by Greg Milner | Jun 23, 2009 | Ask the Experts, Salon Advertising Tips
Salon Internet Marketing: How to Stop Others Sabotaging Your Salon Marketing
This salon got 40 new clients in two days – no thanks to their local newspaper…
Interesting case this week which shows just how vigilant you need to be to stop people sabotaging your marketing efforts.
Untrained staff will do it all the time, if you let them. Phone rings madly after your ad comes out, only to be met by “uh…sorry, don’t know about that offer, hang on, I’ll ask someone…”
That’s something that IS under your control, and only YOU can fix it. But what about when your local newspaper refuses to publish your ad because ‘it’s against the law…”!!!?
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| Inner Circle member Tamara Jones of Beauty Bliss in Cairns, Queensland – 40 new clients from a single $300 ad on page 23 of the local newspaper. But no thanks to the newspaper itself. |
It happend to Inner Circle member Tamara Jones of Beauty Bliss in Cairns, far north Queensland.
“At first they point-blank refused to run my ad at all,” says Tamara, “Then they refused to let me use the word FREE!”
Turns out that some fool at the newspaper had half-read – and totally misunderstood – a recent case where the consumer watchdog had clamped down on an internet company pretending to offer free bonuses which weren’t actually free, they were hidden by inflated prices.
Rightly so…but for the newspaper to interpret this as a blanket ban on the use of the word ‘free’ was clearly nonsense. I know this because, being the diligent reporter that I am, I personally phoned the relevant mouthpiece at the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and got it from the horse’s mouth.
“Are you saying that it’s now illegal for businesses to give away stuff for free?” I asked the spokesman.
“Not at all,” he said, “all we’re doing is stopping people building the cost of so-called bonuses into an inflated price for the original product,” he said.
Sometimes, bureaucracy is a a condom on progress. But its effect is magnified a thousand times by officious and ill-informed employees mis-interpreting the ‘rules’ and needlessly preventing perfectly-legal marketing.
So what happened to Tamara’s ad?
On a happier note, Tamara persisted with the idiot newspaper rep. With no time to check the facts with the authorities, she agreed to change the word ‘free’ to ‘bonus’, and let the ad run last Saturday.It was published way down in the paper, on page 23.
“We had 21 bookings on Saturday, another 17 on Monday, more on Tuesday, and the phone is still ringing. 40 bookings so far, and the ad is scheduled to run again Thursday. I am so impressed. Of these bookings, only 2 are existing clients. My new therapist was supposed to be only working 3 days a week, she’s already doing 5 days…this is great for us, the salon is buzzing again, thank you to all the staff at Worldwide Salon Marketing…!”
Forty new clients…let’s say she keeps only half of them for the long term…and each is worth say $1,000 a year. So that single $300 could well have added $20,000 a year to Tamara’s sales. That’s pretty good leverage.
INNER CIRCLE MEMBERS: Want to see the ad Tamara used? Log into the Members Only ‘sealed section’ and navigate to Getting New Clients – Beauty’ and you’ll find it in .jpg format you can download. Hair salon owners: don’t give me grief about ‘oh, that’s for beauty, we’re a hair salon’. Instead, think: “How can I make this work for my hair salon…?”
by Greg Milner | Jan 28, 2009 | Ads that Have Worked, Beating the Competition, Increasing Retail Sales, Salon Advertising Tips, The Smell of Success
Salon Spa Marketing: “Wow…it’s AMAZING how my business has changed!” says small salon owner
90 new clients every month, and $109,509 in extra sales for ’08
(IC Members: Log into the Members Only section, navigate to Getting New Clients – Hair, and you’ll be able to download the exact ads and text messages Rechelle describes here)
“I have been in business for 11 years and never had the success that I am having now….I have been a Worldwide Salon Marketing member for about 5 years, but didn’t change much about how I marketed my business so obviously I didn’t get the results.
“The salon was not doing so well in 2007. Things were really bad. I then made a decision to do something about the business. So I took action; I went off the tools working only three days in the salon and two full days on the business at home in my office.
“The first thing I knew I needed to get sorted was the marketing and be consistent with it.
Every month we did two big promotions via text message. Each SMS was to 2000 clients. We had a massive response from this particular SMS.”
(Members: Log into the Members Only section and navigate to “Getting New Clients – Hair” to copy the exact text Rechelle used)
“This SMS I started to send out in June 2008 and we are still sending it every fortnight.
“Sales increased in 2008 by 40% compared to 2007! That’s $109,509 extra (Real Big Green Ones) in 2008 sales.
“I also did this exact promotion in a newspaper advertisement which also was a huge success.
“It was a half page ad costing around $350 each time and was placed each month from July 2008. We are still placing the ad every month and it’s still working.(Members: Log into the Members Only section and navigate to “Getting New Clients – Hair” to copy the exact ads Rechelle used)
“We also did all the normal marketing such as newsletters, new clients letters, birthdays and referrals all from the Toolkit. We are getting an average per month 90 new clients. Retail sales have gone through the roof, up $6000 per month.
“The Toolkit gave me the tools, the ideas, the ingredients to make my marketing fantastic and I was persistent with it and it gave me real results. I have attached a copy of the newspaper ad and a picture of myself receiving the best customer service business award for 2008.
All the best, Rechelle Watt, Lamonde Hair Face Body, Toukley, NSW.”
by Greg Milner | Apr 9, 2008 | Getting Salon Clients Quickly, Salon Advertising Tips
Chris Burkinshaw
Salon Marketing: $300 Hair Salon Ad Turns Into $9,200 in new Sales and 15 New Customers
Inner Circle member Chris Burkinshaw of Turning Heads in Wagga, New South Wales, reports terrific success from a cheap little ad he ran in the free newspaper in his town last week.
Chris took a salon template from the WSM system (see My Social Salon here), modified it to suit his salon, and booked space in the paper last Wednesday to test the offer.
Within two days, 7 bookings. By Monday of this week, another 8 bookings. And still coming in.
Ad cost: $330
Total sales so far: $9,200! (In a week.) That’s a gross return on investment of 27 to 1.
Plus, at a new to frequent client conversion rate of only 50%, and average annual client value of $1000, his salon marketing adds up to an extra $7,500 of extra annual revenue. Do only that every week, and you’re adding $390,000 to your annual turnover, in a year.
As Chris says, “We’ve never, ever had this kind of response from our newspaper advertising before.”
Now, only Inner Circle members will find this salon marketing ad in their email in-boxes in the next few days, but I will tell you what the ad DIDN’T have in it.
It didn’t have glossy pictures of glamorous young things sporting impossible-to-maintain hair styles that only have a place on the catwalk. It didn’t have vast acres of blank space, or clever tag lines. What it DID have was LOTS of text, a great OFFER, a simple, compelling headline, a guarantee that would make most salon owners vomit with fear, a Call to Action – and the name and contact number of the salon at the bottom of the ad, where it belongs, not the top of the ad, where most business owners would put it.
(NOTE to Members: watch out for this ad in your in-box. Feel free to use it.)
