by Greg Milner | Nov 25, 2009 | Marketing Superstars, New Zealand
Hair Salon Template Superstar of the Week – Lucyanne Tipoki of Xpertise Hairdressers, Kaikohe, NZ
The Promotion that brought in $2,200 in 3 days for Xpertise Hairdressers in Kaikohe.
Every week I have dozens of phone calls from salon owners asking about our Inner Circle program and more often than not I hear that old chestnut…”but I am in the wrong area of town, it won’t work for me, there’s not enough people in my area, it’s the wrong demographic….blah, blah, blah”.
I feel like saying to them “try telling that to Lucyanne Tipoki!!!” Lucyanne, owner of Xpertise Hairdressers, is in the small sunny Northland town of Kaikohe where there is a population of ONLY 3000, and she is letting NOTHING stand in her way!
Lucyanne Tipoki from Xpertise Hairdressers in Kaikohe, NZ
In fact, Lucyanne says that she often gets visits from other salon owners in her town trying to find out what she is doing and why she is always so busy, while they are twiddling their thumbs in utter boredom.
Lucyanne had been in business for almost 20 years, doing pretty well but in the last couple of years she was starting to see a huge decline in business and the stress was mounting.
“Things were getting stale, no excitement was happening and I think my clients were feeling it too. I was almost ready to close my doors”
Fortunately Lucyanne made the decision to turn her business around. She joined the Inner Circle program in May this year and got her own copy of the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit®. And the rest shall we say, is history! Here’s what Lucyanne has to say about the Inner Circle program and how it has changed her life massively in just SIX months….
“I MUST SAY I LOVE BEING IN THE INNER CIRCLE PROGRAM!!!
I received a flyer in the mail and what caught my eye were the words, SECRET TO SUCESS AND ROADS TO RICHES on the flyer. But I put the flyer down and completely forgot about it until the next flyer came in the mail 2 weeks later. I re-read the flyer again and I took action and joined the Inner Circle program.
I had attended the seminar in Auckland last year and I was very impressed and learnt a lot in that short amount of time. I didn’t join that day because I had been in over draft and out of credit for a few years. I knew I was going to join somehow. It took me almost another 6 months since seeing the program to join and I must confess I was trying to come up with my own ways of writing ads and letters but after hours and hours of working it out, I just gave up and thought blow it, I am just going to join, (knowing that worldwide marketing has already done the written work for all their members).
So since I’ve joined the IC program it has added a whole new outlook on how to run a more exciting, fun, stress free, business. It has changed my life. It almost feels like I’ve just opened up a brand new business and it feels like I’ll do 100% plus better than the last 20 years.
It’s great receiving heaps and heaps of already proven ads or ideas from other members. I love it as it’s almost like everyone is about helping each other out.
My most successful campaign so far was the Unlimited Free Foils deal. I put the ad in our local Northern News and it cost $200. Within 3 days I had sold 25 unlimited foils packages and made $2,200 extra in turnover. 10 out of those 25 clients were upgrades too so I increased my average client spend and 15 of these people have become regular clients.
The people in the far north thought I had won lotto. To give a way something for free in the far north is very rare. People thought I was crazy. (It has been a big eye opener to potential clients offering value for money in my ads because it has hardly been done in the hair and beauty industry). But hey, they took the offer and it has been an amazing response.
The phone kept ringing for weeks and still does. I am known now for ‘Hey, are you the salon that always offers amazing packages’. It’s cool and I am happy to say ‘YES I’ve always got something free to give away’.”
*And it’s important to note here that with every promotion Lucyanne does, she gets it out there in as many ways as she can to maximise her response. It’s on her answer machine, in her shop window, in her monthly newsletter, it’s posted to her existing client base, dropped in letterboxes and much more. She takes MASSIVE action!
“I now spend about one to two hours a day on marketing as it keeps me all hyped up and excited ready for the next promotion. I plan to triple my turn over and work more on the business than in the business. I could do marketing full time. I love it.”
by Greg Milner | Oct 15, 2009 | Marketing Superstars, The Smell of Success
Donnah King (second from right) and staff at Envy in Coffs Harbour, NSW. “600 new clients in 6 months from using Toolkit-style marketing…”
Salon Gift Certificate Template: 600 New Clients in 6 Months – Inner Circle member of the Week Donnah King
Back in May when Donnah King bought a run-down salon in Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, it ‘looked like a sex shop’ as she describes it.
“Blacked out windows, purple everywhere… it was awful. The two remaining staff were sitting around doing nothing – because there were no customers coming in, not surprisingly – so I set about renovating. Two weeks later I got a flyer in the mail about your Road to Riches seminar in Sydney.
‘I took the senior stylist down with me, more as a treat for her than anything. We sat in on the seminar, and I thought ‘right’ let’s give this a go’, joined the Inner Circle program and got our Toolkit, and things changed from that very moment.”
Donnah went back to Coffs Harbour, and immediately started using the templates in the kit. With spectacular results.
“I forgot to tell you about the direct marketing campaign we have just done which produced 41 new clients from 65 postcards handed out in 2 days. They are the $25 gift vouchers. My staff thought I was crazy giving these away but to their amazement over 70% of the people using them bought product valued at over $40 & booked in for another appointment as well. 🙂
by Greg Milner | Sep 17, 2009 | Blog
Okay, it’s a meaningless picture…but how else am I going to illustrate an article like this and not end up on a porn site?
Beauty Salon Template Niche Marketing for Salons & Spas – and a Warning: This Article May Offend Some People
I’ve hesitated about writing this article for more than a week now. I don’t shock easily, but a conversation I had with a new Inner Circle member last week left me gob-smacked, delighted and laughing out loud all at the same time.
That conversation is directly related to one of the key marketing strategies I teach our salon and spa owner Members: the importance of marketing to niches. The biggest mistake salon owners make is trying to be all things to all people – and by doing so, being nothing to anybody. The more narrowly you define your target market, the more precisely you can craft a compelling message that market, and that market alone.
And you can obviously have more than one target market. But whatever you do, don’t jump up and down in the ocean. Nobody will notice. Jump up and down in a puddle. Or a series of puddles.
There are riches in niches.
Hold that thought for a moment. For most salon owners, identifying a target market is little more sophisticated that this: get a road map, turn to the page where your salon is, put a paper cup over it, and draw a circle around the cup. It’s called geographic marketing and it’s valid, but dangerously simplistic.
Kylie Campbell, Inner Circle member and owner of Chocolate Vanilla, a particularly appropopriate name for a salon with a delicate specialty service….
It was this question to Kylie Campbell, one of our newest Inner Circle members last week that produced an answer that almost floored me. Most of the time, I get the usual bland response – “well, we specialize in facials/waxing/hair extensions/blah blah blah” – hardly unique.
I was expecting much the same this time, but she caught me completely off-guard when she said “oh, we do all the usual beauty treatments, like waxing, hair removal, microdermabrasion, eyelash extensions and…er…
Anal Bleaching.
Right about now you’re silently screaming TOO MUCH INFORMATION! (And no, I am not going to describe the process…)
But there’s a valid lesson in this, even if it does get a kind of “eewwww” reaction.
Yep, this Kylie had done a brilliant job of identifying a target (I use the word advisedly) market; in this case a very narrowly-defined, easily accessible niche of predominantly gays, trans-sexuals, transvestites, strippers and other such inhabitants of the ‘dark side’ who (apparently) hold in high regard a lighter pigmentation of that hitherto unmentionable small area of the human anatomy.
Now, I’ve been teaching direct response marketing to salons & spas for a long time. Talked endlessly about the need to ‘slice-‘n-dice’ markets into small, manageable bite-sized chunks, to concentrate marketing resources so you don’t waste bullets on targets that don’t matter. It’s MUCH easier to market to a niche that’s an inch wide but a mile deep.
Some ‘get it’. And reap the rewards in multiples. But most don’t.
However Kylie understood the concept perfectly. Cheekily, cleverly, she took it one step further and named her new salon
Chocolate Vanilla
Now, I am NOT suggesting you all rush out looking for bums to bleach. There are hundreds of niche markets, groups of people with common interests, jobs, affiliations and buying habits. You can buy lists of ’em. Or create your own.
Here’s what’s instructive: smart marketers identify a target market before creating a marketing message. Indeed, you simply cannot create an effective ad, letter or any other marketing piece until you’ve narrowed your target market. (Hint: it’s as much about deciding who you don’t want as it is about working out who you do want.)
Be grateful that I avoided the temptation (mostly) of turning this article into a pun-fest.
by Greg Milner | Sep 1, 2009 | The Smell of Success
Funny title, serious message for business owners
Salon Web Template: Do You Insist The World is Flat?
If you own your own business, this is for you.
Every so often, we get a complaint from a Member, like this one: “We have purchased all of your marketing material about one month and a half ago. We are NOT HAPPY….(I just wanted to) let you know of my disappointment with the marketing so far…”
These do become tiring, particularly in light of overwhelming evidence from literally hundreds of salons & spas all over the world who are using the very same marketing system, and achieving documented – and in many cases, truly spectacular – results.
To verify this, you need only browse around this website. Go look under Salon Superstars. These are real owners of real salons & spas, all over the world, all of them using the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit® containing exactly the same Direct Response marketing and advertising templates for flyers, letters and ads, and the ‘sales thinking’ that goes behind them.
Dan Kennedy – brutal, but accurate
So what is the difference? Idly, I was reading through a little booklet by Dan Kennedy. It’s called
“Why Do I Always Have to Sit Next to the Farting Cat”
but the whimsical title is just an eye-catching headline for a very serious, hard-nosed and instructive essay on why a few people achieve success when the vast majority don’t.
So I quote Kennedy here, as answer at least in part to the complainers:
“If you own your own business, there’s a pretty good chance you also own some of my marketing courses, and/or own a marketing system put out by someone I’ve influenced.
If you own a Marketing System specific to an inudstry, odds are it’s been put into your hands by somebody who I work with. I’m familiar withi the system you have. And I have something important to tell you about it.
The first thing you should know – “it” works. Each of these industry advisors have thousands of business owners who can testify to that. Questioning the efficacy of these Systems is like insisting the world is flat. The time for such an argument has long since passed. These leaders and their Systems are proven.
So the second thing to know is – it’s about you, not ‘it’.
I remember being at one of Joe Polish’s boot camps for carpet cleaners, and listening as a carpet cleaner went on and on about how nothing of Joe’s he tried worked because all his customers were cheapskates and everybody in his town bought only based on the cheapest price. Finally, I stopped him. I asked if there was a shopping mall in town. When he said yes, I wondered out loud how that could be.
If everybody there only bought by cheapest price, the only store there would be a Wal-Mart. You see, insisting that everybody buys by the cheapest price is stupid. (And, incidentally, fewer than 10% of customers buy that way, unless offered no other basis for making a decision.) Then I pointed out to him: he chose his customers. He did certain things to attract them. If they were all cheapskates, his fault.
I find a lot of people fail to get the results they should, that others get, for one or more of these reasons. One, they don’t actually use the Systems as instructed. They fool around with it, use pieces of it, change it.
Two, other aspects of their businesses are so screwed up, marketing that brings more customers in the door is futile.
Three, they are self-defeating whiners and complainers. There is an intangible to business, and that is attitude.
Fourth, they never do much of anything. If they start, they don’t follow through.
So I want to tell you again, questioning the efficacy of these Systems is like insisting the world is flat. The time for such argument has long since passed.”
There’s a saying. A poor carpenter blames his tools. I’m here to tell you, you own extraordinary tools.”
Amen. And by the way, I’ve just ordered a whole truckload of those little books from Dan’s printer in the States. Our Inner Circle members will each get a copy, free.
If you are NOT yet an Inner Circle member, you do NOT yet have the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit®, you are fighting a lonely battle devoid of the right knowledge, useful tools, with both arms tied behind your back, re-inventing the wheel every day, probably doing it the same way you’ve always done it, probably getting the same lackluster results you’ve always got.
You CAN change this, by applying for a 30-day Test Drive of the toolkit and the entire Inner Circle marketing & mentoring system.
by Greg Milner | Aug 19, 2009 | Blog, Marketing Superstars
Salon Template Salon Superstars – Inner Circle Member of the Week, Susan Vincent – USA
If more so-called ‘business leaders’ took some lessons from fleet-footed business owners at the small end of town, like Inner Circle member Susan Vincent of Body & Soul Day Spa in Staunton, Virginia, the US might not be wallowing in its own economic misery.
Unlike the CEOs of big, fat companies bailed out by the taxpayer, Susan didn’t ‘know it all’ – she sought – and found – the money-making templates and tools in Worldwide Salon Marketing’s My Social Salon system, including the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit® and USED them:
“As of June 2009, with the recession in full force, we are still experiencing a 20% growth rate – we couldn’t be happier!”
Susan joined WSM and got her Toolkit nearly two years ago, and immediately embraced its no-nonsense style of direct marketing, advertising, salon/spa marketing plans and sales strategies. But importantly, she did it with a pulse, and used it as a spur to seek more knowledge about the whole world of direct response.
“Although the recession hasn’t hit us like it has in some parts of the US, the community here has embraced that (recession) mindset.
“This has created a very difficult environment for such a small spa. A couple of years ago, a Dan Kennedy mentor of mine recommended that I start a print newsletter. He knew I was a writer and encouraged me to write about my life in the newsletter. I really thought he was nuts. After all, email was the rage.
“Why would anyone want to read a print newsletter? But more to the point, why would anyone want to read about my boring life? Turns out, he was spot on.
“A year after the newsletter’s debut, we grew 35%. Our clients raved about it. They loved the funny, inspirational stories I wrote, much to my surprise. But it wasn’t just that.
“I combined the newsletter stories with great offers. Worldwide Salon Marketing helped me to understand how to craft an offer and combine a killer guarantee to increase sales.”
In fact, so successful has Susan’s monthly newsletter proven to be for her spa, she’s about to launch a ‘done-for-you’ newsletter service for other beauty businesses. She’ll do almost all the writing for you, with a couple of gaps to use for your own offers, and all you’ll have to do is get it printed and mailed.
The fine details are being ironed out over the next few weeks. We’ll let you know when it’s ready to go.
