Professionalism doesn’t just mean being good at your job. You may well be a front running candidate for ‘Ink Master’ when it comes to your epidermal artistry, but are you running your studio with the same effectiveness?
To run a successful tattoo business, skill with the gun needs to be complimented with excellent client service, top shelf management practices and simple client data and communication solutions.
Getting bookings in your door and maintaining a client base are incredibly important, and easier than it has ever been with centralised tools like BetterHQ.
Tattoo client management
Managing tattoo clients can become a messy affair if you’re still reliant on paper-based records, on-the-fly communication and separate record keeping systems.
If simplicity and complete client visibility are your aim (and it should be), you should be looking seriously at a studio management system like BetterHQ.
You’ll not only have a thorough client management and contact system, you’ll also have attached files to each client where you can store photos of tattoos as well as sketches, collaborative imagery or upcoming designs you are working on.
Having all of your client data and artwork in one place creates a seamless and intuitive management system with a single source of truth. Having that single source of truth is a cornerstone of mistake avoidance and studio efficiency.
By opening up a client record, you now have at your fingertips all the information you would ever require on your clients, with the additional ability to contact and market to them directly.
Getting bookings into your studio
What’s a tattoo studio without bookings? An expensive retail space with a tattoo gun and a bored artist. Time to fill that waiting room.
In a modern world, you should be at the stage of reducing or completely eliminating emails and phone bookings from your tattoo parlour.
Not only do these methods create the potential for missed bookings, mistakes and the need to record and transcribe the booking into a calendar or client management system, they’re also a massive waste of time and administrative effort.
With an online booking system, you can easily integrate a booking link into both your website and social media platforms. This ensures immediate touch-free bookings, complete with all of the client details and contact information you would ever require.
This booking and client profile will load directly into your CRM and calendar without you doing a thing, meaning you can concentrate on that sleeve you are finishing. The one earning you money.
Reminders and repeat clients
Bookings are all too often forgotten or overlooked, leading to countless missed opportunities, wasted time slots and idle artists on the clock. This aspect of the service industry is exceedingly common and incredibly frustrating.
In fact, missed appointments make up a huge portion of missed revenue. By using touch free, automated reminders, you can cut this missed revenue down to its bare minimum.
Using a booking management tool means you can set SMS and email reminders to be automatically sent prior to a booking. The SMS reminder is particularly powerful and highly recommended for tattoo parlours.
Marketing industry stalwarts, Campaign Monitor, did some interesting research into SMS vs. email marketing:
“Research shows that SMS open rates are as high as 98%, compared to just 20% of all emails. And, on average, it takes 90 seconds for someone to respond to a text and 90 minutes to respond to an email.
Furthermore, 75% of people have suggested that they’d be happy to receive an offer via SMS – this is why 65% of marketers say that SMS marketing is a “very effective” method for them.”
This research, mirrored by countless other research projects, suggests that not only is SMS an excellent, widely opened method of sending reminders, it’s also a commanding marketing tool.
Periodically reaching out to your established client base with offers, suggestions for more ink or other promotional activity is a powerful way to boost your repeat client numbers and net more cashflow and experience with minimal effort.
If you’re serious about being the best tattoo artist you can be and running an industry leading tattoo studio, leave administration and client management to the solutions that were created to do exactly this. After all, we’re sure your love of ink trumps your love of client management, right?