As a specialist consultant in small business management, one of my primary areas of work is in the field of marketing. It is also where I see the inexperienced salon owner spend and waste unnecessary money. Very few one - off marketing exercises bring in huge dividends or create long - term customer loyalty. However, when a number of easy to implement, effective, repeatable systems are adopted, the sum total of each of these smaller profit centres can be significant. Therefore the majority of a successful salon’s marketing effort should be in the implementation of systems to attract more business and create more profit, so I thought I would explore a few of these ideas in this article.

Marketing 101

The first logical way of making more money in a clinic is to attract more customers. Sounds simple enough, but there are actually two different types of customers that we need to work on. The first and easiest group are our past and existing customers. Here our strategy is to retain clients and establish on-going repeat business. The second is to attract new customers to our business through various forms of advertising.

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Existing Customers

All my studies have shown that it is somewhere between 5 – 8 times cheaper and easier to convince an existing customer to return to your business than it is to attract a brand new client. With this in mind it makes sense to place considerable effort and emphasis on the retention of your existing customer base. Consider this exercise; Print out a list of clients that you haven’t seen for more than two months. How long would that list be? Now imagine how much extra in income you would earn if you had retained the custom of as little as 10% of the people on this list.

The answer is usually a significant amount per year. And yet to achieve this is actually a fairly simple exercise. You see the primary reason customers don’t return is because we don’t continually place in front of them a legitimate reason to come back. Providing our customer service is high, most customers want to use your services again. In fact, most thank you profusely for the services you provided. They just need a legitimate reason to return again. Providing that excuse is the role of the clinic and salon manager, not the customer. By maintaining regular communication with our clients through the use of letters, newsletters, VIP functions, flyers and phone calls that promote special deals, new treatments or equipment, new retail products, seasonal promotions, special events….(and the list can be endless), we are encouraging our existing customers to keep utilising our services regularly.

Try sending out:

• A “Haven’t seen you’ letter with a fabulous special offer on it.
• A happy birthday card with a $10 gift voucher to be used in your business
• A regular seasonal newsletter with special deals, product information, industry news, value added promotions and new treatment or equipment announcements.
• Cross - over letters that encourage users of one particular product or service to try another related product or service. Include an offer that’s too good to refuse to encourage them to try it out.
• A follow up phone call to see how they are enjoying their products or how they responded to the treatment you provided.
• Invitations to VIP events where clients can see demonstrations, listen to speakers, test out products and equipment or just enjoy a social get together.
• Flyers that promote exclusive deals, limited offers, new treatments, the latest products, sales and upcoming promotions, before the general public has access to them.
• In fact, it doesn’t really matter what you do so long as it maintains regular communication with your client and encourages them to return to your business.
• If you had even a small data base of only 500 clients and you retained just 10% of them, visiting your salon 10 times a year and spending on average just $50. That would add up to an extra $25 000!!

New Clients

If you advertise it should be to attract new clients, not existing ones. The cost of advertising can be quite prohibitive for many small businesses so it is often a worthwhile exercise to get some expert help with the production of radio, television and newspaper advertisements. Existing customers can be reached quite economically by mail, fax or phone, however to reach new clients you need to get out into the marketplace.

Many businesses mistakenly believe that their advertisement will simply sell more of their products or services. This is not usually the case. A good advertisement will attract more enquiries. People will walk in, get on line or phone up to enquire about whatever you featured in your advertisement. This highlights a critical area of advertising that is usually forgotten – the handling of enquiries. I have seen many wonderful ads written that have made the phone ring off the hook, but the person answering those calls has not been trained to handle these enquiries properly and only a fraction of them actually resulted as bookings.

I usually follow some basic rules in preparing advertisements through any media or print.

The first task is to capture people’s attention. So headlines become a vital part of all advertising. A headline is not your name, address, logo or phone number – these are the least important things on the page. A good headline is going to capture people’s attention, instantly. So it is big, bold and easy to read, but has an instant appeal to those who listen to or read it. Your headline is responsible for the potential customer stopping and taking notice of your advertisement. If they are attracted to this then they will read through the information you offer. For this reason you should take more time and effort on getting this part of your advertisement correct than anything else in the ad.

Always have an offer. I prefer value-added offers to discounts, where low actual cost / high perceived value extras are offered as an inducement. Offers give the enquirer a reason to call and shows the value in your services or products.

If you can offer a guarantee on your services or products, even if you are just extending the manufacturers guarantee, it is a powerful message to the potential buyer. A guarantee eliminates any risk in the buyer entering into the purchase, especially on higher priced items.

Make sure you include a call to action. Buy Now! Limited Stock. Call Today!! For the first 50 callers…This special always books out so book TODAY! It’s a funny thing, but a call to action will increase your number of calls considerably. You really do need to tell the consumer what to do.

Include a P.S. It is that after thought that can just seal the deal. Mention that you have convenient off street parking, great gift voucher ideas, open 7 days, open late, easy to find location, extensive or exclusive range, now offering the latest equipment or product.

Imagine if you increased your tiny 500 person data base by just 10% through some better advertising. Now that’s only 50 people or one person per week. They visited 10 times a year and spent on average $50. That’s another $25 000!!

Marketing 102

The second area that will make you more money is to have your clients visit more often. Again there are two aspects to this.

The first is to increase their visiting frequency, whilst the second is to introduce them to new or extra services in the salon committing them to an extra visit.

Increasing frequency

Truly professional therapists ensure that they write out treatment programmes for their clients. These programmes plan out the types of treatments and the time between treatments for the customer to get the best possible result. This practice ensures that the client knows that you are really taking their care seriously, whilst ensuring a much higher rebooking rate. It also means that therapists are thinking through the optimum time between treatments for each individual. Usually this will be much more frequently than the standard once a month facial. To back this strategy up salons can promote treatments in a series. There are many treatments that lend themselves to this type of marketing including; micro-dermabrasion, IPL, peels, tanning, body wraps and facials, just to name a few.

What if every one of your 500 people had just one more visit a year at an average of $50 per visit? Another $25 000!! ( I haven’t even taken into consideration the extra clients through you new advertising and retention programmes.)

Extra services

Cross marketing new or extra services to particular groups within your salon is a great way of increasing the number of visits each client makes to your salon per year. The idea is to offer one group of clients a fabulous special deal to try something else from your list of services. For example waxing clients who have never tried a facial. Or facial clients who have never experienced a lash tint. What about nail clients that have never opted for a pedicure? Indeed the permutations and combinations are endless. Try giving out special offers as these customers leave your salon. Mail to a particular group a fabulous deal. Even getting on the phone during quiet times can produce excellent results.

If every one of your 500 visitors tried just one new treatment at an average of $50 per treatment, you would have another $25 000. (Again I haven’t taken in the increased number of clients, nor have I dared to suggest that many might actually enjoy the new treatment and decide to have it regularly!)

Marketing 103

The third area to market towards is the strategy of inviting your customers to spend more each time they visit. Again there are two distinct methods of achieving success in this area. The first is to increase prices. The second is to train staff to up-sell additional services and add-on extra home care products to their beauty regime.

Putting up prices.

I can already feel you squirming at the suggestion that prices need to be adjusted several times a year. I have heard all the arguments about how your customers will leave and I just don’t believe that this is the case if you have the correct strategy. Ask yourself this question: Do you really know how much your clients are prepared to pay for your products and services? If you are like the vast majority of people who answer no, then the only way of finding the point that your clients are prepared to pay is to put up your prices until you begin to get comments. The way to do this is to raise prices gradually. I only ever print a short run of 1000 price menus. This way I need to reprint every few months. On each reprint I only touch up the prices of one section of my price list and only by a small amount.

For example, I might put only my waxing prices up by one dollar and not change anything else. Now how many customers wouldn’t come back for one miserly dollar? The next price list might see facial go up just a fraction, the following one has pedicures and manicures go up, Eventually you will get back to your waxing and you put it up another dollar. The beauty of this strategy is that facial clients don’t care about waxing prices and waxing clients won’t be affected by a price rise in facials. So not everyone even realises that there have been increases.

If half of your 500 strong data base had some sort of waxing on a regular basis and we charged them $1 extra each session, you can expect 250 people x 10 visits x $1 = $ 2500! And that’s just the waxing clients. Add the facial and pedicure, tinting and tanning increased prices as well and this is a considerable amount of extra income.

Up-selling and Add-on sales

The first task of this strategy is to ascertain exactly what each therapist’s average dollar per client or average dollar per hour is. Most of the beauty software systems can calculate this for you. By setting targets based on their averages, staff are conscious of the need to up-sell and add-on additional sales. To help staff in this area utilise staff meetings and training times to continually reinforce that for every treatment there is a secondary treatment that can compliment it.

Similarly every product has a number of sister products that work in harmony with the first. For example a facial can also have a lash tint, or a special eye masque, or even a neck and décolletage treatment. They can all be done whilst the facial masque is applied so they take no extra time and yet can earn the salon an extra thirty to forty dollars. Home care sales are just the same. We sell cleansers, exfoliants and moisturisers regularly, but very few masques or serums or ampoules. Body lotions need loofa gloves and body exfoliants. Every fake tan application should include either a body exfoliation or a home care body moisturiser, exfoliant and loofa glove.

When therapists are made aware of these easy extra sales they will increase their average spend considerably.

If all of your original 500 clients purchased only one extra product throughout the year at an average price of $50. Then they all had just one extra service sometime throughout the year added to their usual treatments valued at an average of $50. That would equal an additional $50 000!! This figure is for only a single add-on product and a single up-sell service. Imagine the result when your staff perform this way regularly.

Now I have used very low numbers to highlight my points, the average salon in New Zealand has more than 500 regular clients and could obviously experience much larger increases. So consider what happens when your salon is retaining more clients than ever before, attracting more new visitors weekly, increasing the regularity of client services, introducing extra services into each client’s beauty regime, increasing your prices and selling more each time someone enters your premises. Each on their own may only be a small amount, but collectively it can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars!