by Greg Milner | Aug 22, 2014 | Blog, Featured, The Smell of Success
Nicole Panayiotou, of Blush Professional Beauty Touch in the country town of Sale, Victoria, is about to have her first baby. So she simply had to get her salon running efficiently, profitably, without her. As the saying goes, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. So Nicole, a Member of WSM’s My Social Salon marketing and coaching program, decided to take massive action.
In this video interview I recorded with her today, Nicole describes how simple direct response marketing she’s learned as a WSM member, combined with her decision to employ a dedicated receptionist, has increased her revenue by $3,000 a week – and made it possible for her to have her baby without worrying about the business!
In July 2014 alone, her WSM-style marketing brought in a whopping 101 new clients….here’s how.
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We now have ONE place in the My Social Salon program available – for those salon & spa owners wanting the kind of sales boost Nicole has enjoyed, go here to find out how you could get a 30 Money Back Guaranteed ‘Test Drive’ of the entire system.
by Greg Milner | Aug 20, 2014 | Australia, Marketing Superstars, Packaging Salon Services, Salon Advertising Tips, The Smell of Success
Asking clients for cash up-front puts the fear of god into many salon owners – but not for Anita Clements of Twisted Desire in Corinda, a suburb of Brisbane. Using marketing templates she simply downloaded from the Worldwide Salon Marketing Million Dollar Resources Library, and some guidance on how to use them, Anita planned and executed a Membership drive that netted $9,200 in up-front sales – in two days, from just a handful of her many hundreds of regular clients.
In this video, Anita explains exactly how she did it, and followed it up a day later with a VIP ‘Blonde Night’ that attracted 30 clients brought in another $3,000 in bookings and product sales. (It’s salon marketing like this that’s helped Anita get ‘off the tools’ and work on the business instead of in it.)
(Note to Worldwide Salon Marketing Members: go here to the Members Library to download the actual marketing pieces Anita used to achieve this excellent result.)
Not a member? Go here to find out how to get a 30-day money back guaranteed Test Drive of the entire marketing program ‘My Social Salon‘.
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by Greg Milner | Aug 7, 2014 | Advertising Tips, Featured, Getting Salon Clients Quickly, Increasing Retail Sales, Newsletter marketing, Selling Salon Products, The Right Mindset, The Smell of Success
Achieving a massive increase in salon sales isn’t actually all that difficult – IF you’re prepared to to take Massive Action.
At Labella Beautique in Rockhampton, Queensland, owners Deanne & Shenae joined Worldwide Salon Marketing’s My Social Salon program in late May 2014. Two months later, they’d quadrupled their sales with a concentrated marketing effort using easy offline and online marketing tools & templates downloaded from the Members Only ‘sealed section’ website.
Admittedly, they were coming off a low base – but if a young (8 months old) little salon in the back blocks of regional Queensland can do it, any salon can. Here’s how Deanne and Shenae describe their marketing breakthroughs…
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Labella Beautique is a Member of the My Social Salon marketing & mentoring program, the world’s most comprehensive, done-for-you, online and offline marketing system developed ONLY for salons and spas. Membership is strictly-limited and available only for those salon owners who want to be business owners, nor merely therapists or technicians.
by Greg Milner | Aug 5, 2014 | Featured, Marketing Products, The Smell of Success
It always surprises me how little so many salon owners know about their own businesses. Particularly, some absolutely crucial numbers. In more than a decade of consulting to salons, I almost always get a bemused silence when I ask a salon owner for one vital piece of information.
“How much is an average customer worth to you in say, a year?”
It’s a question that goes back to an old saying in marketing: “Most business owners see the purpose of getting a customer is to make a sale. Smart business owners realise the purpose of making a sale is to get a customer.”
Most salon owners fall into the former category. They can, with reasonable accuracy, deduce the size of a per-visit spend by an average client, but few seem to have made the connection between the one-off sale, and the concept of “Lifetime Client Value.”
Do you know what an average customer is worth to you in a year? Do ya? Really??? Because if you don’t, you’re fighting a losing battle wearing a blindfold, with both arms tied behind your back.
My question about ‘lifetime value’ versus one-off sale value is usually met with a blank silence because most seem to look no further than next week’s appointments, let alone next year. Yet, when you know such a crucial business ‘key performance indicator’, you can see your database of client records in a completely different light.
Looking at your list of ‘missing in action’ clients suddenly becomes an exercise lit by flashing dollar signs. Imagine this: of your entire database of say 1,000 client records, you discover that only 300 of them are so-called ‘active’ customers. That is, with a reasonable degree of accuracy, you can be pretty confident that in any two month period you’ll see all of them.
Here’s where many owners of service businesses tie themselves up in an ever-tightening knot. Instead of ‘mining’ that database for gold nuggets, they ignore it, and focus frantically on the acquisition of ‘new’ clients – an expensive, time-consuming and often frustrating exercise.
So let’s do some numbers. Say you have 500 clients you haven’t seen for three months or more. In all honesty, if you haven’t seen someone in three months or more, they’re either dead – there’s not much you can do about that – or they’re so ‘cold’ as to be barely registering a pulse. But…and here’s the major difference between these people and all the brand new clients you spend every waking hour trying to attract – you have their contact details. (Well, you do, don’t you…don’t you???)
Letter #1 of the famous Rupert the Dog series…the ‘lost client’ retriever for salons all over the world
Even the most haphazardly-organised salon collects mobile numbers. Some might even have email addresses (although the value of email as a first-strike marketing media has been so degraded in recent years that as a stand-alone method of delivering a message it is almost useless.)
And the really serious business owners, those who treat their salon as a proper business, rather than a mere job – or worse, a hobby – have meticulously built a comprehensive database containing not only phone numbers and emails, but real, actual, old-fashioned physical mailing addresses.
Back to the numbers.
Let’s say you’ve done your numbers – if you’ve read this far, your fingers should have been dancing over your calculator well before now – and you’ve worked out that a regular, long-term client is worth $1,000 to you in a year. If you were to send a compelling offer to those 500 former or one-time-only clients, using a combination of media (phone, email, hard-copy letter), and that offer resulted in say, 30 of those 500 re-visiting the salon to redeem that offer…and you were able to turn 20 of those 30 into regular, long-term clients, guess what? By that single, well-executed marketing campaign, you’ve just given your business an annual income injection of…
$20,000!
And what if you were to repeat this exercise say, three times a year?
(And here’s a thought: next time a new customer walks through your front door, are you going to see $150 stamped on her forehead…or $1,000 stamped on her forehead? Makes a big difference in how you view and treat each new visitor, don’t it!)
There is overwhelming evidence that this process produces results. For years, our Member salons have been using a famous sequence of client letters now known as the “Rupert the Dog” series, in combination with SMS and email follow-up, to ‘Raise the Dead’ from among their lost-client database.
In the UK, Hannah McEnteggart is a typical example:
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You can get these exact same letters as part of the two-volume Salon Marketing Starter Pack. Download the Starter Pack instantly, and get not only those winning Raise the Dead letters, but a whole bunch of other tested and proven salon marketing templates and strategies.
by Greg Milner | Oct 9, 2013 | The Smell of Success
A lesson in how to turn a marketing disaster into a triumph, from Elon Musk, founder of Tesla
Most salon owners have nightmares about this: a disgruntled client goes to the media, and suddenly you have TV cameras aimed at you, and A Current Affair is bad-mouthing your business to thousands of viewers. Or your client creates a storm online – anonymously, of course – with humiliating reviews on Yelp, Google or other review sites.
How would YOU handle that? Would you fall in a heap, bury your head in the sand and hope it’ll all just go away, or will you take action to turn a marketing horror story into a massive advantage?
Here’s a fabulous lesson in brilliant public relations – it’s a Case Study on “How to Turn a Disaster Into a Triumph.”
On Tuesday last week a car caught fire on a highway in America. But this was no ordinary car. It was a super-luxurious, expensive, electric Tesla Model S built by Tesla Motors, the company founded by Paypal co-founder Elon Musk. Within minutes, images and videos of the fire were all over the internet.
By Thursday, Tesla had lost more than $2.5 billion in stock market value. Elon Musk, a 23% shareholder, had personally tanked nearly $600million. Investors feared the fire, and accident, might have shown a flaw in the company’s battery pack despite being called “the safest car in America.” But some truly brilliant public relations soon saw the disaster reversed.
Have a careful read of Musk’s response to the accident. There are lots of things to pick up on here. As Joe Polish points out in his blog,
1. DETAILS. The first half of the letter is incredibly detailed. Complete and thorough. This not only instills credibility, but gives you a clear picture of what accurately happened. They don’t avoid the issue. They face the facts head on in a way that makes sense of the incident.
2. TRANSFORM ACCIDENT INTO ADVANTAGE. In the second half of the letter, Elon transforms the accident into a positive advantage, and actually differentiates the Tesla from normal conventional gasoline cars. He turns disaster into an advantage for Tesla by pointing out the weakness in the competition, and proving the Tesla is superior to the competition.
3. BEHIND THE SCENES. In the last part of the letter, the communications between the Tesla owner who was in the accident and the VP of sales and service for Tesla are reproduced. This gives you a behind the scenes look at how the issue was handled with the customer experiencing the issue. Total transparency. This breeds trust.
Here’s the letter – they even published correspondence between the company and the customer:
October 4, 2013
About the Model S fire
By Elon Musk, Chairman, Product Architect & CEO
Earlier this week, a Model S traveling at highway speed struck a large metal object, causing significant damage to the vehicle. A curved section that fell off a semi-trailer was recovered from the roadway near where the accident occurred and, according to the road crew that was on the scene, appears to be the culprit.
The geometry of the object caused a powerful lever action as it went under the car, punching upward and impaling the Model S with a peak force on the order of 25 tons. Only a force of this magnitude would be strong enough to punch a 3 inch diameter hole through the quarter inch armor plate protecting the base of the vehicle.The Model S owner was nonetheless able to exit the highway as instructed by the on-board alert system, bring the car to a stop and depart the vehicle without injury.
A fire caused by the impact began in the front battery module – the battery pack has a total of 16 modules – but was contained to the front section of the car by internal firewalls within the pack. Vents built into the battery pack directed the flames down towards the road and away from the vehicle.When the fire department arrived, they observed standard procedure, which was to gain access to the source of the fire by puncturing holes in the top of the battery’s protective metal plate and applying water. For the Model S lithium-ion battery, it was correct to apply water (vs. dry chemical extinguisher), but not to puncture the metal firewall, as the newly created holes allowed the flames to then vent upwards into the front trunk section of the Model S. Nonetheless, a combination of water followed by dry chemical extinguisher quickly brought the fire to an end.It is important to note that the fire in the battery was contained to a small section near the front by the internal firewalls built into the pack structure.
At no point did fire enter the passenger compartment.Had a conventional gasoline car encountered the same object on the highway, the result could have been far worse. A typical gasoline car only has a thin metal sheet protecting the underbody, leaving it vulnerable to destruction of the fuel supply lines or fuel tank, which causes a pool of gasoline to form and often burn the entire car to the ground. In contrast, the combustion energy of our battery pack is only about 10% of the energy contained in a gasoline tank and is divided into 16 modules with firewalls in between. As a consequence, the effective combustion potential is only about 1% that of the fuel in a comparable gasoline sedan.
The nationwide driving statistics make this very clear: there are 150,000 car fires per year according to the National Fire Protection Association, and Americans drive about 3 trillion miles per year according to the Department of Transportation. That equates to 1 vehicle fire for every 20 million miles driven, compared to 1 fire in over 100 million miles for Tesla. This means you are 5 times more likely to experience a fire in a conventional gasoline car than a Tesla!For consumers concerned about fire risk, there should be absolutely zero doubt that it is safer to power a car with a battery than a large tank of highly flammable liquid.— Elon
Below is our email correspondence with the Model S owner that experienced the fire, reprinted with his permission:
From: Robert Carlson
Sent: Thursday, October 03, 2013 12:53 PM
To: Jerome Guillen
Subject: Mr. Guillen, Thanks for the support. I completely agree with the assessment to date. I guess you can test for everything, but some other celestial bullet comes along and challenges your design. I agree that the car performed very well under such an extreme test. The batteries went through a controlled burn which the internet images really exaggerates. Anyway, I am still a big fan of your car and look forward to getting back into one. Justin offered a white loaner–thanks. I am also an investor and have to say that the response I am observing is really supportive of the future for electric vehicles. I was thinking this was bound to happen, just not to me. But now it is out there and probably gets a sigh of relief as a test and risk issue-this “doomsday” event has now been tested, and the design and engineering works.rob carlson
On Oct 3, 2013, at 12:29 PM, Jerome Guillen wrote:
Dear Mr. Carlson: I am the VP of sales and service for Tesla, reporting directly to Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO.I am sorry to hear that you experienced a collision in your Model S 2 days ago. We are happy that the Model S performed in such a way that you were not injured in the accident and that nobody else was hurt.I believe you have been in contact with Justin Samson, our service manager, since the accident. We are following this case extremely closely and we have sent a team of experts to review your vehicle. All indications are that your Model S drove over large, oddly-shaped metal object which impacted the leading edge of the vehicle’s undercarriage and rotated into the underside of the vehicle (“pole vault” effect).
This is a highly uncommon occurrence.Based on our review thus far, we believe that the Model S performed as designed by limiting the resulting fire to the affected zones only. Given the significant intensity of the impact, which managed to pierce the 1/4 inch bottom plate (something that is extremely hard to do), the Model S energy containment functions operated correctly. In particular, the top cover of the battery provided a strong barrier and there was no apparent propagation of the fire into the cabin. This ensured cabin integrity and occupant safety, which remains our most important goal.We very much appreciate your support, patience and understanding while we proceed with the investigation. Justin keeps me closely informed. Please feel free to contact me directly, if you have any question or concern. Best regards,
Jerome Guillen I VP, WW sales and service
Now, that’s how to handle a PR disaster.
By Friday, Tesla’s stock market price was back up almost to pre-accident levels.
by Greg Milner | Sep 26, 2013 | The Smell of Success
Nadine Bastion Smellie of Aphrodite’s Sanctuary in Toronto – Worldwide Salon Marketing member since 2010
When Nadine Bastien Smellie of Aphrodite’s Sanctuary in Toronto joined Worldwide Salon Marketing in 2010, she was renting a chair in somebody else’s salon. How things have changed; in this review posted on TrueLocal, Nadine tells the story of how she went from being a chair renter to owning her own salon, with two full-time staff…
“I have been with WSM since 2010. I have to admit it was very overwhelming at first, there was so much to read and to do.
I took my time and looked through the books and cds and thought to myself, this is silly, how can this possibly work?…. Well, boy was I wrong, I tried the lost client letters first, I sent out about 100 of them, and I got 30 clients back from the first letter.
Then I started trying the other things like the vouchers and the promotions and the re-booking and Queen of Referrals. I went from being a chair renter to now having my own salon with 2 full time stylists and a chair renter of my own.
I have worked to grow my business WITH the help of WSM, I would never be where I am without them. If you are thinking “I can’t afford it”, stop that thought in its tracks. I definitely couldn’t afford it when I started but I tried it anyways, and it works.
Please don’t sign up and not make an effort with the tools they give you, you actually need to do the work EXACTLY as they say to do it or IT WONT WORK.
I came from nothing and now, thanks to WSM I have a successful salon. Read the books and emails, listen to the cds, implement the procedures into your salons, IT WORKS.”
