by Greg Milner | Jan 28, 2009 | Ask the Experts, Beating the Competition, Getting Salon Clients Quickly, Increasing Retail Sales, Salon SMS Marketing
Salon And Spa Marketing: Dumb And Dumber-Why The Big Beauty Businesses Are Struggling, And How Small Independent Salons Can Laugh All The Way To The Bank
Despite what you read in the newspapers, it’s not ALL bad news.
From the Big End of town to the tiny end, there are plenty of reports indicating that the “recession” is patchy, uneven at best, certainly NOT a uniform slide into economic oblivion.
McDonald’s is reporting a massive 80% increase in net profit in 2008 over 2007. Spooked by the relentless reports of Armageddon on the TV news, it seems folks are hitting the fast food joints to save money on meals (and no doubt pile on some fat to carry them through the economic winter!)
Maccas made $4.3 billion in ’08, compared with $2.3 billion in ’07.
In our little world of entrepreneurial salon & spa owners, it’s a similar story, all over the world.
In Scottsdale, Arizona, Body Solutions Laser & Skin owners Dr Tim & Kanna Reilly report a staggering 500% increase in sales in 2008 over 2007, using a simple system of done-for-you direct response marketing tools and ‘sales thinking’ strategies they bought from Worldwide Salon Marketing in August 2007.
“It was a revelation,” says Dr Reilly, whose chiropractic clinic morphed into a skin care clinic over several years but had always bled them white. They were on the verge of giving up and closing their doors, until they ‘got it’ just in time and joined the WSM Inner Circle marketing & mentoring program.
IC member Rechelle Watt with her business award…a 40% increase in salon sales in 2008
Then there’s Inner Circle member Rechelle Watt, of Lamonde Hair Face & Body in New South Wales, Australia. While the majority of salon owners whine about how tough things are, Rechelle and hundreds of other Inner Circle members is going from strength to strength.
In ’08, a 40% increase in sales over ’07, according to an email from Rechelle this week.
“WOW!!!….. it’s AMAZING how my business has changed,” says Rechelle, echoing the sentiments of her fellow IC Members. Click here to read Rechelle’s full story.
(Members Only: want to copy what Rechelle’s done? Log into the Members Only section and navigate to ‘Getting New Clients – Hair’ and you’ll find the newspaper ads and the text messages Rechelle used to generate an extra $109,509 in sales in 2008)
And they do it using simple, hard-nosed, “ugly” copy-intensive emotional direct-response marketing, contained in the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit and the coaching they get as Inner Circle members – not the unaccountable, ‘imagey’ expensive branding-style-lets-hope-some-of-it-sticks marketing typically rolled out by big dumb companies using other people’s (eg shareholders’) money.
Big companies in the beauty business are as guilty of pouring useless advertising dollars down the ‘branding’ toilet as anybody else at the top end of town.
Take the giant Regis Corporation, owner of such brands as Cost Cutters, Super Cuts and Hair Club for Men and Women, Regis spend gazillions last year in an up-market makeover of its newly-purchased 635-store Trade Secret chain of salons, attempting to ‘European-ize’ them as a means of selling more bottles of beauty glop.
It was clearly money down the drain. This week Regis folded its Trade Secrets tent, announcing it was ‘selling’ the brand to Premier Salons Beauty Inc.
The word ‘selling’ is a euphemism for actually giving it away. Regis will get precisely zero, nada, zilch for the ‘sale’, instead picking up some tax credits on all the money it’s flushed down the drain on its worthless branding exercise.
All of which just goes to show, dear salon owner, that the ‘geniuses’ running these billion dollar product suppliers and salon chain owners are certainly no brighter, and in many cases a lot dumber, than you the small independent salon owner.
So take heart. If hundreds of our small-time independent salon Inner Circle members can actually increase sales in this deep recession, so can you.
If, of course, you’re equipped with the same marketing & sales tools and coaching.
Which is why you need to apply right now, before you suffer any more hardship, for Inner Circle membership and get that Toolkit in your hands.
Note to US and Canadian salon owners: successful IC members Dr Tim & Kanna Reilly of Body Solutions in Scottsdale, AZ are Worldwide Salon Marketing’s first USA franchise, and are handling all coaching for new North American members as of January 2009.
by Greg Milner | Jan 28, 2009 | Ads that Have Worked, Beating the Competition, Increasing Retail Sales, Salon Advertising Tips, The Smell of Success
Salon Spa Marketing: “Wow…it’s AMAZING how my business has changed!” says small salon owner
90 new clients every month, and $109,509 in extra sales for ’08
(IC Members: Log into the Members Only section, navigate to Getting New Clients – Hair, and you’ll be able to download the exact ads and text messages Rechelle describes here)
“I have been in business for 11 years and never had the success that I am having now….I have been a Worldwide Salon Marketing member for about 5 years, but didn’t change much about how I marketed my business so obviously I didn’t get the results.
“The salon was not doing so well in 2007. Things were really bad. I then made a decision to do something about the business. So I took action; I went off the tools working only three days in the salon and two full days on the business at home in my office.
“The first thing I knew I needed to get sorted was the marketing and be consistent with it.
Every month we did two big promotions via text message. Each SMS was to 2000 clients. We had a massive response from this particular SMS.”
(Members: Log into the Members Only section and navigate to “Getting New Clients – Hair” to copy the exact text Rechelle used)
“This SMS I started to send out in June 2008 and we are still sending it every fortnight.
“Sales increased in 2008 by 40% compared to 2007! That’s $109,509 extra (Real Big Green Ones) in 2008 sales.
“I also did this exact promotion in a newspaper advertisement which also was a huge success.
“It was a half page ad costing around $350 each time and was placed each month from July 2008. We are still placing the ad every month and it’s still working.(Members: Log into the Members Only section and navigate to “Getting New Clients – Hair” to copy the exact ads Rechelle used)
“We also did all the normal marketing such as newsletters, new clients letters, birthdays and referrals all from the Toolkit. We are getting an average per month 90 new clients. Retail sales have gone through the roof, up $6000 per month.
“The Toolkit gave me the tools, the ideas, the ingredients to make my marketing fantastic and I was persistent with it and it gave me real results. I have attached a copy of the newspaper ad and a picture of myself receiving the best customer service business award for 2008.
All the best, Rechelle Watt, Lamonde Hair Face Body, Toukley, NSW.”
by Greg Milner | Jan 27, 2009 | Blog, New Zealand
Marketing Plan For Hair Salon: New Zealand salons get local access to Inner Circle support
IC member and now New Zealand representative for WSM, Rachael D’Aguiar. “All we did to be successful was copy what works. If we can do that, we figure most other NZ salon & spa owners can too…”
Beating the recession has suddenly become a lot easier for Kiwi salon & spa owners; they now have local access to mentoring and marketing tools developed by Australia’s Worldwide Salon Marketing.
Following expansion into the huge US salon & spa market, the company has appointed Auckland salon owners and long-term Inner Circle members Rachael D’Aguiar and husband Chris Sanders as sole NZ agents of its Inner Circle marketing & mentoring program, and the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit™.
“We beat the recession and actually grew our sales – so we figured we could help other Kiwi salon owners do the same!”
According to Chris and Rachael, their Auckland salon D’Aguiar Hair Skin Nails has enjoyed a huge growth spurt in 2008 as a result of using the direct response marketing tools and strategies in the Toolkit.
The couple will be duplicating the successful Australian business for NZ salon owners, including conducting training seminars, individual coaching sessions for members, group coaching calls and supplying on-going and updated, proven marketing support.
Rachael is already well-known in New Zealand as the voice of Whitcoulls’ TV and radio campaign, as well as one of the Huggies Mums.
Chris Sanders has a background in events management, including the recent David Beckham visit, and the NZ tour by (Spandau Ballet’s) Paul Young and Tony Hadley.
“Being successful in business isn’t about being a genius, it’s just copying what others have done and applying it,” she says. “That’s all we did. And if we can do it, hundreds of other NZ salon owners can do it too.”
NZ salon owners can contact Rachael or Chris on Auckland 09 441 6906
by Greg Milner | Jan 18, 2009 | Ask the Experts, Beating the Competition, The Right Mindset
Marketing Plan For Hair Salon Business: Are you an entrepreneur, or just a business owner?
Salon entrepreneurs & Inner Circle members Jane Dowling and Niki Koutrakis: “Xmas was a huge success! Our best ever! Gift voucher sales were up 50% on last year, and overall we were up 30% for December. That’s with the same amount of staff as well! Jane and I are so pleased as January has been off to a busy start also! And the (Advance Notice Marketing Triggers) you send out by email to Members are great…so easy to follow.”
Even those salon and spa owners whose business is recording bigger and bigger sales in spite of the recession (and there are plenty of our Inner Circle members reporting extraordinary results, see the photo and caption at left, and elsewhere on this site) it would be foolish to point at such results and say the recession does not exist per se.
While there may be green shoots of optimism, by and large the picture is a grim one across thousands of industries.
At home, my 28-year-old second son is glum. Just over a month ago he was riding high on the back of the China-driven resources boom, making over $100,000 a year as a fly-in, fly-out driller, about to buy his first property. Then the crash hit, Chinese orders for iron ore started drying up, his employer’s share price tanked 95%.
Within weeks his world has crashed, about to lose his job, no chance of buying that house. He’s no orphan.
But funny things happen when things get tough.
To me, it’s a time of terrific opportunity for (some of) those in the beauty business.
Lean close, dear reader: for here is a dose of reality that 95% of your competition doesn’t get, won’t understand, will to their detriment ignore.
The typical reaction – certainly among Hair Salon businesses – to a downturn is to close the shutters, to actually stop doing the only thing that brings money in the door – a marketing plan for a Hair Salon Business! For you, the savvy salon or spa owner, this is simply a brilliant opportunity.
Because most of your competition actually remove themselves from the market place, decrease rather than increase their visibility. They stop spending money on advertising. And that creates a sudden vacuum.
Less noise in the market place means your message can be heard easier. Fewer salons & spas spending on advertising means your ads, flyers, direct mail can cut through the clutter.
But it takes a certain entrepreneurial mindset to actually get this, a certain determination to not simply understand it, but put it into action. I wonder how many salon & spa owners reading this really regard themselves as entrepreneurial. Not many, I hazard to guess.
The relative few who do are those who tend to be attracted to the My Social Salon marketing & mentoring program. They understand that being in the salon or spa business is not about cutting hair, or applying glop to a client’s face.
They tend to be risk-takers, because if you’re totally averse to risk, you shouldn’t be in business anyhow.
Stubborn, delusionally optimistic, creative, fearless, flexible and focussed are some of the ways psychologists and business people describe the personality of the entrepreneur.
According to former Apple executive Guy Kawasaki, “you need to be in denial or in ignorance about the huge challenges you face.”
And Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway scooter, says he often suffers sleepless nights wrestling over whether to quit a project that’s not panning out. “You end up lying there saying, I’m not stopping. It would be an act of shallow cowardice. Or you decide to quit and you say – This is one of those ideas that just isn’t going to work.”
Of the entrepreneur mindset, Kamen says “It’s not that they’re brilliant or well-educated. They work all the time. They don’t let failure demoralize or destroy them. They pick themselves up and keep going and eventually, every once in a while, one of your ideas actually breaks through and works, and it makes all that stuff seem worthwhile.”
(source: http://us.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/worklife/01/12/entrepreneur.psychology/index.html)
Here’s an example of Entrepreneurship at Work in the Salon Business (AND a special bonus for Inner Circle members)
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| IC member Tegan Messineo and partner Ben – spectacular results from some entrepreneurial ‘sales thinking’ and marketing ACTION up for her country town salon. |
Tegan Messineo of Body Firming and Beauty in Bunbury, Western Australia, joined WSM and received her Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit in October 2008. Tegan obviously believes in ACTION. She writes this week how she used the Toolkit principles, resources in the Members Only ‘Sealed Section’ website and some ‘sales thinking’ strategies to craft a radio ad.
It ran on the local radio station only THREE TIMES before she had to take it off air because it was too successful.
Members: Get Tegan’s radio ad and salon flyer NOW by logging into the Member’s Only ‘Sealed Section’ and navigating to ‘Getting New Clients – Beauty’
On its first outing, the ad ran twice on Day One and generated TEN bookings. On Day Two the ad ran ONCE and generated another 9 bookings, at which point Tegan pulled the ad because they were already up to the self-imposed limit of 19 prospects for the free trial treatment.
At the time of this posting, the salon had had 5 of those 19 in for their free treatment, and signed up FOUR of them for a full course of anti-cellulite treatment at $1500 a time, paid up front. I’ll do the sums for you:
That’s $6,000 in up-front sales, in TWO DAYS, with another 14 prospects yet to see. But at that 80% conversion rate, Tegan can expect total sales of around $22,000 – all from a radio ad that cost a measly $170 to produce and schedule for a full week.
But there was a lot of more detailed ‘sales thinking’ that went into this, I’ll let Tegan explain:
“Now even though we need to give a client 1 hour of our time and we don’t know if they are really here to buy or if they are just tire kickers, we decided that when they call up and book in we will up sell them an extra $20 and they can include Virtual Mesotherapy and Ultrasound to their appointment. Now if this client doesn’t end up purchasing anything she still has to pay her $20 so that then covers our time and product.
“Also because its a free appointment people sometimes think that they don’t need to show up. That then makes it worse for us as we have set aside this 1 hour time slot. So if they don’t want to upgrade to the Meso and ultrasound we then still get them to pay a $20 deposit which they will get back when they show up for their appointment. If they fail to show up they forfeit their deposit.
“In the appointment we have a structure that we use.
- We do the consultation
- Analyse their body shape
- Grade their cellulite
- Measure them
- Do the treatment
- Re-measure them
- Discuss treatment packages
- Close the sale
- Get the Happy Form filled out
“We have included a lot into the packages that we are selling but..in reality it doesn’t cost us much at all. Absolutely everything is factored into the price and then our mark-up is added on. With the toning tables we are using it as something to basically bulk up the package. And we have already had ladies say that they don’t want this or that in their package but because its a package they still have to pay for it.
The cost to run the radio add for this week has been $170.
Thanks for the great Ideas!!! Its sooo nice to see when all your hard work pays off!
Tegan Messineo
Body Firming and Beauty”
by Greg Milner | Jan 14, 2009 | Getting Salon Clients Quickly, Increasing Retail Sales, Motivating Salon Staff, Salon Advertising Tips
Hair Salon Marketing Plan: How This Salon Got 165 New Clients in ONE Month-Special Group Coaching Call For Inner Circle Members
Motion Beats Meditation, Every Time – Hit ‘Play’ on audio below.
First, some interesting news that belies all the gloom and doom. International research and survey firm Synovate reports that a poll of 11,500 people in over a dozen countries found 41% of people plan to spend the same amount on beauty products and services as they did before the downturn, while only 27% said they would cut down. (source: www.synovate.com)
And there are other signs (hard to find in the mainstream press) that the outlook is not ALL thunder and lightning for 2009. China? The most recent figures I can find indicate China’s growth will ‘only’ be around 7% this year. ONLY 7%?? In any other country, 7% growth would produce dancing in the streets and joyful public fornication.
There are other indicators that the world hasn’t actually stopped turning. Principally from our own Inner Circle members. I love it when I hear from members who are truly kicking some serious butt… despite the ‘recession’, without regard to any and all obstacles put before them, regardless of nay-saying friends, family and/or staff, while ignoring the self-fulfilling talk of gloom and doom.
Like Chicken Little, for some people the sky is always falling in. For a few (certainly most of our Members) what falls out of the sky is money.
Nadia Valerio of Valerio Hair in Doncaster, Victoria. A real ‘action woman’.
Among them, Nadia Valerio of Valerio Hair in Doncaster, Victoria.
Most salons struggle to fill chairs/treatment rooms at this time of the year. Nadia and her staff of 11 are struggling to keep up with the sheer volume of clients, all brought in using simple ads, flyers and sales strategies from the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit™
Get this: In November last year Nadia took an ad from the Toolkit and ran it in the local paper. The salon was run off its feet, in just five weeks they took in no fewer than
165 NEW clients.
(MEMBERS: Log into the Members Only ‘Sealed Section’ and you’ll find the ad that Nadia used under “Getting New Clients – Hair”)
That result was achieved despite what many would see as a massive handicap – located in a huge shopping mall with no fewer than EIGHT directly competing salons.
“Every client that came in the week after then received a $10 welcome letter/gift voucher to come back to the store and so far in 8 weeks of the first ad going to print 45 of those clients have come back, it has been the most amazing response, I could not have asked for anything more and this is just a start. We have put together a plan for the next 6 months and can’t wait to put it all in to play. Once again thank you WORLDWIDE SALON MARKETING you have taken my business to the next level,” writes Nadia.
