, spa or clinic.

Client retention rate

Client retention rate, like rebooking, is also measured in time. If your client doesn’t make a future booking within 24 hours of their last appointment but they do book again, they are considered retained.

The key to client retention is to create loyalty by providing high-quality service and a fantastic client experience. Loyal, long-term clients are important for three reasons:

1. They’re your easiest, most predictable source of revenue: They’ve already purchased from you, they already know you and many are likely to continue doing so.
2. They’ll spend more with you because existing customers are less price-focused so you won’t need to offer discounts like you would to attract new customers. When they trust you, it’s much easier to upsell retail and add-on services to further increase your profits.
3. Your current clients are your best form of marketing: Word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20-50% of all purchasing decisions, and referral leads convert around 30% better than leads from other marketing channels.

Expert tip  to increase your client retention rate: <h3>

In addition to providing a high-quality experience with every visit, create a loyalty, or referral programme to reward your clients for their loyalty. This is also a nice opportunity to reinforce why they keep coming back.

See more about Kitomba Loyalty: Getting started with Kitomba’s Loyalty programme.  

Average client spend

Your average client spend is the total amount spent by clients on services and retail, divided by your total number of clients buying services and retail. This figure is automatically tracked and worked out in the Kitomba Business Summary report. 

This number is a key indicator of the profitability of your client base. It shows that you don’t necessarily need more clients to make more money – increasing your average client spend will add to your bottom line without the cost associated with attracting new clients.

Expert tip to increase average client spend: 

Look at the numbers. Are your prices in line with what your competitors or the industry are charging? Kitomba’s unique Benchmark feature allows you to track this so you can see where you’re performing well and where you can grow further. You might need to review your prices or introduce complementary add-on retail products or services such as treatments and encourage your team to upsell these to their clients.

Client revisit period

Your client revisit period is a really important number. The length of time clients take between appointments can have a huge impact on your annual revenue. That’s because reducing it by even the shortest amount of time will result in a massive jump in revenue.

Here’s an example based on averages of real Kitomba appointment information: 

If your client revisit period was reduced from 6 weeks and 4 days to just 6 weeks and you complete 95 appointments a week at an average client spend of $99, you would be able to complete 9 additional appointments each week. That’s almost $900 extra per week and $46,000 per year!

Expert tip to reduce your client revisit period:

Run a training session with your team on ways to reduce their client revisit periods. For example, remind your staff they’re the experts, so they should educate clients on why they need to visit every 6 weeks for their colour or every 4 weeks for a facial. You could also offer touch-up colour packages, or upsell your clients into using certain products between visits. 

New client rate

Retaining clients and creating loyalty is really important, but don’t forget about attracting new clients! They’re the lifeblood of any business as they link directly to revenue. 

A consistent increase in clients allows you to be certain of business growth and it also ensures that more potential clients are hearing about your business.

Take a look at your new client rate. This is the proportion of your serviced clients who are new in that period. It should be sitting at a minimum of 10%. Businesses naturally lose an average of about 10% of their clients each year, so you need to focus on countering this.

Expert tip to increase your new client rate: 

If your percentage of new clients is low and you regularly have gaps in your appointment book, it’s time to kick off some marketing activities to get more clients through the door. Finding new clients can be an expensive exercise but there are cost-effective alternatives. For example, run an ‘introduce a friend’ promotion or put a little money towards some Facebook advertising.

For more tips and strategies for marketing your hair and beauty business, check out our salon marketing guide. 

If you’re experiencing the opposite and your new client rate is low but you’re fully booked weeks in advance, your business has reached capacity. So it’s time to grow! Do you have a large enough salon? Do you need to look at growing your team?

Are you ready to grow your business?

There are so many opportunities to grow your business by focusing on these key client numbers!

So take some time to run your reports and see which areas you could work on so you can become even more successful. View Kitomba Reports to learn more.

Your salon and spa software should be able to accurately run these reports for you. Kitomba’s easy-to-use reporting feature makes analysing these KPIs and tracking targets easy! Book your free demo here to see how Kitomba can help grow your business.  

Read next:

• Salon client experience guide
• Proven ways to grow your business in the hair and beauty industry
• The 3 numbers that will increase your profit