1.Why text marketing pairs with Booksy
Booksy is excellent at the moment of booking — discovery, confirmation, the appointment reminder twenty-four hours before. What it isn't built for is the rest of your relationship with the client: the four-week gap between visits, the slow Tuesday afternoon, the regular who used to come in monthly and quietly stopped showing up. Those moments are where revenue actually lives or dies for a chair-based business, and they're almost always recovered with a single, well-timed text.
SMS open rates sit around 98% inside fifteen minutes — email is closer to 20%, and most of that is bots. For a barbershop or salon owner, that gap is the difference between an empty chair and a $90 cut. Pairing Booksy (your booking calendar and client database) with a dedicated text marketing tool lets you keep using the appointment software your clients already know, while finally putting the relationship work on autopilot. The whole loop — export, import, segment, send — takes about half an hour the first time and ten seconds every time after.
2.Export your Booksy client list
Booksy ships your client list as a spreadsheet (CSV or Excel) with names, phone numbers, and email addresses. The path you take depends on which version of Booksy Biz you're on, so it's worth checking the in-app option first and falling back to support if you don't see it.
Option A: Self-serve export (newer Booksy Biz versions)
- Open Booksy Biz on the web or desktop app and sign in as the owner.
- Open the Customers section from the left menu.
- Look for an Export to CSV button (sometimes hidden behind a three-dot menu in the top-right of the customer list).
- Save the file somewhere you'll find it again — your Desktop or Downloads folder is fine.
Option B: Request the file from Booksy support
If you don't see a self-serve export option, Booksy's support team will pull the list for you and email it back. They typically reply within a business day.
- In Booksy Biz, click the ? (Help) icon in the left menu, then choose Support to open the in-app live chat.
- Ask the agent for "a copy of my client list as a CSV." Specify CSV — they can also send Excel, but CSV imports more cleanly.
- Alternatively, email info.us@booksy.com from the address on your Booksy account. Include your business name and the same request.
tags. Drop a short label next to each row (regular, fade, color, walk-in, VIP). Five minutes of tagging now turns into months of tighter campaigns later — Teleno can filter on those tags directly.
3.Import the file into Teleno AI
Sign in at app.teleno.ai and open the Contacts page. Drop the CSV onto the importer. Teleno reads up to 200,000 rows and auto-maps the most common headers — phone, name, email — without you touching anything. If your column headers are unusual ("Mobile #" instead of "phone"), you'll see a mapping screen where you can match them to Teleno's fields.
Teleno understands these contact fields out of the box: e164 (phone in international format), first_name, last_name, email, tags, locale, sms_opt_in, source_label, plus three commerce fields that make segmenting much sharper — ltv_cents (lifetime spend), order_count, and last_order_at (date of last visit). Booksy doesn't export lifetime value directly, but if you have a recent revenue report by client, paste those numbers into a column called ltv_cents in dollars or cents — Teleno figures out the units.
The importer dedupes on phone number per business, so re-importing an updated list later just refreshes the existing contacts instead of creating duplicates.
4.Three campaigns to send first
Most Booksy shops are walk-in heavy with predictable visit frequencies — every two weeks for a fade, every four to six for a cut-and-color. That cadence is exactly what makes lapse-based and recency-based segments so productive. Below are three campaigns we'd recommend running in your first week, ordered by how quickly they tend to put money in the till.
Campaign 1 — Last cut was five weeks ago
The single highest-ROI message a barbershop can send. In Teleno's AI Builder, type:
customers whose last order was more than 35 days ago
Teleno builds the segment, drafts the message, and shows you exactly who'll receive it. A draft worth sending:
"Hey {first_name}, it's been a minute — want me to hold a chair for you this Saturday? Reply with a time that works. STOP to opt out."
The first time we ran this with a Brooklyn barbershop, eleven of forty-three recipients booked within twenty minutes.
Campaign 2 — First-time client this month
The window where a new client decides whether you're "their place" closes fast. A friendly check-in sets the tone before they drift to a competitor. Prompt:
contacts whose first_seen_at is within the last 14 days
Sample text: "Hey {first_name}, glad we got to meet you last week. If you'd like a standing slot, reply with a day and we'll lock it in. Reply STOP to opt out."
Standing-slot requests from this segment convert at roughly 25–30% in our customer data — far above any cold campaign.
Campaign 3 — Top 10% by lifetime spend
Your VIPs deserve a different kind of text — one that doesn't feel like marketing. Use it for early access to a new stylist, holiday gift cards, or a private slot on a Sunday. Prompt:
top 10% of customers by lifetime value
Sample text: "Hey {first_name}, before we open it up — Marcus is taking new color clients and we wanted to offer his first three Saturdays to regulars first. Reply if you want one. STOP to opt out."
5.A quick word on compliance
One important thing to know up front: in the United States, sending business SMS legally requires a registered 10DLC (10-digit long code) campaign through The Campaign Registry (TCR). Teleno walks you through the registration during onboarding, but the approval happens at TCR and typically lands in 1–3 business days. You won't be able to send your first campaign until that approval comes back, and you won't be charged the platform fee until it does. Your card sits on file from day one, but billing only starts when you can actually send.
Two other rules: every recurring marketing message you send must include an opt-out instruction ("Reply STOP to opt out" at the end is the standard), and you must only message contacts who have a basis to receive marketing — which, for an existing salon client list, is almost always covered by the relationship, but is worth reviewing if you imported names from somewhere other than your own appointment book.
6.Get started
If you have a Booksy export sitting in your Downloads folder right now, you can have your first text campaign drafted in under twenty minutes. Setup is free — billing starts only after your TCR campaign is approved and you've actually got a working business number to send from.
Start your free Teleno account →
Also using GlossGenius or Vagaro? Read the companion guides: