How NappStar Grew Salon Online Bookings

NappStar Salon NYC Is a trailblazing loc salon that specializes in natural hair. The brand’s founders and partners, sisters Melissa and Annette Roche started the company over a decade ago with one vision and two skill sets.

Melissa with her passion for numbers and entrepreneurship while Annette who is the creative genius started what is NappStar Salon NYC today. The sisters passion is fueled by their mom’s hard work who became the family’s main bread winner when their father succumbed to a coma for 14 years.

Melissa first reached out to GoGoGuest curious to learn more about our WiFi marketing solutions. What turned out to be a demo about growing customer engagement developed into a complete digital transformation conversation and the journey to 1000% increase in online bookings for NappStar NYC.

Prior to GoGoGuest solutions and services, NappStar Salon’s online stack comprised of a few technologies that did not fully support the salon experience, their online booking experience and customer call center. The experience made it difficult for a potential customer who is interested in loc hair services and it made it difficult for the salon’s team to be in sync with appointments and cancellations. It was a mess! 

The website was previously designed and developed on Squarespace, with an iFrame to an online booking calendar that lived on Square and a pre-booking questionnaire that had over 20 questions long. It looked daunting for any first time potential customer. 

To make matters worst, NappStar’s services were not clearly defined for the online user interested in learning more about locs, it didn’t empower the potential customer to simply book the appointment. You had to call. Visitors dropped from the site in less than 5 seconds after landing on the online booking page. Conversion rate was at a high of 2 – 5 successful bookings a month.

Melissa then shared her vision of growing their online bookings. She wanted to see NappStar’s growing Instagram community translate into revenue.

Challenge #2: One Calendar For All Stylists

NappStar NYC offered three channels for customers and potential customers to reach them: Online, walk-in and customer call center. Offering three different ways for customers to reach you is all great.

The challenge that NappStar faced with three different customer input channels is the lack of one calendar that offered complete transparency and visibility to everyone. This meant that when a cancellation occurred for a  stylist, that information is not visible to the call center or the salon’s calendar. Often a stylist would find a time-slot double-booked with two different customers and two different appointment requests. It was a nightmare for the staff too! 

Solution: Complete Digital Transformation

The GoGoGuest team is very excited to have designed and implemented solutions and services that meet all of Melissa’s requirements for NappStar Salon NYC.

Achieving 1000% increase in online bookings during COVID-19 is proof that when technology and digital tools prioritize the human experience, then digital transformation can achieve 10x returns for your business. 

Our Approach

The team at GoGoGuest comes with over 20+ years of experience helping big and small brands navigate technology and digital channels or tools to grow. Before starting our company, founders Jessica and Chris both led digital strategists and technology teams that delivered for brands Coty Inc., Moet Chandon, Rimmel, Gwen Stefani, Claritin, Pfizer and Genentech to name a few. 

1. Identifying the gaps

Understanding a customers’ challenge is the first step in our onboarding process here at GoGoGuest. Evaluating a customer’s existing assets, flow, user experience and resources (the people who will use and support the solution we recommend) is a major step in assessing the solution stack we recommend. 

At GoGoGuest we take a very consultative approach to solving customer challenges, selecting the technology stack and how it all integrates with our customer engagement and customer analytics platform. This means that customers are very integrated into the process and decision making before we move forward with implementation. 

For Nappstar NYC, we implemented our Growth solution package and used our integrations and consulting services to deliver.

2. Defining The User Experience

Knowing the customer’s goals and objectives is always a great start to defining or refining a brand’s digital transformation. The end-result of the objective is often a desire to create efficiencies in their lead to conversion funnel that will grow revenue. 

What most brands forget is that digital assets and technology alone is not going to solve the delicate dance of lead conversion. Each customer touch point must be clear and well understood on both sides of the fence. For NappStar Salon NYC these are questions we needed Melissa to help answer for us:

• Where are your customers coming from?
• Who are your customers and their personas?
• What is it that you want each customer persona to learn about your brand?
• What would you like them to do if they show interest?
• What information are you going to share to convince them that you’re the expert in natural hair locs in all of New York City?
• How would you like to get paid for your service?

After thoroughly understanding the customer personas, customer engagement touch points and the operational resources available to support these engagements, we recommended building a new website with an online booking system, one main calendar and all payment channels integrate with Square POS as their main payment gateway, PayPal and cash as an option. 

3. The Technology Stack

Selecting the technology stack is the last piece in our process before fully implementing the solution for any of our Growth customers. Here’s what we recommended and implemented for NappStar Salon NYC.

• Weebly for their new website since it is simple enough to maintain by an internal resource at NappStar NYC. The features are very well integrated with Square. Weebly was acquired by Square in 2018.  The web platform comes with SEO optimization, web analytics and a responsive, easy to use editing tools. 
• Acuity Scheduling for their online bookings. This keeps all stylist bookings in sync with the website, the online call center and the salon. 
• GoGoGuest customer engagement and customer analytics platform. This means that we implemented our customer engagement and analytics platform including WiFi marketing at the salon, the online booking funnel and the website channels. All customer touch points and engagements are captured, recorded and analyzed by GoGoGuest. Our powerful segmentation and marketing automation tools trigger welcome emails, reminders and win back content driven by the customer’s behavior and level of engagement. 
• GoGoGuest integrations and consulting services designed, developed and delivered the entire website experience and online booking experience for NappStar Salon NYC. Learn More.

Results

We launched NappStar’s new website with online booking system and customer engagement in the first week of February 2020, a few weeks before COVID-19 hit the United States and lockdown orders were rolled out in New York City and across the nation. 

Leveraging an engaged community on Instagram, NappStar shares educational content about loc hair care, styling, color and more!

Annette is fantastic at creating content that is useful, creative and beautiful – it certainly makes you want to try natural loc hair! With compelling brand storytelling, it is easy for the NappStar community to navigate the website to learn more about their services, find a schedule that works and confirm it all online in a matter of minutes.

After launching the new website and online booking experience in February 2020, NappStar saw 119 customers right before lockdown. We were so pumped! As soon as lockdown was lifted, online appointment bookings have soared to triple the numbers in February 2020.

Ready to get started with your growth journey? Book a demo.