Introduction: Client retention

In the salon and spa industry, client retention is one of the most important metrics to measure your business success and performance. In Timely, we have a number of tools and reports available; to help you to track and improve your client retention rates. In this guide, you will learn what client retention is and strategies on you can measure this.

What is client retention?

Client retention looks at whether your clients are returning to your salon, and booking follow up appointments with your business. Research shows that selling and marketing your products & services to existing clients, is much more effective than acquiring new clientele. 

Should I have a client retention strategy?

A client retention strategy is a critical part of your business plan, as it is proven to support long term success. This should be paired with marketing initiatives targeted at new clientele. In Timely, we will consider a client as retained if they have a future booking in the calendar. There are three elements of retention you can view:
 

• New client retention: how many of your new clients are returning
• Returning client retention: how many of your existing clients are returning
• Total client retention: how many of your total clients (new and returning) are retained

Introducing: the client retention report

The client retention report gives you an overview of the retention rates across the entire business. This can be run for all staff, or for an individual members. This report will allow you to measure how many of your clients in a given date range have future bookings. 
 

This will give you a breakdown of how many of your total, new and returning clients have been rebooked. As well as showing you retention percentages for individual staff and services. The retention percentages will be based on a per client basis, not on individual bookings. So if a client visits multiple times within a specific date range, they will only be counted once.

Timely note: 

This report is currently in preview and is based on new calculations. This means that the figures that you see in this report will be different to the retention/rebooking number in the executive summary report. 

The main difference is that this is on a per client basis, versus a per appointment basis. Where multiple staff members see the same client during an appointment the rebooking counts toward both staff members. If clients visit multiple locations your reports should be viewed by location to ensure the correct figures are shown.

Introducing: the clients not retained report

This report allows you to view a list of clients that visited within a specific date range, that have not been rebooked. This allows you to easily identify those clients so that you can reach out to them directly. You will also be able to see relevant information about the client, including their contact details, last booking details and whether or not they are a new or returning client.