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.
by Greg Milner | Jun 22, 2008 | Ask the Experts, Getting Salon Clients Quickly, Salon Advertising Tips
Salon Marketing Plan Strategy: Are They SERIOUS??
When I first read the following email from a spa owner last weekend, I thought she was having a lend of me, taking the mickey. I read it again, and again. Nope, she was actually serious. But it still took my breath away.
So I’m not going to embarrass the poor lady by revealing her name, or the city she writes from. It doesn’t matter anyway, because it could have come from any one of the many thousands of salon & spa owners who subscribe to this newsletter and market their beauty salons (except our Inner Circle members, of course. At least THEY are well educated enough not to make this most basic of foolish, delusional mistakes.)
“My husband and I are in the process of setting up a Spa & Beauty Salon, and working on a tight budget. Our first big hiccup is a dispute over our business card….”
Good grief. Of all of the challenges of setting up a new business – hiring staff, fitting out, getting product to sell, signage, marketing, admin, etc etc etc – a business card has provided the catalyst for their biggest dispute? My heart sank. Then. it got worse.
“We finally reached a decision on our logo, which I must say was very hard. I designed the business card with the logo on the left hand side. Our phone number on top right with a list of services underneath, followed by our address on the bottom, all on a matt white background so our logo will stand out in blue.”
By this point, my head is in my hands, throbbing. My eyes are glazing over.
Why do so many people new to business invest so much time, energy, money and angst over things that do not matter a damn remains an enduring mystery to me. So, for the benefit of this misguided soul, and every other salon & spa owner reading this, I’ll repeat something I’ve been banging on about for years:
In the entire history of the human race, a logo has never sold anything. Zero. Zip. Nada. Nyet. EVER.
Neither has a business card…that’s correct folks, even a business card emblazoned with a fancy logo.
The fatal mistake this and so many other business people make – and this applies equally to the ‘big’ end of town – is to assume that things like logos and pretty graphics and clever ‘slogans’ are enough in and of themselves to do the only thing that really matters in any business. And that is, to
get customers in the door and sell something to them.
(And do not for a moment believe that this most basic misunderstanding is limited to start-up businesses. A few years ago, the biggest bank in my part of the world, the Commonwealth, actually hired – at a cost of millions of dollars – an entire squadron of PR people, pony-tailed advertising so-called ‘experts’ and image consultants to agonize over, workshop, consult, focus-group and doodle till they were blue in the face so the brains-trust at this giant organization could unveil, with great fanfare, their new corporate logo!)
Do you really think, for a moment, that had McDonalds done nothing but erect a couple of golden arches, they would have sold so much as a single hamburger? Of course not, because McDonalds understands that ‘corporate branding’ and ‘image’ is only secondary, and matters more after they’ve acquired a customer, it doesn’t actually get the customer in the door in the first place.
No. What gets the customer through your door, above and beyond all else, is
THE OFFER.
Without a compelling OFFER – wrapped in a great sales message – plus a means of identifying your ideal target market (it’s called lead generation), and a method of delivering that message to that ideal market – all the fancy logos, business cards, corporate branding, staff training, back-office systems, salon fit-out etc etc – are a complete
waste of time, energy and money.
So my advice to this salon owner, and anybody else contemplating, agonizing over, arguing about their logo or business card… forget it, throw it out…and start again. Start with the only thing that gets customers in the door, and that is marketing, in its most basic form:
The OFFER, a great headline, testimonials, a strong guarantee, a call to action, multiple means of response, follow-up offers, list building, and above all, building a relationship with your customers.
In the end, ALL business is about relationships. And if you think a logo is going to do all of the above, by all means, go ahead and waste your time on the damn thing. Personally, I wouldn’t give it a nano-second’s thought.
And for those who don’t believe a practice what I preach: I don’t even have a business card.
by Greg Milner | Jun 1, 2008 | Packaging Salon Services, Salon Advertising Tips
Salon Marketing Plan Strategy: Getting Your Clients to Pay ONE YEAR Up Front…
Need cash in a HURRY? When I’ve needed cash in a hurry, I’ve always found that the best way to get it is…drum roll…. ask your customers for it.
That’s exactly what Inner Circle member Nikki Gilbert (left) of Creations Beauty Studio, just outside Canberra, did recently.
“How I Brought in $12,000 …. in ONE Week, from just SEVEN Clients”
(No wonder she’s smiling!) What Nikki did was create a terrific value-added offer as a marketing plan for her salon, based on the techniques in her Toolkit. (In Nikki’s case, $4,572 worth of facials, microdermabrasion, waxing and massages over 12 months, for just $1,794.)
She took a carefully hand-written two-page letter template from the kit (Inner Circle members see below), written on yellow legal pad…and re-wrote it in her own hand. Then she printed a bunch of them, and sent this two-page letter to just 15 of her clients.
Result?
“I had seven clients take up the offer, for a total of $12,558. I am delighted!” says Nikki.
NOTE TO WSM MEMBERS:
The exact letter that Nikki used is now available in the Members Only ‘Sealed Section’. Login and click on the category ‘marketing to existing clients’
Not yet a WSM member? Click here to find out more about My Social Salon
by Greg Milner | Apr 9, 2008 | Getting Salon Clients Quickly, Salon Advertising Tips
Chris Burkinshaw
Salon Marketing: $300 Hair Salon Ad Turns Into $9,200 in new Sales and 15 New Customers
Inner Circle member Chris Burkinshaw of Turning Heads in Wagga, New South Wales, reports terrific success from a cheap little ad he ran in the free newspaper in his town last week.
Chris took a salon template from the WSM system (see My Social Salon here), modified it to suit his salon, and booked space in the paper last Wednesday to test the offer.
Within two days, 7 bookings. By Monday of this week, another 8 bookings. And still coming in.
Ad cost: $330
Total sales so far: $9,200! (In a week.) That’s a gross return on investment of 27 to 1.
Plus, at a new to frequent client conversion rate of only 50%, and average annual client value of $1000, his salon marketing adds up to an extra $7,500 of extra annual revenue. Do only that every week, and you’re adding $390,000 to your annual turnover, in a year.
As Chris says, “We’ve never, ever had this kind of response from our newspaper advertising before.”
Now, only Inner Circle members will find this salon marketing ad in their email in-boxes in the next few days, but I will tell you what the ad DIDN’T have in it.
It didn’t have glossy pictures of glamorous young things sporting impossible-to-maintain hair styles that only have a place on the catwalk. It didn’t have vast acres of blank space, or clever tag lines. What it DID have was LOTS of text, a great OFFER, a simple, compelling headline, a guarantee that would make most salon owners vomit with fear, a Call to Action – and the name and contact number of the salon at the bottom of the ad, where it belongs, not the top of the ad, where most business owners would put it.
(NOTE to Members: watch out for this ad in your in-box. Feel free to use it.)
