Improving spa booking, communication, and community

With a mission of helping spa owners succeed, Daniela Woerner of Addo Aesthetics is a champion of progress within the spa industry. This alignment with Mangomint's values is what brought us back for another episode of the Spa Marketing Made Easy podcast. 

Daniel Lang, Mangomint co-founder and CEO, spoke with Daniela Woerner about our newest features, efforts of community support, and planned software improvements designed to make salon and spa software invisible.

While you can tune in to the full conversation here, we have featured some highlights of episode 342 of the Spa Marketing Made Easy Podcast below. 

Product updates: What's new in Mangomint

Mangomint announces HIPAA compliance for med spa booking

HIPAA compliance allows Mangomint to store sensitive patient information, secure our client forms, and follow the best practices med spas need for HIPAA-compliant booking. 

DL: Since you and I last spoke, some of the most exciting things that happened in terms of the software itself is one: we have HIPAA compliance now — so that makes us much more usable for med spas. We can store sensitive patient information — that's great because we also have a forms feature. So you can use it to collect all of the data and have it on one platform. You no longer have to use a separate EMR or EHR system. You can all do it within Mangomint. That's big.

DW: I think that's more than big. That was, I think, the number one objection for people that had a medical spa — because that's a non-negotiable. Like you can't, of course, violate HIPAA. And so, it's like, do I have two software [systems]? How am I doing this? And so having that HIPAA compliance is just huge.

DL: Absolutely. And it took us a while, frankly, to get it. HIPAA is one of those things where you can do it in many different ways, and we wanted to make sure that we really understood what it takes to be HIPAA compliant and follow all the best practices and guidelines to have proper measures in place. When you're dealing with sensitive information, you just want to make sure that you treat it properly — that there are internal audits and things are in place. We took our time to make sure we did it right. But we finally have it, so that's exciting.

New Service Customizations for seamless salon and spa booking

Spas and salons can now use Mangomint's advanced Service Customizations feature to collect valuable information at the time of booking, sell add-ons, guide clients to their ideal service configuration, and effortlessly organize complex appointments.

DL: In terms of other features, there's actually one that we are very excited about as well. We call it Service Customizations. Imagine you book a facial at a spa. You might want to include certain add-ons — like LED light therapy, as an example. With the Service Customizations feature, you can allow clients to customize the service at the time of booking. So, after they select the type of facial they want, you can ask them a series of questions and let them choose from a number of different options.

The classic example that inspired this feature is when you go to the spa, you book your 60-minute massage, and the first question is, "What kind of aromatherapy would you like? What scent would you like? What kind of oil would you like?" And some of the options might actually cost extra.

It's a great upselling opportunity as well. If you have the time and you can increase the service price by adding CBD oil or a 15-minute scalp massage, for example. You can really increase the average revenue per ticket. 

There are also applications in other fields as well. I know you're mostly in the spa [industry], but we have a lot of salons as well where gender-neutral pricing is a big topic. You know, it used to be where you had a men's cut and a women's cut. I always joke like, "What do you do when Jason Momoa shows up with his big head of hair?"

[This feature supports] a much more streamlined service menu. You could offer a signature haircut. As soon as the client selects it, the question is, "How long is your hair? Is it short, less than six inches, medium length, or long hair?"

The idea is to streamline the menu and then ask a bunch of questions to guide clients to choose the right service. So, instead of presenting all of the different options to them, you just ask them the questions. Then, the system figures out, "Okay, this is gonna take 75 minutes, it's gonna cost this much. Here's all the availability."

Advanced resource scheduling capabilities

Mangomint can now manage scheduling for an unlimited number of resources alongside traditional staff booking capabilities.

DL: The last one in terms of big updates is we have Resource Scheduling now. It is one of those things that we always had in a more basic version, but now we have a very sophisticated, advanced implementation of that feature. And the reason it matters is, imagine you have a spa with four different treatment rooms. You can do a facial in three of them, but you only have one HydraFacial machine, as an example. So you need to make sure that not only do you have an esthetician, but you also have one of the three rooms and the machine available. The system can now understand that you need the machine, you need the room, and you need the esthetician — and it can book all three of these things.

Growing our community: The Salon Business

Mangomint acquired The Salon Business to provide a community that customers can trust for best practice insight, educational resources, and the tactical support they need to thrive.

DW: So tell me about The Salon Business. Tell me about this new acquisition and kind of what that means. What do you see in acquiring this company? Where are you gonna take this? How is this gonna support your clients?

DL: Absolutely. So as I mentioned, you know, our vision or our mission for Mangomint is really to become invisible as a salon and spa software company. But what we've noticed over the years is that to actually help our customers be successful, it's not enough to just give them the tool, right? It takes education — it takes best practices that you want to share and disseminate. So we found this platform called The Salon Business. And they have great content up there, hundreds of articles — everything from, "How do you find a name for your new business?" to, "How do you write a cancellation policy that's friendly, that gets the job done?" Very tactical advice.

We saw a great alignment between that business's vision — and the way they wanted to add value to customers — and Mangomint. Fortunately, we were able to bring them into the Mangomint umbrella. And the person who started it, John Hallberg, is a fantastic marketer educator. So he joined Mangomint as well. He's now our VP of content community. 

DW: I love the saying, "A rising tide floats all boats." I truly, truly believe in collaboration and not competition. I think that when we share our resources and share our knowledge and support other business owners, the whole industry excels.

Long-term vision: Moving forward with Mangomint

Two-Way Texting updates

Two-Way Texting has already transformed client communication for salons and spas. Mangomint is working to take this feature even further. 

DW: So, what else do you guys have on the horizon? 

DL: One feature that I didn't mention, but that we are also very excited about, is Two-Way Texting. At first, it sounds very basic, right? Like text messaging, what's so exciting and new about that? However, we built it fully integrated into the software — it's like one stream of communication with the client. So imagine you're looking at the calendar and you're wondering about this particular client here, "What text messages has the system sent?" So you can see the message history just like you would on your phone, but then you can also have a conversation with that client in that same stream.

So from the client's perspective, it's all coming from the same number. And on your side, it feels very much like what you're used to on your phone. Now, that's exciting and people love it already — but we think we can take this way further. 

A lot of client decisions on whether or not to get a service — especially in med spas where treatments can be more expensive — start on the website. They start with research on, "Is this the right treatment for me? Am I even eligible for this type of thing?" And a lot of times when these questions occur, people want to chat with somebody, they want to talk to somebody.

So we think there's a great opportunity for us to bring the website chat feature into the fold, but make it HIPAA compliant and add it into that same feed. Now, you have one platform that allows you to both manage your day-to-day and have one-on-one communication with leads on your website who may have questions.

Planned marketing support for spas and salons

Mangomint plans to continue innovating its CRM features to streamline all salon and spa management tools into a single platform.

DL: Longer term, we definitely want to build upon that and make it more of a marketing platform as well. Right now, a lot of the [customer relationship management] things require you to use different tools. In the longer-term vision that we'll work on over the coming years, you could do all of that inside of Mangomint. But the end goal is to have one platform with your CRM, your calendar, day-to-day — everything in one platform, And, that really removes the friction between all of these different tools.

Get started with Mangomint's salon and spa scheduling software

Tune in to the full conversation between Daniel Lang and Addo Aesthetics here. 

If you don't have Mangomint yet and would like to see how this software can help your salon or spa, please launch a free 21-day Mangomint trial or book a demo with one of our experts to see it live.

If you haven't found what you are looking for in our spa and salon scheduling software, Mangomint is constantly releasing new features and updates. You can stay in the know about Mangomint's software advancements by subscribing to our newsletter below.