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:
[cf]hannah[/cf]
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 | Jul 14, 2014 | Blog
“Why Most Salon Marketing Fails”…
Why Most Salon Marketing Fails
- An Exceptional Guest Experience….
- How do we Keep ‘em Coming Back?
- Renegade Millionaire
- Price… Is it Always an Issue?
- The Salon Owner’s Worst Enemy
- How to boost salon sales by 25% – in 5 weeks or LESS.
- Problems finding good staff? Then stop being so ‘nice’
- about it!
- How Natalie Boosted Her Salon Takings by 13%
- Is your marketing message getting ATTENTION?
- Great ideas you can STEAL
- From $6,000 a month to $30,000 a month
- – in THREE years.
- Scissor Boy TV
- Scissor Boy TV
by Greg Milner | Jun 30, 2014 | Blog
On a warm sunny June day along the appalling roads of the far north Kimberley region of Western Australia, a lot of bad things can happen. And usually do.
Our camping holiday was suddenly cut short, thanks to an overheated shock absorber in some of the most remote country in outback Australia. But as always, it’s never the problem that’s the problem, it’s how you fix it. And thanks to some amazing customer service, an equipment failure that could have been disastrously expensive (for me!) turned into a triumph of public relations for the company that made my car.
As a business owner, you’ll likely never be asked to ‘make-good’ to this extent. But the way Land Rover went about salvaging what could have been PR disaster and turning it into a great success story is worth studying. I’ll explain.
[cf]Rangie[/cf]
My wife Michelle and I had set out from Broome to explore some of the most spectacular, rugged and remote landscapes in Australia. The Kimberley region is vast – big enough to fit the entire United Kingdom 7 times and still have leftover room. We’d travelled parts of it three years ago, and this time we wanted to visit the majestic Mitchell Falls, on the west coast. But to get there, you have to drive hundreds of kilometres over some of the worst roads anywhere in the country. All had been going well, until we hit the track into Mitchell Falls itself. It was then I discovered that the violent shaking had disabled the rear suspension of my near new Range Rover.
(We weren’t alone in this. The roads up that way are littered with four-wheel-drives of all makes, disabled with blown shock absorbers, broken springs, snapped axles and shredded tyres.)
Fortunately, my Rangie was still under new-car warranty. And therefore subject to Land Rover’s ‘recover you from anywhere’ policy in case of vehicle break-down.
Over the next few days, using borrowed satellite phones (no mobile coverage here) and an ancient pay-phone when we eventually reached a cattle station 100 kilometres away, Land Rover Australia came to the rescue, in one of the most logistically difficult, expensive and remote recovery operations they’ve ever had to mount.
The start of a 4,000km recovery mission
Land Rover organized and paid for:
1) a truck to drive from the nearest town – over 400 kilometres away – down the Gibb River Rd to Drysdale River Station, retrieve our car and take it to Broome – another 700km away – then return to pick up our camper trailer and deliver that to Broome as well. It took four days to complete the job.
2) the charter of a Cessna to fly Michelle and me to Broome.
3) Our hotel accommodation in Broome.
4) A replacement part to be trucked from Melbourne to Perth (3,500km), while our car was trucked down from Broome (another 2,500km) for repairs.
5) Our flights back home to Perth.
Just a rough guess, but I’m putting the total bill for Land Rover at north of $25,000. Now there’s no way the average salon or spa owner will ever need to match that, but the structure of the process is illuminating. By bending over backwards, Land Rover
1) turned an ordinary customer (me) into a raving advocate for the brand.
2) ensured I’d be buying another one when mine was due for a trade-in.
And thanks to the ‘bush-telegraph’, our story spread like wildfire around campfires throughout the region. “Ya mean the company did all that?”
Here’s the lesson: It’s never the problem, it’s how you solve the problem that matters.
by Greg Milner | Apr 29, 2014 | Blog, Featured
Kellie Rout – from little things, big things grew
What would YOU do if you were in your early to mid-twenties and starting out in the salon business right now – would you do things differently?
Ten years ago, young salon owner Kellie Rout was a typical small business person – working full time ‘on the tools’, trying her best to manage, train and encourage her small staff, and struggling to figure out how to turn her little two-basin salon into a thriving business. She found many of the answers with Worldwide Salon Marketing’s membership program. Kellie joined the same year WSM was founded, and has been a Member ever since.
Fast-forward a decade, and how things have changed – a success story only a tiny percentage of hair or beauty professionals can mirror. Kellie’s Emphasis on Hair is now a two-salon business employing 22 staff. Kellie hasn’t worked on the floor for years, and spends almost all her time working from home with husband Keenan and enjoy their two young children. Need inspiration for your own salon business? Watch this 7 minute video!
[cf]kellie[/cf]
Want the same kind of power behind your business? Check out the My Social Salon marketing & mentoring program and apply for a 30-day Money Back Guaranteed Test Drive!
by Greg Milner | Apr 15, 2014 | Blog
Ever slept through the flight attendant’s safety presentation? If you’re a regular flyer, like me, you’ve heard it all before. You sit down, pick up the newspaper or magazine, and pretty much ignore it. Which is a problem for all airlines, not the least because it’s their first attempt at trying to convey an important message to passengers.
By far the most difficult task for anybody trying to get a message to customers and potential clients is….getting ATTENTION in the first place.
And you simply will not do it with ‘me-too’, bland, same-as-everybody-else kind of marketing. It just won’t ‘cut through’. With that in mind, a sharp-witted flight attendant with South West Airlines in America decided the standard, garden-variety pre-flight safety demonstration (the one almost every frequent flyer ignores) just wouldn’t do.
Take a look at this. (I particularly like the line about what happens if the oxygen masks fall down!)
[cf]safety[/cf]
Want ‘cut-through’ marketing that actually gets attention for your salon or spa? The world-famous Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit is a $4,995 FREE BONUS for every salon accepted into the My Social Salon marketing & business training program.
Click here to see if you qualify for a 30-day Test Drive of My Social Salon
