by Greg Milner | Mar 17, 2013 | Beating the Competition, Blog, Email marketing, Featured, Packaging Salon Services, Salon Events
Ashleigh Mills of Ashleigh Renea Hair & Beauty in Katanning, WA; $3,000 in gift voucher sales in two hours
Most business owners simply leave everything too LATE to capitalize on marketing opportunities in the hair & beauty business. And you don’t have to be a genius to identify many of these opportunities, they’re scheduled in the calendar years in advance. For example, Mothers Day. (In most of the world, the second Sunday in May)
But great rewards come to those who plan well in advance. For example, long-time WSM member Ashleigh Mills of Ashleigh Renea Hair & Beauty in regional Western Australia.
With Mothers Day approaching, Ashleigh decided she needed military-style planning and precision to make the most of this major ‘salon marketing trigger’ event in any salon’s annual calendar.
From the WSM Members Only ‘sealed section’ resources website, Ashleigh downloaded a series of templates for email marketing, planned her campaign several weeks out, and drew up a schedule of out-bound marketing pieces to her database of clients.
On the appointed date, she pulled the trigger. On Saturday, the day before Mother’s Day, Ashleigh arrived at work early. Just as well. Before she’d even opened for business, the phone started ringing, and didn’t stop for two hours.
And that’s in a little country town of just a few thousand people. Here’s how Ashleigh describes that morning, and the lead-up to it.
[cf]Ashleigh2[/cf]
Ashleigh and hundreds of other smart salon owners around the world have 24/7 access to the huge library of resources in the Members Only ‘sealed section’ website, plus the world’s best online marketing tools, templates and systems in the ‘done-for-you’ My Social Salon marketing program, ONLY for salons & spas.
LIVE now on the Members Only website
All NEW Mothers Day advertising, posters, fliers – instant downloads for Members
We’re adding dozens of new salon advertising and marketing templates to the Members only ‘sealed section’ website site every month – in March, a completely new series of templates for one of the BIGGEST salon marketing events of the year.
Mothers Day is a big day for salons & spa marketing all over the world. It’s when thousands of salons make (or should make!) a large part of their annual revenue.
But so many face the thought of marketing with a shudder – all that work!
Not for Worldwide Salon Marketing members. As always, we provide our members with fresh direct response marketing templates – for all the major Marketing Trigger Events – throughout the year.
You’ll find them in various sizes and formats, both US and A4, postcards, posters etc.
Never stare at a blank computer screen again!
(STOP PRESS: new Mother’s Day Marketing & Advertising Templates here)
The new templates join literally hundreds of done-for-you advertising only for salons & spas, in the world’s biggest specialist library for salon & spa marketing.
All you do is simply download them from the website, edit them to suit your own salon’s offers and specialties, enter your own business name and address, and bingo – instant advertising! Never again stare at a blank computer screen, not knowing what to write or how to lay it out.
These templates are being continually produced by our copywriting and graphics team, adding to our vast library every month.
The Members website is a storehouse containing literally years of proven, done-for-you direct response marketing templates. They’ve been downloaded, tested and proven to grab salon clients fast, all over the world.
Online marketing, email, SMS, newspaper ads, radio ads, salon posters, client letters – you’ll find them all on the Members Only website.
Not yet a member?
Still sitting in front of a computer screen, tearing your hair out, not knowing what to put in your ads?
Go here to find out how you can get 24/7 access to the world’s largest Marketing Resources Library just for salons & spas
by Greg Milner | Jul 13, 2009 | About Us, Beating the Competition
Hair Salon Marketing Tips: When your competition copies you…
Do you find it annoying when a competing salon sees how successful you are, and simply copies your advertising for themselves?
Yep, there it is, virtually a direct copy of the ad you ran only last week.
Well, get over it. Pay it no more attention. In fact, you should be celebrating it. Because what they’re seeing (and copying) is only the tip of the iceberg of your success.
What they cannot see, and therefore cannot copy, is all that bulk below the waterline – the systems that turn that great marketing into solid sales behind the counter.
I know this because it happens to us all the time.
Just this week, one of our operatives in England emailed me a link to the website of yet another salon marketing wannabe
who’s seen how Worldwide Salon Marketing has grown from a spare-room start-up into a multi-million dollar business – and wants ‘in’ on the action.
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Yet another one – if you search the web long enough you’ll find more and more of these sites popping up, purporting to offer salon owners ‘the’ answers to all things marketing.
Apart from a website, few have any more depth to them.
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This new player – he’s by no means the first, and won’t be the last – has even gone so far as to blatantly copy our product names, e.g., he’s promoting his own ‘Inner Circle’ program, he’s offering his own ‘7-Step Mini Marketing Course’, and more carbon copies of the systems and marketing collateral we’ve developed over the last 5 years.
Our ‘spy’ was worried about our new ‘competition’. Frankly, I couldn’t care less. Because I know that 99% of all start-up business owners fail to do the things which create depth, structure and longevity for their business. In other words, they do no more than enough to skim the surface for short-term cash, and don’t invest in resources to create a long-term business.
The bigger we get (400 current member salons, growing by 30-40 per month) the more we invest in strengthening the foundations.
Here at head office, there are ten staff engaged in coaching members, providing member services, marketing, internet support, accounts and product development. In New Zealand and America, we have franchisees devoted to supporting our Members in those countries, and soon, similar operations in the UK.
Over the years we’ve invested millions on establishing systems for database management, offline and online marketing, seminar events, product packaging, product delivery, intellectual property development, member services, and office management.
(more…)
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 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 | Sep 17, 2008 | Beating the Competition, Getting Salon Clients Quickly, Increasing Retail Sales, Motivating Salon Staff
Worldwide Salon Marketing members: see below for the exact ad and marketing idea for a salon that brought one Member 87 new clients and $12,000 extra sales in a month.
You might be wondering ‘how can a little salon like mine ever be a successful business….when I know nothing about business!?’
Well, take heart. About the only thing you can hear on Wall Street this week is the sound of wrists being slashed and breasts being beaten, as yet more of America’s ‘institutions’ collapse in a very untidy heap, and the rest of the country shakes in fear of the economic ‘disaster’ ahead. Lehmann Brothers…dead and buried. Merrill Lynch sold for a pittance. Now the country’s biggest insurance company, AIG, bailed out by the taxpayer for $80-odd BILLION.
So you think YOU don’t know anything about business? The guys running these huge corporations are supposed to be Titans of Industry, the so-called Masters of the Universe. Yet it seems they’re not so smart after all.
How dumb was it to lend money to people who never had a hope of paying it back?
The emperors really don’t have any clothes.
If only these fools had half the smarts of some of our Inner Circle members, who clearly know more about how to make a profit than most of the Wall St wizards who’ve got America and much of the rest of the world into so much trouble.
Below are reports just in this week, from salons and spas in America and Australia…from salon owners who have thumbed their noses at the ‘recession’, are making more money than they’ve ever made in their lives, at a time when most salon & spa owners are shutting their eyes, slamming the door, hiding under the table and hoping that when they eventually do come out into the light again, things will have miraculously got better, all by themselves.
For here is the Great Recession Lesson: the more people do just that – bunker down, stop marketing…the greater is the opportunity for those few of us remaining to capture their market, make more money, not less, and come out the other side in better shape than we’ve ever been.
EXAMPLE #1: First to one of our more prominent Inner Circle members, Body Solutions Laser & Skin Care in Scottsdale, Arizona. From owners Dr Tim & Kanna Reilly, an email just in today, complete with the ad they used to achieve some spectacular results this past month:
Tim & Kanna Reilly
Hi Greg,
I know you like to share some ideas with other Inner Circle Members so I thought I’d open up this one. The attached ad (sse below) ran in our local paper (black and white, quarter page ad) from August 11to September 13. The results:
87 New Clients @ $99 per facial = $8613
53 bought products totaling approx $4000
60 already rebooked for another next month. Total from one monthly promotion was over $12,000, money spent on ad was $1040 for the month ( the ad ran 3x per week for 4 weeks)
Thanks as always for all your help, ideas and encouragement! If we keep this up well be looking for even more space. Take care, Kanna Reilly, Body Solutions LASER & SKIN, Scottsdale, AZ, USA.
WSM members: log into the Members only ‘sealed section’ www.worldwidesalonmarketing.com/members and navigate to the “Getting New Clients – Beauty” category to download the exact ad that Tim & Kanna used to get these results.
The In-Spa promotions that brought this Member retail sales of $25,000 a month.
EXAMPLE #2: Sydney salon owner Lesley Morgan-Wesson took two years to decide to join the Inner Circle program and get her marketing & sales Toolkit. By the sound of Lesley’s latest email to us, sounds like it’s been a worthwhile investment!
“We shall achieve our $1,000,000 goal by the end of this year…”
Lesley Morgan-Wesson Marketing Ideas For A Salon
I was working on reception in the salon yesterday… (because we’re 2 staff down at the moment: 1 on holiday and 1 I let go) and I was staggered at how busy we are!! I don’t work in the salon and rarely go in so I mean… it was really a surprise!
Let me explain…
Some of our staff are booked up til January of next year! We’re generally booked up until the end of September.
We’re doubling our turnover each month over the same period last year. We’re getting 15-20 enquiries from our website per day and most are converting… and they’re good quality clients as well.
Client feedback is very positive… one of our long term clients popped in yesterday because she saw me in the salon and we were generally updating each other. She praised the business, the staff, the marketing, the atmosphere, the decor, in fact the whole business… and me. This is a lady whose professional life revolves around the big end of town and has worked closely with all the big fashion houses in Paris. So you can imagine I was thrilled by her praise.
And perhaps the biggest coup for me was a few weeks ago I was approached by a local up-market shopping centre to open a spa there (on the basis of our website, our look and our reputation). I had a meeting last week with centre management and I’m working on a feasibility study and financial projection for them and for me… it’s looking very positive.
We shall achieve our $1,000,000 goal by the end of this year… no mean feat when you think a few months ago a Thai massage centre opened right next door to us and another massage centre opened across the road PLUS we already had 28 competitors in the area! Well, I’m happy to announce about 7 businesses have already closed and we rarely see anyone in the massage centre.
Why am I sharing this with you? Well, our salon has always done well… but this year it’s growing exponentially and really taking off!
I believe the reason is several-fold… I’m implementing all the Inner Circle theory (not just slavishly copying the templates) you speak and write about and yes, it requires tweaking at times… but when you get it right… BOOM!! I also have formulae, templates, notes, mentors and coaches to guide and support me and I feel so confident about the path I’m on… it’s great.
(Last year I was seriously considering giving up… too hard for the little return… I was so close to over it!)
So thank you very much… I enjoy being part of the Inner Circle because you and Jill have an impeccable work ethic and it is also evident in the staff you employ.
Kind regards (and raving fan),
Lesley Morgan-Wesson, Owner, LADY AT BAY, Sydney.
Marketing Ideas For A Salon Lesley
Recession? Nuts to that!
Ashleigh and hundreds of other smart salon owners around the world have 24/7 access to the huge library of resources in the Members Only ‘sealed section’ website, plus the world’s best online marketing tools, templates and systems in the ‘done-for-you’ My Social Salon marketing program, ONLY for salons & spas.
