by Greg Milner | Jan 13, 2010 | New Zealand
Hair Salon Website Template Free: NZ Salon Superstar of the Week – Bedelia Shepherd of Nelson Beauty Therapy DOUBLES her salon’s turnover just one month after joining the Inner Circle Program!
“Thank you for your support leading up to Christmas, we have been blown away with our results. We have more than doubled our last Dec turnover and the vouchers sales bought in just under $18000.”
It’s amazing the amount of times I hear salons owners say “my accountant has advised me not to join the Inner Circle program because my business can’t afford it”. I find it so utterly bemusing that any person would tell you to not invest in the ONE THING that is going to make you money….marketing!
Bedelia Shepherd of Nelson Beauty Therapy
And that is exactly what happened to Bedelia Shepherd of Nelson Beauty Therapy in Nelson 18 months ago when she was looking to join the Inner Circle program. As it happened, she only joined in December 2009 and has already doubled her monthly turnover since then. If only she hadn’t listened to that business adviser’s bad advice 18 months ago, she would be in a completely different place now with her business. Here is what Bedelia has to say…..
WOW … I’m so excited with the results we are achieving. Since I joined the Inner Circle program a month ago, we have doubled our turnover in that short period of time. The girls in the salon are right behind everything we are doing with our marketing and in- salon promotions. Our customers are excited and can feel the positive energy.
There is a lesson in this for me I’d love to share with you! 18 months ago I spoke to Greg and wanted to join WSM but allowed myself to be talked out of it by very well meaning business advisers! Their reasons being ‘my business couldn’t afford it’….!!I Needless to say I don’t use their services anymore!
My advice if I can be so bold is ……..your business can’t afford not to belong to WSM.
I’m very thankful and extremely grateful to both Greg and Chris for their support, and this is only such early days, but the simple saying of “surround yourself with positive people with successful business practices and your half way there” is certainly true in my case.
In the first week of January we have done the entire retail sales of last January and exactly half of the beauty sales for the whole month! We haven’t even implemented all the marketing we set out to do just yet! Now things have settled down a bit I can breathe and spend time on planning.
Really looking forward to this exciting year and seeing what I can achieve.”
by Greg Milner | Jan 7, 2010 | The Right Mindset, US
Husband-and-wife team Tim & Kanna Reilly’s Body Solutions Laser & Skin in Scottsdale, Arizona, grew 63% in 2009 – after a massive 500% increase in 2008 – thanks to the marketing and ‘sales thinking’ tools in the Inner Circle marketing & mentoring program…
Hair Salon WordPress Template: The Beauty Business that Grew 63% in 2009
Economically speaking, was 2009 the worst year since the great depression or was it a year of salon business growth and prosperity?
Well, it depends on who you ask. For us it was a great year, better than 2008 in fact. For many small business owners in our industry it was a year filled with financial stress and for a large number of salon owners – complete financial meltdown.
Thanks to the tools and strategies that we learned from the Worldwide Salon Marketing Inner Circle program we were able to turn our failing medspa into a highly successful and profitable business. For us, 2008 was a great year; we grew more than 500% over 2007.
At the end of 2008 we sat down to establish our goals for 2009. Could we possibly expect to have a better year in 2009 than 2008? Expect may not be the right word, but we certainly planned on having a better year.
Planning may certainly be the key. An old college professor of mine used to love saying, “Plan your work and work your plan, if you fail to plan you can plan to fail.” Those words have meant more to me now as a business owner than they did as a student.
It’s all about planning. Success doesn’t come knocking – looking for you. It won’t break down your door and insist on coming in. You have to go after it; hunt it down and claim it for yourself.
Plan your marketing for an entire year. Inner Circle members should have received a big full page calendar for 2010.
This allows you to look at the whole year in one glance. Commit to marketing consistently every week. You might not know exactly what your marketing offer will be on April 5th yet, but just know that on April 5th you WILL have something ready to go. That kind of marketing commitment done on a regular basis will create momentum, and momentum, like a wave, will pick you up and carry you towards your goal.
Thinking about marketing without taking any action steps to put those ideas in motion is a waste of time.
You must act on your ideas and then track your response. If the response was good, then do it again. If your response was bad, you need some new ideas. What, you don’t have a ton of fresh new ideas just waiting to burst forth from your brain??
Hmmm…reminds me of a high school English teacher I had. He used to say, “Smart people learn from a dumb person’s mistakes, but wise people learn from a smart person’s mistakes!” So be wise, don’t be smart. Use tools, strategies and ideas that have already been proven to work. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. You can grow your business in record time IF you have the right tools and IF you take action to implement those tools.
We did and that’s why our 2009 was 63% higher than 2008; it was our best year yet!! You’ll have to excuse me now, I have to go set our 2010 business goals!
by Greg Milner | Nov 12, 2009 | Email marketing, New Zealand
Free Salon Business Plan Template Marketing Superstars – NZ Inner Circle Member of the Week Tracy Power
If there is one thing that salon owners are guilty of it’s not rewarding our existing clients enough! You know, those clients who have been coming to us for years if not decades, spending all their hard earned cash to make themselves look and feel amazing! We just assume that they would never betray us and go to another salon…
Far too frequently I hear salon owners say,
“Why would I offer this special package to my existing clients when they are already going to come in to the salon anyway and spend more than the package…”
It’s quite simple really…
If you don’t reward your existing LOYAL clients, they will eventually leave and go somewhere that does reward them!!!
Tracy Power – Woman Day Spa, Nelson NZ
So it was music to my ears today when I spoke with long term Inner Circle member Tracy Power of Woman Day Spa in Nelson, New Zealand. Last week Tracy emailed her clients a Christmas promotion she found in the Members Only ‘sealed section’ and followed the same format used by Michael Curtis of Blush Day Spa in Perth.
The phone immediately began to go crazy.
Within 2 hours of emailing the promotion Tracy had sold 50 vouchers making $6000. In fact, the promotion went so well that they ran out of gift vouchers and had to call the printer urgently to have more made!
“I couldn’t believe it, the phone was going so crazy I actually didn’t know what to do!!! Within 2 hours we had sold all our vouchers and yesterday we sold another $2000 worth.
We have told our clients that we will be releasing another 50 next week and I have already had one client request 20 x $50 vouchers.
Before I sent the email I was a bit worried that I would be giving away too many free vouchers, but when some of my clients came in to pick up their vouchers they were thanking me so much for the wonderful gift…they were just so happy and it made me realise that I need to reward them more often!
And of course some of the clients will give these vouchers to their friends for Christmas so I will get lots of new clients in January too!”
So far Tracy has made $8000 in early bird xmas voucher sales, from an email that cost her ZERO, ZILCH, NADA….Now that’s not a bad return on investment!
But more importantly, Tracy has made her existing clients feel incredibly special with this offer and she will reap the rewards from this in the months and years to come.
Well done Tracy for being our Salon Superstar of the week – You really deserve it…
by Greg Milner | Sep 10, 2009 | Marketing Superstars
Bev Bowman & Rosemaree Jones of Beautique in Cooranbong, NSW – a $160,000 increase in sales in one year thanks to the Toolkit
Beauty Salon Template Inner Circle Member of the Week: $160,000 increase in one year
Bev Bowman of Beautique Beauty Medispa in Cooranbong, NSW writes:
“I have wanted to write to you for a while now to let you know how happy we are with your salon marketing program and our increased sales. We attended the Sydney conference in August 2008 so I thought it may be a good time to share how we have been going since we have had the program for 12 months now.
Firstly, a little background on our business, Rosemaree Gough Jones and I have been in this business for almost 30 years and have made plenty of mistakes etc along the way but also learned as well.
So what have we achieved? An increase of just under $160,000 since joining the program taking our sales up from $1.565mil to $1.725mil, and to see those figures makes you feel that it isn’t going to be too hard to take it up to the $2mil mark, our goal for the next year.
We have been involved in everything that we thought would help us grow and develop, from reading everything we could get our hands on, to attending seminars and using the services of a business coach (that was an extremely expensive exercise without the results but that’s another story). Just to make sure we were doing it right I even went to University to get a Masters in Business Administration, majoring in Marketing and guess what they taught me (yes pretty pictures etc) but nothing has got us the results that your program has.
Our new client letters that we sent out for August has already returned $5000 of sales, can’t wait to see how much this will be in a year’s time. So for our original investment of $8029 for the membership we have a return of $160,000. I definitely don’t know of any better investment than that!
I know you expect to have your members double their turnover in the first year (and if we had I would be writing this email from the Bahamas) but we had been sending out a lot of the direct mail already, birthday letters, new client letters, Raise the Dead, newsletters etc. So maybe we haven’t doubled, but the result we have achieved by changing the way we do a few things as per your program have been outstanding for us.
Not only has it increased sales it has got us thinking on a whole new level and I can’t wait to implement other parts of the program. You know we haven’t done any letter box drops or advertising yet in newspapers etc, all this has been achieved with our existing client base and implementing a few changes.
Looking forward to the 14th September in Sydney* see you there. Thanks again, Beverley Bowman.”
* Bev will be among the Inner Circle members participating in our Closed Door Mastermind session following Monday’s Road to Riches salon marketing seminar at the Novotel Brighton Beach Hotel in Sydney. And for Inner Circle members only, she’ll be my Special Guest, along with fellow IC member Gail Smith, on our next CD of the Month, to be recorded next Wednesday. Look out for the CD in your next IC Member’s Only newsletter.
(If YOU want the kind of results Beverley has achieved, you need to be a Member of the Inner Circle program, complete with your own edition of the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit®. Go here to see if you qualify for a 30 Day Money Back Guaranteed Test Drive of the entire system – completey risk free.)
by Greg Milner | Sep 3, 2009 | Email marketing, Website Marketing
Tegan Messineo and partner Brad with their freshly-minted twin boys.
Hair Salon Website Template: Email or Hard Copy? Salon owners have questions, we’ve got answers….
It’s no surprise to me when Inner Circle members like Tegan Messineo of Body Firming & Beauty in Bunbury, Western Australia (who only got her Toolkit in December 2008) tell me they’ve literally doubled their businesses.
Tegan is a prime example of entrepreneurial thought AND action, one who doesn’t merely join the Inner Circle program, get the Toolkit and expect it to, of its own accord, leap off the shelf and gang tackle prospects as they wander past her front door, dragging them in by the hair.
Instead, she treated Inner Circle membership as the beginning of her education in direct response marketing, not merely as the ‘magic pill’ end to all her business worries. As Tegan writes this week,
“I have been doing LOTS of reading on Emotional Direct Response Marketing and listening to heaps of cds…”
That’s pretty obvious by the intelligence and thoughtfulness of Tegan’s question re direct mail vs email:
“I have got my website up and running (http://www.bodyfirmingandbeauty.com) and we are offering a FREE $25 voucher. Now I have 2 choices:
Option 1-
Post voucher with letter, special offer and current price list out to client.
Post another letter 2 weeks after if they haven’t used up their voucher
Post a 3rd letter
Post a 4th letter out to the client (the voucher has a 8 week expiry on it)
Option 2 –
Set up auto-responder to email the voucher out once the form has been completed.
Set up the rest of the letters to be emailed out.
The email one is really cost effective and it saves a lot of time once it is set up and ready to go, however it is very easy for people to press X and get rid of it when it comes in. Where as in hard copy the client will have to open it and look at it before deciding what she wants to do with it. What way do you think will have the best response? (and I am almost certain that you will say………test them both hahaha)
Yup, you’re right. That’s exactly what to do – test.
And I would say this whether it be about beauty salon marketing or marketing for an accountancy firm. Email, sure – it might be efficient, but it’s nowhere near as effective as real mail.
I would run BOTH alongside each other, ie they get an email auto-responder plus follow-ups AS WELL as the hard copy equivalents, delivered at approx the same time. That way you can easily and quickly measure response right alongside each other, piece for piece.
And once you’ve set up the autoresponders they don’t cost you anything in time or money anyway, so you may as well put some effort into the direct mail while the email stuff runs by itself. You’ll soon know which is getting the response, but I’d bet my own mother it’ll be the hard copy stuff.
I would run BOTH alongside each other, ie they get an email auto-responder plus follow-ups AS WELL as the hard copy equivalents, delivered at approx the same time. That way you can easily and quickly measure response right alongside each other, piece for piece.
But here’s what’s really instructive in Tegan’s question: the fact that she’s asking it in the first place says much about her new approach to her salon since joining the Inner Circle program. That new approach is itself recognition that she’s not IN the salon or beauty business, she’s in the marketing business. Marketing IS the business.
If more salon owners could take the blinkers off and recognize this fundamental truth, they’d begin to become business people – even entrepreneurs (there’s a difference!) instead of merely technicians who find themselves owning a business, however reluctantly.
If YOU want the kind of success that Tegan’s enjoying, but better yet, the real and tangible THRILL of discovering effective direct response marketing for salons & spas, and how it really can make your phone melt down with appointments, you need to join the Inner Circle program and get your own copy of the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit® – the original and still (by far) the most comprehensive system of advertising and sales templates and strategies ever developed for the small salon or spa.
