If you have ever thought that marketing won’t work for your salon because you are in a small town then you should watch this video.
In this short clip, Suzy Poole owner of Body Divine in Kerikeri shares how she has taken her salon from a pretty dire state of affairs to a busy, profitable business in under a year, with big plans for expansion.
I was visiting Kerikeri for a couple of days this week and decided to pop in for a cuppa with Suzy and check out her salon. And I was really impressed with what I saw.
Suzy has created her own economy, while others around her continue to struggle on. In fact, Suzy’s business is growing so fast that she is in the process of expanding her existing salon and building a hair salon out the back.
What stood out the most on my visit to Suzy’s salon was the energy that she puts in to marketing her business, it’s clear that she has a great attitude, is incredibly passionate about it and a real ‘massive action’ taker.
And while I was in the salon clients were walking in and asking to buy one of her mini memberships that she had just released that morning. And as you’ll hear in the video, one customer even left a cheque in her mailbox with strict instructions so she didn’t miss out on one of only 10 memberships released!
Check out the video here….
For those of you who are not familiar with Kerikeri it’s a fairly small town in the Bay of Islands, population a few thousand.
Thanks for the grand tour of the salon Suzy and keep up the excellent wor
Most of us have had that horrible experience with a Yellow Pages or advertising sales rep in the past where they think they know best as to how your ad should look, we’ve gone with what they’ve said thinking that they are the experts, only to be left with an incredibly ineffective advert that looks ‘pretty’ but generates no phone calls and a large invoice!
Chloe Wilson of Unique Beauty, Timaru NZ
Well for Chloe Wilson of Unique Beauty in Timaru, New Zealand the days of trusting ad reps are long gone! She now trusts in one thing…her own opinion of how an effective advert should be constructed.
Since then she has been going guns blazing and has in fact tripled her salons turnover since joining Worldwide Salon Marketing around 8 months ago.
Here is what Chloe had to say….
“When I opened up my beauty salon in April 2011, it was very slow at the start, I spent over 6,000 on advertising that wasn’t working, in August I found WSM on the internet and started up with a 1500 leaflet drop to the surrounding area to the salon. I had 15 people book in from it and more from there just it just flowed.
After having a few phone calls with Toni, I let her know how scared I was about putting this advert in the yellow pages – she reassured me it would work, so I stuck with it. The advert cost me $2000 and doesn’t just look like an expensive business card anymore.
When the YP came out in October I had 3 phone calls on the day of it coming out and about 20 the next week following. I still get phone calls every week for the deal in advert and just people getting other treatments.
Since November I’ve only had 3 quiet weeks and I’ve had fully booked weeks, working 3 late nights a week and I’ve tripled my income a week from $500 a week to 2,000-3,000 weekly. I have also 10 weddings this year as well which has brought me more people to the salon and 3 booked in for the end of the year (friends from brides has make-up done with me).”
For Inner Circle Members I have made the actual Yellow Pages ad used by Chloe available on the members website for you to see.
Thanks for sharing your success with us Chloe. I’m sure you’ll have inspired many salon owners to give their ad rep a good old kick in the backside the next time they try and tell them they know best!
Keep up the great work!
Chris Sanders, Director Worldwide Salon Marketing NZ
Isn’t it time you started making some real money in your salon and doing marketing that actually gets results just like Chloe got? If you are ready to take the next step in your business then click here NOW to find out more!
Every salon owner loves the thought of getting more new clients through their business. It means an increase in turnover, profit, more product sales and so on. But what it also means for a lot of salon owners is more time ‘on the tools’. And that’s scary when you are already working 50 hours a week trying to run a business, make appointments, do the GST, pay the wages, do the marketing and everything else on top of that!
Hana Snowden, Owner of Ataahua Day Spa in Lower Hutt, NZ
Hana has been in our marketing and mentoring program now for 8 months and in that time she has seen her business grow and grow. Hana was a Beauty Therapist at the time of joining and has worked incredibly hard and taken lots of action to build her business. She soon realised the value of working ‘on’ her business instead of ‘in it’ servicing just one client at a time.
For those of you who have read ‘the E-myth’ you will be familiar with the concept of working more on your business as opposed to in it. For those who haven’t read it, it’s a MUST read so go out and get your hands on a copy asap!
Hana could spend an hour or 2 putting together her marketing campaigns that would bring her in lots of customers as well as thousands of dollars, instead of being in a treatment room making 50 bucks for a waxing appointment.
And this growth in turnover and customers allowed her the freedom to make the decision to pull herself ‘off the tools’ once and for all. She set a date (15th March) and told all her customers that as of that date she was a business owner, not a beauty therapist and would be handing her clients over to an employee.
Now I am not saying that being a beauty therapist or stylist is a bad thing. Rather being the owner of your business is a better thing, instead of being an employee/slave to it!
And Hana knows that should a staff member be sick, or someone leaves and has to be replaced then she can step back in, albeit temporarily, and cover for them – she has that option available to her.
And if Hana has been getting 10 new clients a week up to now, imagine what it will be like now that she can focus even more on the marketing.
10 new clients on average a week is 520 new clients per year. If each of those clients has a value to Hana of $1,000 each then she is looking at an increase in turnover of half a million this year alone. Heck, even if she kept just 50% of them that’s still a quarter of a million!
Too many business owners (not just salon owners) make the mistake of creating a job for themselves and becoming chained to their businesses. For many, the only way they feel they can make more money is to work more in the business so they can cover the bills. But the business will just continue to suffer if no time is being spent on the important stuff, the marketing and getting systems in place. And so the vicious cycle continues.
And I am talking from personal experience. Just over 4 years ago my wife Rachael was working as a Beauty Therapist in our salon D’Aguiar: hair.skin.nails in Auckland. She’d spend about 70 hours a week in there doing treatments, I would hardly ever see her, her hair was falling out due to stress and she was suffering severe RSI.
Just like Hana, we made the call (with the help at that time of Greg Milner) to pull Rachael off the tools, as nervous as we were that the clients would leave and the business would fail. Well, of course the clients didn’t leave, the salon flourished and today we own 4 massively successful businesses (including the salon which is run by a manager and we pop in maybe once a week).
If someone had told me 4 years ago that I’d be running 4 businesses then I would have thought they were mad and laughed in their face. But today, I understand the concept of working on the business, not in it. So I still have plenty of time to spend with Rachael and our new 2 week old baby. It’s all because of the world-famous Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit®
Monique Porter of Monique Beauty Therapy, North Shore, Auckland
Setting yourself goals and targets is so important in both your personal and business life. Without having an end result in mind, how will you be able to visualise and achieve your desired outcome?
Let’s take ‘losing weight’ as an example in your personal life. When you set yourself that goal did you have a specific number of kilo’s in mind that you wanted to lose? Did you write that number down somewhere or have a chart on the wall plotting your weight loss over a number of weeks? Was there a timeframe you wanted to achieve it by? Did you reward yourself for meeting certain weight loss targets and was there a consequence if you didn’t make your goal? Come to think of it, did you even weigh yourself to find out what your current weight is – or was the whole idea a wild stab in the dark?
It’s crucial to set goals and targets in your business life too.
In a coaching call just over a month ago with Inner Circle Member Monique Porter of Moniques Beauty Therapy on Auckland’s North Shore, she explained how she was having real problems selling retail to her customers. In fact, so much so that Monique, who is a sole operator, was selling no retail at all to her clients.
We talked through the retailing strategies in the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit® ‘Selling Like Crazy Manual’ and put in place some targets. The target set was to sell just 3 products per week over the 4 weeks (12 in total) by the time we spoke next. Baby steps to start with, but as you’ll hear Monique surpassed these targets with ease…
“I’ve gone from selling no product at all, to selling 18 products in just a month. I Sold 3 starter packages at $65.50 each, 9 bottles of product for in-grown hairs at $21 each, 4 flax seed oil products at $32 each and and 2 nail polishes for $10 each. That’s a total of 18 products for the month and $532 in extra revenue!”
Now that Moinque has achieved her first target, she can and has set new targets to keep this momentum going. If every month she got 18 different clients using her products, that’s 216 clients by the end of 12 months using her product ranges at a current average sale of $29.55 each. Of course, this doesn’t take into account that many of these client will also start purchasing more than just one product.
It’s also worth looking at what would have happened if Monique had NOT sold product to these clients, apart from missing out on the obvious extra income?
These clients would have left her salon and more than likely walked straight down the road to the supermarket or chemist (a salon’s biggest competitor) and bought their product from there. Now the products you get from a supermarket or chemist are generally not the best, so when the client found that their skin or hair wasn’t improving, the first thing they will do is blame the salon or therapist, not the products. So it’s unlikely that you’ll ever see them in the salon again.
So it’s extremely crucial that as experts in your industry, be it hair or beauty, you need to share your knowledge with your clients and give them the products to keep looking after themselves at home, in between their visits to your salon. That’s what your trained to do after all!
And don’t be afraid to sell people stuff! Let me ask you a question. You love to shop, right? So why are people so afraid to sell other people stuff, be it hair products or whatever. Whether you like it or not, you and your staff are sales people in your salon.
Well done Monique on your great product sales and looking forward to hearing more success stories from you!
If you put a gun to my head and told me I could only use ONE method of marketing to my clients, I’d always give the same answer – NEWSLETTERS!
Not once every six months, not once every quarter, but every single month. Nothing puts an ‘iron fence’ around your clients like a regular hard-copy newsletter, in an envelope, with a stamp on it. (Email? Sure – it’s efficient, but it’s nowhere near as effective.)
Now, there are THREE ways to do a monthly newsletter.
1) The HARD way. Sit down at your computer and write the whole thing yourself, lay it out so it looks attractive, and get it printed.
2) The EASY way. Download the many templates for newsletters in the Members area, sit down at your computer, and write all the content for it.
3) The REALLY EASY way!
Long-time IC member Susan Vincent has set up a brilliant ‘done-for-you’ newsletter service for salon owners who know the value of a monthly newsletter, but just don’t have time to do it themselves.
For just $97 a month, Susan will do everything for you, and email you the complete newsletter, in Word format, every month. All you need to do is insert your own details, and send it off to the printer.
Frankly, it just doesn’t get any easier than that. For $97 a month, there’s no way I’d be sitting down at a computer for hours on end!
Here’s what Inner Circle member EvaTzschaschel says about her experience with Susan’s newsletter service:
‘Hi Susan,
I just wanted to let you know how excited my clients are about the newsletter. I know I would have never gotten my act together if you didn’t offer your fabulous service. Here are some comments of my clients: “I enjoyed reading your newsletter”, “It’s a really good read”, “Very professional”; and a few people asked me for the next issue. I think it’s a good way to stay in front of clients without being pushy. Thank you so much for your help.
Kind regards,
Eva Tzschaschel
Face Body Wellness
4/3 Julius Ave
North Ryde
NSW 2113′
“During November for marketing I released 4 newspaper ads, Glossy DL clinic package promotions inserted into envelopes and home delivered, Email’s sent out to the data base (I had purchased a beauty salon prior) and hand delivered DL cards. Nothing sold more clinic packages than the newsletter.B ecause of the style of your text, even clients of 11 years can’t tell it’s not me talking. Thank you Susan for your passion. Integrity is growing with you on board.”
