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 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.
by Greg Milner | Sep 2, 2009 | Blog
Salon Price List Template: WSM named among 100 Fastest Growing Companies
We’re delighted to reveal that – thanks to our many hundreds of Inner Circle member salons around the world – Worldwide Salon Marketing has been named by Business Review Weekly among Australia’s top 100 fastest growing small to medium companies.
With average annual revenue growth of over 48% over three years, WSM was 74th on the list of the ‘Fast 100’ – in the worst economy the world has seen for 75 years.
(And aside from our Members, it’s in no small part due to a VERY dedicated and talented team here at head office, as well as our representatives in NZ and the USA)
The recognition is even sweeter, coming as it does after a horrible economic year. But it shows what can be achieved when you set out to do nothing but help salon and spa owners actually make some real money and start to pay themselves what they’re worth.
We’ve certainly come a long way since co-founder Jill Groves and I sat down in a spare room in my house five years ago and created the company from scratch.
The BRW Fast 100 issue hit the newsstands on October 29.
