Last Updated on September 7, 2026 by Ewen Finser
Email marketing isn’t optional for a salon. It’s usually what turns a one-time client into a regular. Rebooking reminders, win-back campaigns for lapsed clients, birthday promos, these are the emails that keep chairs filled and money coming in. But knowing you need email marketing is one thing, finding the right tool to get it all in place and keep it running is another.
You’ve got a lot of options for marketing tools, and if you’re busy with your day-to-day work, it can seem impossible to find the time to test and evaluate them all. I’ve been there myself and when you’re shopping around, there are two main routes people go: built-in platform tools or standalone email apps
The pros and cons can be long, and often providers don’t fully understand the “rub” for salons. Front desk staff are busy with appointments; they are context-switching and handling any guest recovery issues or staffing challenges that may pop up to keep everything running smoothly. Squeezing in marketing tasks between client interactions is not effective or realistic.
And stylists/owners are not always on our computers all day. We’re providing one-on-one service, keeping our salons stocked with everything from client snacks to beauty supplies, and figuring out how to accommodate that late client. Once the day is over and we’re updating client treatment records, we’ve spent all the time we can on our main focus: clients in our space. Ideally, we’d build in more admin time or hire marketing teams, but that can seem like one more thing to manage. So instead, we go looking for a tool that can handle it for us.
Let’s look at a few options for the best email marketing for salons, standalone and integrated.
Salon Email Marketing Platform Comparison
Platform | Starting Price | Email Allowance/Cost | Pricing Notes | Best For |
Mailchimp | Free | 500 sends/month (Free) | Essential: $13/mo (5,000 sends); Standard: $20/mo (6,000 sends); Premium: $350+/mo (150,000+ sends). Scales with contact count. | Salons with a dedicated marketing team or email expert who want deep standalone email features and don’t mind manual list setup. |
GlossGenius | $28/month | Included, based on plan | Standard: $28/mo; Gold: $56/mo; Platinum: $168/mo (paid monthly). No standalone email pricing. | Smaller salons and solo or newer providers who want minimal marketing management time and more focus on retention and reviews. |
Mangomint | $120/month per location + $10/month per user | Marketing add-on from $30/month | $30 add-on = 3,500 credits. Campaign emails: 1 credit each; Flow emails: 5 credits each. Pay-as-you-go: $0.01/credit. | Salons that want flexibility, using pre-built Flows for easy automation and customizable Flows/Campaigns for teams with more time. |
Zenoti | Custom pricing, starting at $225/month | Not publicly listed | Included in Zenoti OS package. AI Workforce tier available as add-on. | Larger, multi-location salon/spa/wellness chains that want loyalty and referral programs and can manage more complexity. |
Boulevard | $176/month | 500–10,000 emails/month depending on plan | Tiers: $176, $293, $410/mo. Advanced Medspa: $410 or $468/mo. Marketing and reporting included across all tiers. | Salons of all sizes wanting strong targeting power (via tags and audience-building) without a complicated setup. |
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is one of the most recognizable names in email marketing, known for its automation, analytics, and ease of use. It’s a stand-alone email marketing platform that has a lot of capabilities, but pricing increases as that capability (and subscribers) expands.
That’s to be expected, and honestly, you’d want some of these features. Email marketing is where these platforms excel, not on capturing client notes and other in-salon actions.
But since a lot of your client data already exists in your salon booking software, you’d want to weigh how heavy of a lift it will be to use a standalone platform and whether the difference in results would be worth the time spent on configuring everything.
What does that configuration involve? A high-level breakdown would look like this:
- Create a spreadsheet with all of your client information (first name, last name, email address, phone numbers).
- Upload all of your contacts into Mailchimp.
- Review the import for errors.
- You will encounter a few errors; it’s inevitable, but fixable. We’re all more comfortable using software, and platforms have certainly improved the user experience or ease of use. It won’t be difficult, but it will be time-consuming.
- Create audiences using tags.
- Tags categorize clients according to their activities within your salon. Are they a lapsed client (whatever your definition of that may be), current client, or influencer? You can create a tag for these clients and use them to send targeted campaigns.
- Go to your Contacts list and select each client who will be tagged. Click Tag Contacts to bulk assign clients to the tags.
Five steps don’t seem so involved. But do you have the time to spend on this? Is this gaining you any added value?
As a user of both stand-alone and salon marketing platforms, I can honestly say it wasn’t worth it for me. I needed, and suspect you will too, to target by so many varied in-salon actions that even the robust tagging features weren’t enough for my needs.
Why? Because Mailchimp can only work with what you’ve shared with them. If you’re hoping to reach out to a client who hasn’t been back in 8 weeks, Mailchimp needs a way to know this information or timing. Your booking software platform already knows this.
So while Mailchimp has a lot of power to send targeted emails, the analytics are helpful, automations are top-notch, you will need to be very organized when importing your client list or have the patience once they are inside Mailchimp to tag and segment your lists
As I said previously, Mailchimp has this configured to be user-friendly; it’s just not as efficient as working where your client list already lives.
Pricing: Mailchimp starts free (500 sends/month), with paid plans kicking off at $13/month for the Essential plan (5,000 sends). Standard runs $20/month for 6,000 sends, and if your list is big enough to need Premium, you’re looking at $350+/month for 150,000+ sends. Keep in mind pricing and features scale with your contact count, not just your send volume, so costs can climb faster than you’d expect as your list grows.
Final verdict: If the difference between a stand-alone automation and a built-in salon software automation is minimal, save yourself and your team the extra work. I think Mailchimp is one of the easiest stand-alone marketing tools I’ve used, but getting my audiences set up was a bit clunky.
GlossGenius:
GlossGenius is a booking and payments platform built specifically for salons and beauty pros. This salon platform has marketing built into every tier; no stand-alone pricing. Like other salon booking platforms, your client’s data is at your fingertips for marketing purposes. No extra exporting tasks needed!
I like what GlossGenius is offering: the ability to see which channels are driving results. You can then focus on those areas, monitor them, and then pivot if anything changes as far as your ROI. There are AI abilities built in to help you craft the ideal marketing message and call to action, including images.
Another great feature is the automation asking for reviews. These are triggered after a visit; again, no external platform integrations needed. GlossGenius knows when the visit was completed and will send an email prompting the client to review your salon.
Reviews are gold, and while asking clients to give you a review during your checkout flow can work, I have seen better results with sending them post-service.
Pricing: GlossGenius starts at $28/month for the Standard plan, with Gold at $56/month and Platinum at $168/month (when paid monthly). Email marketing is baked into every tier, so there’s no separate cost or plan to worry about, just pick the tier that matches the features and volume you need.
Final verdict: A good option for smaller salons and solo or newer providers; those who want to spend less time managing marketing and more time on high-impact efforts like client retention and reviews.
Mangomint:
Mangomint is a management software designed for salons and spas looking to streamline scheduling and client communication. Campaigns, automated flows, and offers use your existing client data to reach clients at the right time in their client journey.
Automations, or Flows, as Mangomint calls them, are great because you can reach every client with one campaign, offering them something different depending on their client “behavior” within the salon. For example, the initial Flow outreach is a check-in after their appointment. You can reach every client who had a visit in the last 2 weeks, and then branch them into Flows like “has an appointment booked” or “doesn’t have any appointment booked.” Your messaging will be based on this fact, so your call to action or offers will be different.
This is a great way to reach clients but does require time to set up. For smaller salons without a dedicated marketing team, take advantage of Mangomint’s Campaigns. These are customizable as well, just not as specific as a Flow. Campaigns are one-time blasts to alert clients of things like a special offer, and are manually set up by your team. In short, you can utilize Flows for very targeted offers like recovering clients, and use Campaigns for reaching out to existing clients to alert them to special offers and new services.
Pricing: Mangomint starts at $120/month per location, plus $10/month per additional user. Marketing runs as an add-on starting at $30/month, which gets you 3,500 credits (Campaign emails cost 1 credit each, while automated Flow emails cost 5 credits each since they’re more targeted). If you go through your credits, pay-as-you-go tops up at $0.01 each.
Final verdict: A strong option for salons that want flexibility. Pre-built Flows make automation easier to get started with, while customizable Flows offer more control for teams with the time to build targeted campaigns.
Zenoti:
Zenoti is an enterprise-grade platform built for larger salon, spa, and wellness chains with multiple locations. I really liked this one because it offers a loyalty and referral program option. Loyalty programs allow you to set up goals based on client actions like purchase thresholds or visits. Referral programs reward your clients for sending in a friend or family member, for a service or a retail purchase. These can be fun for the clients and encourage prebooking and the always-trusted word-of-mouth referrals. The platform uses its loyalty tier as another way to reach clients with special campaigns, reinforcing the value of your loyalty program. Sometimes clients aren’t sure why they should sign up for these programs, so having that option for marketing is a bonus. They also offer a gift card marketing option you can turn on, and a campaign calendar.
On top of their base marketing suite of options, they offer an AI Workforce tier including AI digital marketing assistants, receptionists, lead manager, and concierge. As much as I like automation, I’m not sure I’d want everything running through AI.
With the Zeenie AI assistant option, you could turn out campaigns quickly if you’re handling this as a salon owner. We know our clients best and can use our salon voice to reach them, but having an assistant to write copy can save time and convert them.
Pricing: Zenoti uses custom pricing, starting at $225/month. Email allowances aren’t publicly listed since it’s quote-based, but marketing and loyalty tools are included as part of the Zenoti OS package, with the AI Workforce tier available as an add-on for those who want it.
Final verdict: At this level of customization, marketing starts becoming a job rather than a feature. Zenoti offers a lot of powerful options, but that means complexity. I’d look for something with easier setup and fewer add-ons. Sometimes simpler is better.
Boulevard:
Boulevard is a booking and business management platform made for appointment-based businesses like salons and spas. I found Boulevard’s marketing dashboard to be user-friendly and intuitive. I appreciate that, like other salon booking platforms, salons can use existing client data to create marketing campaigns, and it hits all the right notes for salons of all sizes. It has enough targeting options and automation to perform the types of marketing most salons need, with less intense setup needs and a very approachable interface.
The client tagging system stands out to me on Boulevard. While tags aren’t new and are available in many platforms, combining them with the existing client history and actions like visits and purchases within Boulevard is where they shine.
Tags are clear indicators of who the client is and what they might want to hear from you. You can design multiple targeted campaigns using these tags, combined with other criteria found under Appointment Details, Client Details, and Commerce Details as you build the specific audience for your campaign. For example, if you want to send marketing to clients who have recently visited (Appointment Details) but haven’t purchased any retail items (Commerce Details), Boulevard can find this exact client list. You don’t need to pull detailed reports and sort for what you need.
These details all work together, building a specific Audience, and once it is created, you are able to reuse it. Campaign reports will let you know how successful this particular Audience campaign is, and if it’s not performing, you can tweak it and test it again.
Pricing: Boulevard starts at $176/month, with tiers scaling up to $293 and $410/month (Advanced Medspa runs $410 or $468/month). Email allowances range from 500 to 10,000/month depending on your plan, and marketing plus reporting tools are included across every tier, no separate add-on needed.
Final verdict: Boulevard gives you plenty of targeting power without making email marketing more complicated than it needs to be.
Which Email Marketing Should You Choose?
As you can see, more features and more set up aren’t necessarily bad, but are they better? Dedicated email platforms can make sense for salons with dedicated marketing teams or email experts but for those of us who are working lean, integrated is the answer. We need the client data to filter in automatically and know that we’re hitting the right audience. No need to double check our lists or remember to update client profiles. It’s already happening daily in our salon booking platform.