Hair extensions – Very Profitable, but you still need to sell it HARD.

Hair Extensions templateHair extensions are one of the most profitable services for any salon. But you can’t simply post a glossy picture and hope for the best. Like all direct response marketing, it still needs to be accompanied by a compelling OFFER, and reasons to call you NOW (eg, scarcity, limited to the first X to call etc)

This template allows you to insert your own details, along with your offer, guarantee, scarcity etc.

You can use it as a mailbox flyer, turn it into an image for Facebook and Instagram, and upload it to your own website.

MEMBERS: Click HERE to download in Word (editable) format. 

NOT A MEMBER? Get this – and hundreds more done-for-you, proven salon advertising and marketing templates as a Member of Worldwide Salon Marketing. For a ridiculously small price, never again sit in front of a blank computer screen wondering what to write!

Go here to find out more – you can be downloading winning promotions within minutes!

[VIDEO] How Peta got 30 new clients

Smooth logoPeta Hyde owns a successful salon in Caloundra, Queensland, just south of the Sunshine Coast. She’s been a Member of Worldwide Salon Marketing’s top-level My Social Salon marketing & coaching program for a long time.

So she knows that successful salon marketing and advertising is about taking lots of action, simultaneously…not doing one thing and waiting a month before doing something else.

In this video, she explains how a well-executed campaign brought in 30 new clients…

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Peta is a Member of the My Social Salon program. You can find out more about that program here, and apply for a 30-day Risk Free Test Drive.

 

How to craft a compelling offer

How to craft a compelling offer

How to craft a compelling offer

Too many salon owners spend money on an ad, or a flyer, and somehow expect a flood of customers simply because they placed the ad. It’s an enduring mystery to me how so many business owners think the mere running of an ad should be enough in itself to generate business.

Yet the information about what makes great advertising – for the salon business, for any business – has been public knowledge for more than a hundred years.

It was six o’clock on a May evening in 1905 when John E. Kennedy sent a note up to A. L. Thomas, the senior partner of the Lord & Thomas advertising agency. Thomas was just getting ready to leave the office when the messenger brought him the note. It read as follows:

“You do not know what advertising is. No one in the advertising business knows what advertising is. No advertiser knows for certain what advertising is. If you want to know, tell this messenger that I should come up. I’m waiting in the lobby downstairs.”

It was signed: “John E. Kennedy.” Thomas read the note with an amused smile then handed it to Albert D. Lasker, the junior partner in the firm and said to him, “Well, you have been asking this question for years and nobody has yet satisfied you. Maybe here is the answer…You see the man.”

Albert Lasker saw Kennedy that night. It wasn’t until 3 o’clock in the morning before they left the building. And when Lasker left that night, he had the answer to what advertising was. What Kennedy told him that night was simple. Advertising is

SALESMANSHIP-IN-PRINT.

Salon advertising doesn’t get much worse than this. It smacks of pure laziness, ignorance and desperation. With advertising as pathetic as this, the salon deserves to fail. And it’s so easy for a competitor to counter with “We fix $5 haircuts.”

And the core skill of ‘salesmanship in print’ is in creating a compelling offer – then building a story around that offer which virtually forces the reader to keep reading.

Most business owners are too lazy to bother with this. About the best that most can bother with is a plain and simple discount. For example,

“Half price waxing!”

That’s not an offer. All it does is train your clients to expect a discount. It devalues what you sell. And it takes money right out of your wallet.

But it doesn’t take much effort to do so much better. Take a look around at what you already do in your salon or spa – things you currently provide your clients for free, in the normal course of business.

Now, what if you put a notional value on each and every one of these things?

A stylist will typically give a client a brief scalp massage during the shampoo. A beauty therapist might, in the normal course of doing a facial, relax the client with a soothing hand massage, some eyebrow grooming, perhaps a mini pedicure.

All of these things have a value. Yet, if they’re merely provided as a freebie, without declaring that value, then in the client’s mind they are worth…nothing.

It’s only when you clearly ascribe a defined value of each and every ‘extra’ service that you provide, that you create in the mind of the client what we call in marketing ‘perceived value’.

Worldwide Salon Marketing member salons will know all about this. The hundreds of ad, flyer and sales letter templates in the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit, and in the Members Only ‘sealed section’ of this website, all contain some form of what we call

value adding.

Once you ‘get’ this, it suddenly becomes easy to create massive added value – and it allows you to actually increase prices under the valued-added ‘shelter’.

The biggest advertising secrets…

David Ogilvy - had a better understanding of what makes effective advertising than anybody else

David Ogilvy – had a better understanding of what makes effective advertising than anybody else

This is quite a long blog post. Deliberately so, to be honest.

If you have even a passing interest in what actually makes people buy stuff (your stuff, maybe), what makes for ‘good’ advertising and what deserves to be instantly consigned to the trash, this will be riveting, eye-opening stuff (particularly if you believe the nonsense peddled by so many fools about ‘people won’t read it if there’s lots of text’, and ‘fill it with lots of pretty pictures and not much else…’).

Take one of the world’s top car makers, Honda. This esteemed Japanese company spent no less than $US107,000 on a full page ad in the New York Times magazine. Take a moment to cast your eyes over this ‘masterpiece’ below.

For their $107,000, Honda – thanks to the geniuses at their high-priced agency – ended up with an ad that clearly gave the ‘creative’ art director a warm fuzzy feeling, but breaks almost every rule in the advertising book.

The Honda ad misses the mark in so many ways. Here are just a couple:

1) the entire premise of the ad is a single small headline in the middle of the page – “Our speakers can create an interesting sound. Silence” – followed by one paragraph of text so tiny you need a magnifying glass to read it. Here is what it says (clumsily):

Most speakers only create sound. Ours, on the other hand, can also take it away. Microphones inside the cabin constantly monitor unwanted engine noise. When noise is detected, opposing frequencies are broadcast through the speakers to eliminate it, literally fighting sound with sound. The result is dramatically reduced engine noise for a quieter, more comfortable cabin. Active Sound Control in the Acura TSX V-6. The most innovative thinking you’ll find, you’ll find in an Acura. Learn more at acura.com.
—Honda Motor Co., Ltd.

2) “The wickedest of sins,” said ad guru David Olgilvy, “is to run an advertisement without a headline.” This pathetic effort for Honda contains a bizarre headline of three blank treble clefs with no notes of music. Er, doesn’t the sound system in the Honda play music??

3) Then, in a tribute to laziness, the copywriter has left the remainder of the page entirely blank. A complete waste of (very) expensive real estate.

Ogilvy, the creator of the most famous ad agency in the world, Ogilvy and Mather, was a stickler for research. And that discipline produced some of the world’s greatest advertising campaigns. The writer of this appalling Honda ad clearly didn’t do any research. If he had, he would have been able to creatively ‘steal’ some of Ogilvy’s work.

One of the most famous automobile ads in the history of advertising was David Ogilvy’s masterpiece for Rolls-Royce that ran 50 years ago. Like the Honda Acrua ad, the headline is pinned to the same USP—the quietness of the car. Here is that ad:

From “Ogilvy on Advertising”:

You don’t stand a tinker’s chance of producing successful advertising unless you start by doing your homework. I have always found this extremely tedious, but there is no substitute for it.

First, study the product you are going to advertise. The more you know about it, the more likely you are to come up with a big idea for selling it. When I got the Rolls-Royce account, I spent three weeks reading about the car and came across a statement that “at sixty miles an hour, the loudest noise comes from the electric clock.” This became the headline, and it was followed by 607 words of factual copy.

Here is Ogilvy’s copy:

Headline: At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.

Subhead: What makes Rolls-Royce the best car in the world? “There is really no magic about it—it is merely patient attention to detail,” says an eminent Rolls-Royce engineer.

1. “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise comes from the electric clock” reports the Technical Editor of THE MOTOR. Three mufflers tune out sound frequencies—acoustically.

2. Every Rolls-Royce engine is run for seven hours at full throttle before installation, and each car is test-driven for hundreds of miles over varying road surfaces.

3. The Rolls-Royce is designed as an owner-driven car. It is eighteen inches shorter than the largest domestic cars.

4. The car has power steering, power brakes and automatic gear-shift. It is very easy to drive and to park. No chauffeur required.

5. The finished car spends a week in the final test-shop, being fine-tuned. Here it is subjected to 98 separate ordeals. For example, the engineers use a stethoscope to listen for axle-whine.

6. The Rolls-Royce is guaranteed for three years. With a new network of dealers and parts-depots from Coast to Coast, service is no problem.

7. The Rolls-Royce radiator has never changed, except that when Sir Henry Royce died in 1933 the monogram RR was changed from red to black.

8. The coachwork is given five coats of primer paint, and hand rubbed between each coat, before nine coats of finishing paint go on.

9. By moving a switch on the steering column, you can adjust the shock-absorbers to suit road conditions.

10. A picnic table, veneered in French walnut, slides out from under the dash. Two more swing out behind the front seats.

11. You can get such optional extras as an Espresso coffee-making machine, a dictating machine, a bed, hot and cold water for washing, an electric razor or a telephone.

12. There are three separate systems of power brakes, two hydraulic and one mechanical. Damage to one will not affect the others. The Rolls-Royce is a very safe car—and also a very lively car. It cruises serenely at eight-five. Top speed is in excess of 100 m.p.h.

13. The Bentley is made by Rolls-Royce. Except for the radiators, they are identical motor cars, manufactured by the same engineers in the same works. People who feel diffident about driving a Rolls-Royce can buy a Bentley.

Price. The Rolls-Royce illustrated in this advertisement—f.o.b. principal ports of entry—costs $13,995.

If you would like the rewarding experience of driving a Rolls-Royce or Bentley, write or telephone to one of the dealers listed on the opposite page. Rolls-Royce Inc., 10 Rockefeller Plaza, New York 20, N.Y. Circle 5-1144.

When Ogilvy presented his copy to Rolls-Royce management in New York, the senior engineer said, “We really must do something to improve our clock.”

According to the Ogilvy agency, this ad ran in only two newspapers and two magazines. Yet it sold a ton of Rolls-Royce cars and the headline is Ogilvy’s entry in the “Oxford Book of Quotations.”

Why Ogilvy’s Ad Was a Masterpiece and the Honda Effort Is a Dud
The Rolls-Royce ad dazzled the reader with an avalanche of goodies, whereas Acura pinned its pitch to one small element of a very complex machine: its quietude. Here is Claude Hopkins on why an advertisement—such as Ogilvy’s Rolls-Royce effort—should tell the whole story:

Whatever claim you use to gain attention, the advertisement should tell a story reasonably complete …

Some advertisers, for sake of brevity, present one claim at a time. Or they write a serial ad, continued in another issue. There is no greater folly. Those serials almost never connect.

When you once get a person’s attention, then is the time to accomplish all you can ever hope with him. Bring all your good arguments to bear. Cover every phase of your subject. One fact appeals to some, one to another.

Omit any one and a certain percentage will lose the fact, which might convince.

People are not apt to read successive advertisements on any single line. No more than you read a news item twice, or a story. In one reading of an advertisement one decides for or against a proposition. And that operates against a second reading. So present to the reader, when once you get him, every important claim you have.”

In terms of copy, Ogilvy tells the quietness story in six succinct words:

Three mufflers tune out sound frequencies—acoustically.

To say the same thing—clumsily—the sad-sack Honda copywriter takes 64 words:

Most speakers only create sound. Ours, on the other hand, can also take it away. Microphones inside the cabin constantly monitor unwanted engine noise. When noise is detected, opposing frequencies are broadcast through the speakers to eliminate it, literally fighting sound with sound. The result is dramatically reduced engine noise for a quieter, more comfortable cabin. Active Sound Control in the Acura TSX V-6.

Finally, you judge which ad has the sexier call to action:

“If you would like the rewarding experience of driving a Rolls-Royce or Bentley, write or telephone to one of the dealers listed on the opposite page.”

Or…“Learn more at acura.com.”

And when you go to acura.com and you get a navel-gazer of headline created by a copy team talking to itself:

Rational thought meets freedom of expression

Good grief.

Acknowledgement: Although I have written extensively on the subject of ‘telling the whole story’ before, I thank Denny Hatch (www.dennyhatch.com) for much of the source material for this article.

Why Most Salon Marketing Fails

Why Most Salon Marketing Fails – Message to all salon & spa owners addicted to Facebook, brainwashed into thinking that ‘old-fashioned’ types of salon advertising and marketing are dead:

A lot of people had a lot of good ideas before you were born. And most of those good ideas are still good ideas. But their lessons have been largely forgotten, which is why most hair & beauty industry marketing in the ‘modern’ era is a complete failure.

Take a look at this Revlon TV ad from 1973.

A ‘Charlie Girl’ had power and confidence unheard of among women in 1973 – hence the briefcase, and her hand on HIS backside instead of the other way round!

Anybody over the age of forty will remember the famous print and TV campaigns for Revlon’s ‘Charlie’ perfume. In the seventies, when women were still fighting to be seen as ‘equal’ to men, these ads were a revelation.
For the first time, they portrayed women as strong, deliberately sexy, confident and powerful at a time when most advertising put women firmly in the kitchen and laundry.

And if you’re a student of marketing, you’ll notice one more crucial thing: the ads aren’t about the product! There’s not even a hint about what’s in it, no dreary nonsense about how it was created by white-coated scientists with lots of letters after their names, in clinical laboratories using secret ingredients distilled from the purified secretions of a now-extinct South American tree frog.

Revlon founder Charles Revson knew the secret that most business people seem to have forgotten long ago; that nobody cares a damn about the product.

Revson’s advertising answered emphatically the only question that really matters:

‘Why should I, your prospective customer, buy this?’

There’s an old saying that talks about not being able to ‘see the forest through all the trees’.

Everybody suffers from it from time to time, even those who’re often seen by others as super-successful.

Like the salon owner who approached me last week for some advice. This very young salon owner joined Worldwide Salon Marketing a few years ago when she was working alone and struggling, and became almost an ‘overnight’ success.

She devoured everything I teach about direct response marketing for salons, soaked it up like a sponge, rapidly and repeatedly implementing everything she found in our systems, and pretty soon found herself creating her own advertising through everything she’d learned.

Became, in effect, a marketing machine.  Her salon grew and grew, she bought another salon, and within two years of joining WSM was working almost exclusively from home, while her salons ran on automatic pilot.

But that wasn’t enough for all this new-found entrepreneurial zeal. It had to find another outlet somewhere. So she decided she’d develop her own skin care product line, and use the internet to sell it.

All good so far. Then she ran into a bank of fog that clouded her once-clear vision. She wrote to me and asked

“Greg, I need a bit of reassurance…is this web-based ‘glop’ a good idea, or am I frigging mad???!!! We all have these days when we wonder ‘what the hell…’ – don’t we?”

We do indeed. This is what I wrote back to her:

“Don’t think of it as ‘web-based glop’. There is no such thing as an ‘internet business’. The internet is not a business, it’s merely a media. Just one media.

You need to think of your idea as a business, like any other business. As a marketing and sales business that just happens to be selling a beauty product or products, using the internet as just one of the many forms of media it uses to get its message out, gather leads, make sales to those leads.

It’s much bigger than just an ‘internet business’. And it’s not something you can do for a couple of hours a week, sitting at the kitchen table in your track pants, thinking this is all it takes.

You’re contemplating setting up and growing a business. Not a hobby. Don’t think of it as a ‘internet glop’ hobby. Imagine instead that you’re setting up a drilling company, or a construction business, or a fashion brand. Do all the same things you would do for your ‘glop’ business as you would do for those businesses.”

She got it immediately.

“ Thanks for that…..reality check. You’re exactly right! It comes down to marketing and sales…there are companies selling the same product, the difference will be my marketing and my sales ability…which these other companies have no idea about!”

She hit the nail on the head.
Most people, particularly in big, dumb companies, lose sight of the fact that it’s not what you’re selling that matters, it’s how you market and sell it.
They fall under their own spell, mesmerised by their own wonderful product or service, deluded into thinking that their prospects, customers and clients actually give a damn about the product. They don’t, at all. People only care about what a product does for them, not the product itself.
Which is exactly why you see most companies selling any kind of hair or skin product blathering on endlessly about obscure and meaningless ingredients – essentially, selling the sausage instead of the sizzle.

So the next time you’re tossing around product options for your salon, look closely, ask questions, and when the product rep tries to blind you with science, hold your hand up and demand clear, concise answers.

“If you were standing in front of a customer, what would you say to this customer that would clearly, in a single sentence, convince the customer to buy your product as against any and all options available to her?”
Unless and until you get a great answer to that question, all you’re selling is ‘glop’.

Why Most Salon Marketing Fails

19 salon marketing tactics – the dinosaur that still bites

19 salon marketing tactics - the dinosaur that still bites

19 salon marketing tactics – the dinosaur that still bites

19 salon marketing tactics – the dinosaur that still bites – In an age where business owners seem obsessed with YouTwitFace and InstaPin, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that old-fashioned direct mail has worked for a hundred years – and still works, brilliantly. If it’s done the right way. According to a survey conducted by by Millward Brown, a leading global research agency, ”physical media–AKA direct mail–left a ‘deeper footprint’ in the brain.” In other words media that consumers can touch and feel resonated and touched more emotions than those of the digital variety.

And those consumers that are affected by “physical media” are not just the older demo, as many marketers believe.
Here’s a Direct Mail Checklist – print this out and keep it handy for the next time you’re contemplating a direct mail piece, such as a mailbox flier or a letter to clients.

The Outer Envelope

1. Use the back of the envelope.  It’s 50/50 the envelope will arrive face-down – why not use the back to further entice the prospect to open it up?

2. Put a strong message on the outer envelope. I often recommend not using the outer envelope for anything other than the stamp and the address, but if you have a really strong message, it’s sometimes worthwhile putting it on the front. A famous outer envelope for a psychology magazine said: “Do you close the bathroom door, even if you’re the only one home?”

3. Use a dimensional package. Boxes always get opened. Always. Just make sure your company name’s prominent on the outside, otherwise the bomb squad may get hold of it first.

4. Version your envelope to your list. Nothing will get a prospect to open an envelope faster than if it’s obviously for them. For example, “Inside, a special offer for owners of businesses.”

The Letter.

5. Make the letter look like a letter. Not some institutionalized, obviously mail-merged piece of mass-marketing. It should look as much as possible like a personal one-to-one communication. It’s why I use and recommend a font like Courier New instead of Times New Roman or Ariel – which look just like they’ve been done on an office computer.

6. Make the letter personal. It should read and sound like a personal letter, even intimate. Written with a different voice than a standard business letter. Read it aloud. If it doesn’t sound like you’d say it to somebody sitting in front of you, gas it and start again. It continues to amaze me how much stiff, awkward, yet ostensibly ‘businesslike’ mail crosses my desk.

7. Write the letter in the first person. It mystifies me why, as a business grows, its owner or owners begin to want to hide behind some sort of amorphous, anonymous corporate entity. Say ‘I’, not ‘we’. A famous letter from the President of AT&T to its customers in the US began: “I love a challenge. As the President of AT&T Consumer Long Distance Services, I face them every day. And that’s why I’m writing to you.” I wish I’d written that paragraph. You can’t help but read on. It won back more than 1.2 million customers without even making an offer. Telstra’s Ziggy Switkowski should take note.

8. Add a powerful PS. I read something in a marketing magazine recently that said a PS was passe and nobody read them any more. Nuts. It’s the first thing a lot of people read, so always add one, and make it powerful. Restate your offer. Re-inforce your guarantee. Add your physical location, with reference to some well-known building or business nearby.

9. Make it longer. I have this debate with clients all the time. How long should a letter be? There’s only one answer – as long as it’s interesting. You’re not talking to everyone, you’re talking to the small percentage of your target market that will truly be interested in what you have to offer. Typically my letters and the letters I write for clients run to at least half a dozen pages. They always sell better than short letters. Always.

10. Use a yellow ‘post it’ note. I haven’t tried this yet, but direct marketing colleague Alan Rosenspan says he’s used it to lift response by 10%. One technique is to put a yellow post it note on a page that seems to have been ripped out of a magazine. “Bob, try this, it really works.”

11. Give them a way to respond. Amazing the amount of marketing that looks great and then fizzles out leaving the reader no way of actually buying the stuff or picking up the phone. Always give several different ways to respond…phone, preferably a 1800 number, by fax, by email. Not too many though. Give people nine ways to get off a sinking ship and they all drown.

12. Personalise the reply card. Here’s the test: If you up-end the envelope and nothing falls out but the reply card, is there enough on there to encourage a reply? If your sales message is strong and the card or page has the prospect’s name on it, you’re on a winner.

13. Use anecdotes. It’s supposed to be a personal communication to one person – even if you’re mailing to a million. Tell stories, make them personal, they can be a powerful way of backing up what you’re saying, and they lift interest. “Take my own teeth, for example,” a dentist might write. “My own dentist said to me the other day, Alan, this one’s going to have to come out.”

14. Say ‘You” as much as possible. There are a dozen or so words direct marketers have proven to be powerful in headlines and letters, and there’s none more powerful than the simple ‘you’. Use it as often as you can.

15. Use testimonials. How many? As many as you can! Pretty easy to dispute one or two testimonials. Pretty hard to dispute 500 of ‘em!

16. Use photographs. Nothing but nothing is more powerful proof than a photograph. Why do you think the weight-loss people use before and after pictures? Because they sell – they are what draws the eye and a response like “I want to be like that!”

17. Always include a guarantee. If you want a rule, this is one of the unbreakable ones: don’t try to sell anything without a guarantee of some kind. Make it a BIG guarantee, outrageous if possible. One of the most outrageous guarantees I’ve seen is from Jerry Jones, CEO of Media Group Corp in Oregon. Jerry sells ‘patient retention’ programs to dentists – it’s a newsletter to several hundred of the dentist’s best patients, prompting them to make referrals and spend more on cosmetic treatment. Jerry has scores of testimonials from dentists and doctors telling him how successful the program is for them.

Jerry’s guarantee: “If after 90 days you aren’t satisfied that the cost of my program isn’t offset by the gain in production, I’ll not only give you all your money back, I’ll fly you and a partner to Florida for a long weekend, AND I’ll spend two days in your practice doing menial tasks.”

18. Increase the offer if they act now. Anything you can do to get people to act now, rather than put it off, can increase response. For my ‘paperlessoffice’ business, I offered a completely free one-month trial, but only if the offer was taken up in January. Result: a full book for January.

19. Put a deadline on the offer. The role of the offer is to get people to act now. But make sure you give people enough time to respond, say a few weeks.

 

19 salon marketing tactics – the dinosaur that still bites