Zenoti Lets Birds Barbershop Soar

Birds Barbershop operates nine salons in the Austin, Texas, area, and plans to add another one this year. But that’s not the only growth it’s undergoing.

The company currently sees about 20,000 clients per month across all its locations. “We see men, women, kids, people with long hair, short hair. Everyone is invited to the party at Birds,” says Jayson Rapaport, its cofounder. “We’re still growing.”

Birds prides itself on its quality, its experienced staff, and the experience it offers customers, Rapaport says. “Our locations are located in neighborhoods. Each shop looks different to fit in with the neighborhood we’re in. A large franchise group is more cookie-cutter in appearance.”

Birds supplements its haircuts and stylists with local art on its walls, arcade games, music, and even cold Independence beer. It’s been named one of the 100 best salons in America eight consecutive times by ELLE Magazine, No. 1 since its inception by The Austin Chronicle, and one of the nation’s 5,000 fastest-growing small businesses nine times by Inc.

As it did with other service businesses, COVID-19 brought havoc to Birds Barbershop in 2020, with all locations shutting down for three months and traffic warily returning after that.

To deal with some of the restrictions that remained once the salons reopened, the company sought a solution for contactless customer interactions for booking, check-in/out, and payments. It eventually chose Zenoti Software, an all-in-one, cloud-based management platform for spas and salons. As a result, online bookings increased by 60 percent.

Building on that success, Birds Barbershop went to Zenoti again a year later for a full CRM solution.

Businesses like Birds don’t have the marketing personnel or expertise to conduct A/B testing for different marketing strategies, but they also don’t need a CRM solution with a lot of bells and whistles, Rapaport explains. “We didn’t need anything too robust, just something that is simple and effective.”

Birds was using Constant Contact, but it lacked the automation capabilities that are part of Zenoti Marketing & Sales. “Not only did [Zenoti] automate the marketing interactions, it also automated things like newsletters. The return on the cost was something like 20 times, so it was really a no-brainer,” Rapaport says.

Zenoti “has been really impactful. Barbershops and salons, even at our scale, are fragmented and small. I don’t have a chief technology officer; there’s no data scientist that works for me.”

Birds executives meet monthly with Zenoti’s customer rep to determine the effectiveness of current campaigns and what tweaks might be needed. The solution also performs automated analysis of the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and ads so Rapaport and other company leaders can see what is working and what isn’t.

“On the front end, it does what any CRM should do, but it does it really well,” Rapaport says. “A lot of customers move in and out of the business. It’s important to ensure proper communication with my clients. That’s what this does.”

Zenoti also aggregates customer data, showing Birds where it can find the most value and identifying opportunities, “all-important in a customer-facing business like mine,” Rapaport says. “It aggregates our clients and puts them in different cohort segments, and our clients are responding.”

Birds uses Zenoti’s solution to push out loyalty offers for birthdays, anniversaries, etc.—promotions that are rare in the industry, according to Rapaport. “It’s more thoughtful when we have custom campaigns for each individual, each group we are trying to target.”

A dashboard provides a quick picture of conversion rates, revenue generation from campaigns, and other relevant information.

With automated marketing outreach to customers who stopped frequenting the business, Zenoti’s platform enabled Birds to reap an additional $9,000 in sales from cross-sales and related activities.

“This is really important to us,” Rapaport says. “It’s been a remarkable solution that works really well for us. It’s been a big revenue generator.” 

The Payoff

Since adding Zenoti Marketing & Sales, Birds Barbershop has seen the following results:

• an additional $9,000 in revenue;
• 1,228 customers recovered; and
• an estimated 20 times return on investment.