It should come as no surprise that technology is completely reshaping the beauty and wellness industry.

According to a report by Zion Market Research, the global beauty salon software market was valued at $1.7 billion in 2018 and is expected to reach $5.5 billion by 2025, with new mobile apps and cloud-based software largely driving the growth. Meanwhile, other technologies, like social media, have also had a huge impact on the beauty and wellness industry – a survey conducted by Cosmetics Business found that over 80% of beauty industry professionals use social media to promote their businesses and interact with customers.

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While this can present new challenges for beauty service providers, it also comes with opportunities. There's no time like the present to invest in technology that's quickly becoming essential. In the process, you can become more organized and productive, and create better experiences for your clients.

Ready to take your beauty business to the next level? Read on to learn about the ways you can use technology tools in your business, and which apps and software you truly need.

How Many Apps Do Beauty Service Providers Really Need?

Here's the part that can be challenging for beauty and wellness professionals: determining which tools you actually need.

There are so many technology tools out there (and new ones get invented all the time). To make things even more complicated, every single one of those tools claims to be essential to running your business smoothly and efficiently.

And those tools might help you level up your salon or spa. But there's just one problem: They each only do one thing.

As you already know, running a beauty or wellness business means keeping a lot of balls in the air. So do you get 20 different tools to streamline all the different moving parts of your business?

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Thankfully, no. You can get just one tool to do it all: GlossGenius.

GlossGenius is the only truly all-in-one software solution for beauty and wellness professionals. It provides one platform to run all the digital aspects of your business–with no extra work, additional tools, or unexpected fees. Everything gets connected together in one place to make taking control of your business easier than ever before. GlossGenius is the only platform that's built by beauty pros, for beauty pros. We get what it's like and we know what you need – so we put it all in one tool.

Read on to see how GlossGenius can replace nearly a dozen other technology tools, so instead of having a whole tech stack, you can use a single, streamlined, user-friendly salon app to meet all your needs.

9 Ways Service Providers Should Be Using Technology

Whether you're a makeup artist, hair stylist, esthetician, spa or salon owner, or another kind of wellness or beauty professional, there are many aspects of your business that can be made more efficient with technology. These are nine areas where beauty service providers should be taking advantage of technology – like GlossGenius – to make their work easier and their client experience better.

Booking

One area where technology has completely changed clients' expectations of beauty and wellness businesses is when it comes to how they book appointments – booking apps have become commonplace, and today's salon and spa customers expect a seamless, digital way to book their favorite services.

A booking app should have client management features, notifications, and reminders (even better if reminders are automated so it's one less thing on your plate), and a mobile app is a huge plus for you and your clients.

There are many apps, such as Calendly, Booker, and Salon Objectives, that can fulfill some of these needs.

But there's only one app that handles all your client management and booking needs within an all-in-one-platform. GlossGenius helps you establish your brand presence online with a gorgeous custom booking site that makes it easy for your clients to book with you. Plus, clients don't need to sign up, sign in, or download anything to book services, reducing friction for them.

You have full control over your schedule, whether you require deposits or cards on file, and when to ban bad clients. GlossGenius also helps you keep track of all the client data you need to know: visit history, purchases, analytics, notes, pronouns, and more.

GlossGenius elevates the client experience to help you build better relationships, and the result is a 35% average increase in bookings – while you're 100% more prepared for client visits.

Payments

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Gone are the days when beauty and wellness professionals had to manually handle cash from all their clients. Today's clients expect to be able to pay in a variety of ways – from keeping a card on file to using a digital wallet like Apple Pay.

There's just one problem for beauty service providers: Different payment gateways all come with different rules and fees. Sure, you could use Charge Stripe, SumUp, iZettle, or Square for your salon or spa's payment needs. But if you want to accept any payment easily, securely, and stylishly, all you need is GlossGenius.

With payment processing built into the same platform that handles all your business's other needs, GlossGenius also offers some other key benefits:

• Free, same-business-day transfers
• An industry-low payment processing rate (just 2.6%!)
• No contracts or hidden fees

If you want to level up payments even more, you can get a stunning, high-end GlossGenius card reader that allows you to accept chip cards, contactless (NFC) cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay anywhere, wireless, securely, and instantly.

Now, when you subscribe to GlossGenius Gold, you can save 50% on your own GlossGenius card reader!

Marketing

‍Marketing for spas, salons, and other beauty and wellness businesses can be a challenge. It's necessary to grow your salon business and reach clients the right way, but local business marketing requires a wide variety of tools and skills – not to mention the time and effort it takes to run successful marketing campaigns.

Rather than cobbling together a ton of outreach and marketing tools (from Mailchimp to Google My Business), you can just use one that's already integrated with the rest of your business's digital needs: GlossGenius.

GlossGenius has modern marketing methods built in, making it easy to reach high-value clients with less effort. Free email marketing allows you to filter by visit history, appointments, product purchases, and more, and SMS text message marketing – with a 99% open rate – is designed to get clients to book.

You can even connect GlossGenius with other platforms like Yelp, Instagram, Facebook, and even your own website, making it effortless to meet your clients where they are.

Over 80% of beauty industry professionals use social media to promote their businesses and interact with customers.

Client reviews

All beauty service providers should seek out reviews on major platforms like Yelp and Google Reviews. But nothing helps you control your reviews – and your reputation – like a platform for managing them. GlossGenius puts you in control of your reputation and brand with an all-in-one way to manage client reviews – and get more of them.

GlossGenius’ smart review technology proactively reminds clients to leave a review with every receipt. That means greater client satisfaction, more reviews, and new clients for your business. Plus, client reviews offer tips to help you continuously improve your business and services.

Inventory management

Whether you stock hair products or skincare, for too many beauty and wellness businesses, inventory is a cost, not a profit driver.

There are so many digital platforms for inventory management, and many of them will do the job for your salon or spa business. But with GlossGenius, you get inventory management built in with all your other digital tools, so you can automatically update inventory, track client purchases, and apply sales tax. 

GlossGenius inventory management seamlessly integrates with your point-of-sale, so inventory management is done automatically in the background without any extra work on your part. Get low stock alerts and avoid overstocking – plus, you'll have access to reporting and analytics that help you understand true product costs, best sellers, worst sellers, client purchases, and more.

Team management

Have commissioned teams or booth renters? A team of two, five, or 15? Growing beauty businesses need software that can keep up with them, but many existing apps charge by the team member, meaning that as your team grows, so do your expenses.

GlossGenius Gold lets you invite unlimited professionals to your account – no additional charges or fees necessary. GlossGenius Gold subscribers can add new team members with pre-set roles, or define their access with deeply customizable permissions, so they never need to worry about who has access to what. They can manage their team easily from anywhere they can take their phone.

Bookkeeping

There are plenty of bookkeeping software options that are geared toward business owners. But none are made by beauty service providers, for beauty service providers.

On the other hand, GlossGenius' expense management functionality let you digitally store copies of receipts, categorize your expenses, and generate reports instantly. It also automates the process of calculating sales tax, retail costs, sales earnings, expenses, and more – GlossGenius crunches the numbers so you can focus on what you do best: taking care of your clients.

Many beauty service providers use Quickbooks or FreshBooks, and they do a great job. But with GlossGenius, you get the same great bookkeeping tools in a platform that's integrated with all your other digital needs – one tool to do it all.

Business data

One of the most powerful things about GlossGenius is that, because all these tools are combined in one platform, it gives you unparalleled access to business data and analytics that can help you boost productivity, streamline operations, and grow.

GlossGenius can generate real-time reports and analytics for every part of your business:

• Appointments
• Sales reports
• Retail reports
• Most Valuable Clients reports
• Expense reports
• Inventory reports
• Transaction reports

If you need to know what your most popular salon services are, that's just a few taps away. If you're wondering which products have the best sales and margins, you can see that. All the business data you need is available in-app, anywhere you can take your phone.

No-show protection

And finally, GlossGenius allows you use technology to protect your business in a way that no other tool can: all-in-one no-show protection.

Nothing poses more of a risk to a beauty and wellness business than last-minute cancellations and no-shows. GlossGenius combines features from all the tools above to protect your business from no-shows, better than any other app in the market can. By combining deposits, card-on-file booking rules, cancellation and no-show policies, notifications, reminders, and more into a single system, GlossGenius helps you protect your time – and your revenue – with a completely integrated stack of no-show prevention tools.

5 Other Fun and Useful Apps for Beauty Service Providers

While GlossGenius handles all aspects of running your beauty business in the digital age, there are other tools you can use to better market yourself, boost your reputation, provide better client experiences, and have fun while doing it all.

Snapseed

When you post photos of your work – whether to your portfolio or a social media channel – you want them to best represent your talent and skill. That's why you need a powerful, intuitive photo editor: enter Snapseed.

Snapseed is one of the most powerful free photo editors out there, with a wide range of tools and features geared toward professional photographers–but a user interface so simple that even a beginner can use it. A few taps in Snapseed, and you can apply high dynamic range (HDR) filters that make all your shots look model-quality.

‍Download Snapseed for iOS and Android.

Canva

Canva is a free-to-use online graphic design tool that's used by beginners and professionals alike to create graphics and videos for social media. Rather than posting a plain photo of your work to your Instagram, use Canva to add text, create collages, insert illustrations, create templates, and more, giving your social media feeds a more professional, curated look.

‍Download Canva for iOS and Android.

Style My Hair

How often have hairstylists had a client arrive to their salon appointment not sure what they want done? Stylists need a beauty app they can use to help clients "try on" different haircuts and colors, and Style My Hair, L’Oréal Professionnel’s 3D hair color makeover app, is it.

The app uses your device's camera and augmented reality technology to re-color your client's hair. They can move around, flip their hair, and more – and the 3D hair color technology will move with them so they can see their new color in action. You can even try ombré and sombré looks.

‍Download Style My Hair for iOS and Android.

OPI Nail Studio

A hair styling app isn't much use for you if you work in a nail salon. What you need is an app that allows you to design and see manicures and pedicures on different skin tones and lighting. The OPI Nail Studio app does all of that, and then allows you to order in new shades with just a few taps, so you can create your designs in real life.

‍Download OPI Nail Studio for iOS.

Calm

Running a business can be demanding, with long hours, high client expectations, and the need to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and techniques. This can lead to stress and burnout, which can ultimately affect the quality of service provided to clients and the overall success of the business. And, as you probably know, you can't properly pamper your clients if you aren't taking good care of yourself.

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The Calm app provides guided meditations, breathing exercises, and other mindfulness tools that can help salon owners manage stress, improve focus, and cultivate a sense of calm in their daily lives. Additionally, the app offers sleep stories and music to help users relax and get a good night's sleep, which can be essential for those who work long hours and need to be well-rested for their job.

Overall, the Calm app can be a useful tool for hair salon owners who want to prioritize their mental health and well-being and improve their ability to provide high-quality services to their clients.

‍Download Calm for iPhone or Android.

Don't Download a Dozen Apps for Beauty Service Providers – Just Download One

As a beauty and wellness professional, you can take advantage of the wide range of technology tools your business needs. All you need to do is try GlossGenius, the only all-in-one platform that manages all the little things to keep your business running smoothly – while you stay booked and busy.

‍Start your free GlossGenius trial today.