by Greg Milner | Nov 23, 2010 | Salon Advertising Tips
We get a LOT of calls asking us about the Toolkit and what’s in it.
So here’s a list you can download – it’s the Contents Page of the Salon Marketing Made Easy manual, which contains the hundreds of salon-specific marketing templates for marketing in all kinds of media; newspapers, direct mail, online, text messages, letters, Yellow Pages, magazines, email and much more. Plus how to use them, the Direct Response formulas behind them, and the campaign strategies they’re based on.
Click here to download the Contents Page for the Hair Salon marketing manual.
Click here to download the Contents Page for the Beauty Salon marketing manual.
NOTE: These are the contents of just the Salon Marketing Made Easy manual in the Toolkit. I have not included here the contents of the other major manual, Selling Like Crazy.
How to get the entire Toolkit, and join the Inner Circle Premium marketing & mentoring program on a 90-day Risk Free Test Drive – Click here to complete the simple online form and we’ll contact you within 48 hours.
The all-new Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit – the first major update since the product was launched in 2004
by Greg Milner | Aug 12, 2009 | Salon Advertising Tips
Salon owner Jemima Richards used a series of linked sales letters straight from the Toolkit to triple her marketing response
Salon Website Template: The ONE Marketing Strategy That Will Triple ANY Salon’s Direct Mail Response
Call me old-fashioned – somebody did once, and I said ‘fiddlesticks’ – but it’s a mystery to me why so many salon owners (even some Inner Circle members, who should know better) just do NOT get one of the simplest, easy-to-implement salon & spa marketing strategies I have ever taught.
Well, from Jemima Richards of Sync Detoxify Nourish Regenerate yet more proof – if any more were needed – that this strategy DOES work, works brilliantly, and all you have to do is implement it.
Says Jemima:
“Had to just let you know that we have been laughing a lot around here because I am an idiot! The reason for the laughter is the amount of return we are getting (using your strategy) and how many more bookings we are getting from the 2nd and 3rd letter.
“You always said it, and not that I didn’t believe you…if only I had been doing this all along…!”
What Jemima is talking about is the proven direct mail strategy of a linked series of letters to a list of customers or qualified prospects. Most businesses send one letter, and no matter what response they get, presume the rest are simply not interested, and give up.
It is a fatal marketing mistake. You leave untold amounts of money uncollected, sitting on the table.
Hear this: if you are tempted to do a one-shot mailing and stop there, save your money. They don’t even feel the breeze.
As Jemima says – and we have proven over and over and over again – you’ll often get a BIGGER response off letters #2 and #3 than you will off the first letter.
It is precisely why the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit™ is FULL of these linked, sequential letters, for a multitude of purposes and events, e.g.,
- The ‘Raise the Dead’ letters for getting ‘lost’ clients back. Written specifically for this purpose, with fun, from Rupert the Dog.
- The New Client re-booking letters, a series of three.
- The change of season letters to existing clients
..and a ton of other letters for every imaginable purpose.
“Oh, I couldn’t do that, my clients would think I’m pestering them.”
No, they won’t. Here’s the truth: clients leave you because of neglect, not because you’re sending them nice letters.
(And if ONE client complains, are you going to use that as a pathetic excuse to ignore the rest of your client base?)
by Greg Milner | Jun 23, 2009 | Ask the Experts, Salon Advertising Tips
Salon Internet Marketing: How to Stop Others Sabotaging Your Salon Marketing
This salon got 40 new clients in two days – no thanks to their local newspaper…
Interesting case this week which shows just how vigilant you need to be to stop people sabotaging your marketing efforts.
Untrained staff will do it all the time, if you let them. Phone rings madly after your ad comes out, only to be met by “uh…sorry, don’t know about that offer, hang on, I’ll ask someone…”
That’s something that IS under your control, and only YOU can fix it. But what about when your local newspaper refuses to publish your ad because ‘it’s against the law…”!!!?
 |
| Inner Circle member Tamara Jones of Beauty Bliss in Cairns, Queensland – 40 new clients from a single $300 ad on page 23 of the local newspaper. But no thanks to the newspaper itself. |
It happend to Inner Circle member Tamara Jones of Beauty Bliss in Cairns, far north Queensland.
“At first they point-blank refused to run my ad at all,” says Tamara, “Then they refused to let me use the word FREE!”
Turns out that some fool at the newspaper had half-read – and totally misunderstood – a recent case where the consumer watchdog had clamped down on an internet company pretending to offer free bonuses which weren’t actually free, they were hidden by inflated prices.
Rightly so…but for the newspaper to interpret this as a blanket ban on the use of the word ‘free’ was clearly nonsense. I know this because, being the diligent reporter that I am, I personally phoned the relevant mouthpiece at the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and got it from the horse’s mouth.
“Are you saying that it’s now illegal for businesses to give away stuff for free?” I asked the spokesman.
“Not at all,” he said, “all we’re doing is stopping people building the cost of so-called bonuses into an inflated price for the original product,” he said.
Sometimes, bureaucracy is a a condom on progress. But its effect is magnified a thousand times by officious and ill-informed employees mis-interpreting the ‘rules’ and needlessly preventing perfectly-legal marketing.
So what happened to Tamara’s ad?
On a happier note, Tamara persisted with the idiot newspaper rep. With no time to check the facts with the authorities, she agreed to change the word ‘free’ to ‘bonus’, and let the ad run last Saturday.It was published way down in the paper, on page 23.
“We had 21 bookings on Saturday, another 17 on Monday, more on Tuesday, and the phone is still ringing. 40 bookings so far, and the ad is scheduled to run again Thursday. I am so impressed. Of these bookings, only 2 are existing clients. My new therapist was supposed to be only working 3 days a week, she’s already doing 5 days…this is great for us, the salon is buzzing again, thank you to all the staff at Worldwide Salon Marketing…!”
Forty new clients…let’s say she keeps only half of them for the long term…and each is worth say $1,000 a year. So that single $300 could well have added $20,000 a year to Tamara’s sales. That’s pretty good leverage.
INNER CIRCLE MEMBERS: Want to see the ad Tamara used? Log into the Members Only ‘sealed section’ and navigate to Getting New Clients – Beauty’ and you’ll find it in .jpg format you can download. Hair salon owners: don’t give me grief about ‘oh, that’s for beauty, we’re a hair salon’. Instead, think: “How can I make this work for my hair salon…?”
by Greg Milner | Jun 2, 2009 | Salon Advertising Tips
IC member Marnie Kallmeyer – discovered why advertising in glossy magazines can be TOXIC for your business, if you do it the magazine’s way instead of our way…
Yet more evidence, if any were needed, that the publishers of magazines are more interested in how advertising looks than how effective it is for the people who pay their bills – the advertisers.
Inner Circle member Marnie Kallmeyer of Beauty Image reports this week the frustrating experience of paying up-front for a full page ad in a bridal magazine. The magazine not only
a) refused to run her strong direct-response ad, they
b) told her there was too much text in it (!!), then
c) provided her with their version – the horrible, useless, space-wasting piece of ‘pretty’ junk you see below.
When Marnie objected and said ‘forget it, I’ll cancel the ad and have my money back’, the magazine refused to refund her!!
I spoke to Marnie today and here’s what she said:
The more you get accustomed to ‘our’ style of emotional, effective direct-response marketing, the more you become a marketer of your business rather than simply a stylist or beauty therapist, the more you will encounter this kind of idiocy among certain sections of the media.
Big lesson: ignore these fools, take your advertising dollars where they will be effective.
Big prediction: this magazine will inevitably join the ranks of so many others who refuse to run advertising that attracts customers – in the tank. The advertisers clueless enough to accept the magazine’s stupid rules soon wake up that their money is down the toilet, pull their ads, and the magazine sinks like a stone.
by Greg Milner | Apr 8, 2009 | Salon Advertising Tips
Beauty Salon Marketing 101: Back to Basics
Asking Too Much Of Your Advertising.
Most business owners try to get their ad to do too much, to appeal to all possible prospects. And by doing so, it achieves nothing. Asking a single ad to do everything is asking too much of it.
A single ad should have one purpose, one job, one expected outcome, and nothing more. If you want to sell a particular kind of body treatment or hair service, only sell that service…sell it hard, with a great offer, a terrific headline, a strong guarantee… don’t simply fill your ad with a bullet-pointed list of everything you do. That’s not an ad, it’s an expensive 
business card. And nobody ever sold anything off a business card.
Here’s a typical beauty industry salon ad…. typically thoughtless, wasteful advertising, trying to do everything and in the end achieving nothing.So instead of saying in your advertising something like “call us for all beauty needs such as body treatments, pedicures, manicures, massages, nails, facials, blah blah blah…’ make your ad specific, make the offer very clear…
A word of warning: Most of the people who sell you advertising space are ignorant of this kind of advertising, and if they’re not ignorant of it, they fear it, because it is so accountable.
Many, many times we have had Members tell us that advertising reps have mocked the copy-intensive style of advertising in the Toolkit, sneering at it because it looks unprofessional, doesn’t look glossy, doesn’t have lots of pretty pictures in it, has too much text, etc etc.
Often, magazines have even refused to run this kind of ad, because their main interest is producing a glossy publication that looks pretty to their readers, rather than accepting advertising that actually works for their advertisers…the people who actually pay the magazine’s bills.
The general advertising industry is not at all tied to results. What the smart business owner has to do is educate himself enough so that he’s an informed, well-researched consumer when he does deal with service providers like agencies and printers and publishers.
As a small business owner, you should be investing only in marketing that is results measurable, so that you can track what you get for your dollar. You have to learn to say no to certain advertising reps or advertising opportunities, unless and until those opportunities pass the accountability test, for example if you’re approached to advertise in a magazine, you ONLY go ahead with that offer if you can run YOUR kind of ad, not their kind of ad – and only then if you’ve satisfied yourself that that particular publication is attracting the kind of readers you want as clients.
Most businesses in the beauty industry are out there with no message at all. Typically, salon owners will buy or lease their space, hang a sign out the front, spend a huge amount of time and energy on the interior, fret over the logo etc etc…. and open the door and wait for customers.
Very few spend any time at all on the only thing that really matters, which is getting customers through the door. Very few spend any time or research on what they’re going to communicate to the market about who they are, and why prospects should do business with them. Very few spend any time doing what we call ‘sales thinking’: which is analyzing what you sell, what your USP is, what your customers really want – and crafting a perfectly-pitched message that sells you and your business.
You see, advertising is nothing more than salesmanship in print.
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.”
So here’s a list you can download – it’s the Contents Page of the Salon Marketing Made Easy manual, which contains the hundreds of salon-specific marketing templates for marketing in all kinds of media; newspapers, direct mail, online, text messages, letters, Yellow Pages, magazines, email and much more. Plus how to use them, the Direct Response formulas behind them, and the campaign strategies they’re based on.
