by Greg Milner | Jan 12, 2012 | New Zealand
Whenever putting together any marketing campaign it’s not just as simple as printing a few flyers or emailing a handful of clients and all of a sudden being bombarded with calls from them wanting to buy what your advertising – sure that would be nice but with the increasing competition out there all vying for your customers dollar or pound (not just from rival salons) then you have to think smart about how you are going to get your clients so excited and worked up about a package or product you are about to release, that they are already pre-disposed to buying it from you when it finally does go on offer. You have to build the hype in advance.
Michael Hill Was Creating A Buzz!
Last week I walked past a local jewelry shop and noticed a long queue of customers eagerly waiting outside. There was a rope fence separating them from the entrance and a red velvet curtain blocking customers from seeing inside the store. The customers were standing on tippy toes trying to see what was going on inside…they were REALLY excited!
The blackboard outside the store said…
‘TODAY ONLY – Make Me An offer on All Jewelry in Store’
They had created a buzz, excitement and mystery with their customers and passers by, and put a time limit on it to add to that – TODAY ONLY! People are naturally inquisitive and if they see people flocking like sheep then they don’t want to feel left out…they want to be in the know too!
As salon owners we need to be creating this type of hype with our clients, planning and executing our marketing with thought and not just being impulsive or reactionary. That’s how so many salons waste money – as they say ‘you fail to plan, you plan to fail.’
And planning is exactly what Louise Gray of Louise Gray Skin Care in Ponsonby, Auckland did in order to sell over $6000 of Christmas 2 for 1 vouchers.
Louise Gray and her Team in Auckland, NZ
In a coaching call early in November last year I talked through with Louise the importance of building hype especially when doing a promotion such as this or similarly memberships. I helped her to construct a 3-step email campaign and planned what dates to send out the emails.
The initial email called for her clients to register to get early bird notification when these vouchers went on sale – just 15 minutes more notice than non-registered clients. The email also limited the number of 2 for 1 vouchers going on sale to create urgency and get people to register.
Email 2 reminded her clients to register and also let them know how many had registered so far. This increased the urgency as it showed the demand for the 2 for 1 vouchers was HOT!
The 3rd email was to pre registered clients announcing the vouchers where ON SALE NOW and created urgency for these clients to call and get their voucher before the email was sent out to all 2136 clients on her database 15 minutes later.
The sequence of emails created a buzz and subsequently sold $6000 worth of vouchers. And of course that means there is going to be an influx of new clients in the salon over the next few months as the ‘free’ voucher had to be given to a new client and had an expiry of 3 months to get these people in the door fast!
And the best thing of all…email is FREE!
So next time you are planning any marketing campaign, think about how you are going to deliver that campaign to your target audience to get the best results.
by Greg Milner | Jul 21, 2011 | Marketing Superstars, The Right Mindset
Kerri Ryan’s Water Lily Day Spa in Clonmel, Co Tipperary has TRIPLED sales – including 717 new clients in the past three months alone
If you’re all too ready to blame ‘the economy’ for your salon or spa’s miserable sales, empty chairs, unused treatment rooms, this report with either
1) make you want to punch someone, or
2) inspire you and light a beacon of hope.
Ireland was once the ‘Tiger of Europe”. But, like Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece, the Irish economy is now on the ropes, saddled with debt they can’t repay, on the edge of bankruptcy.
Naturally, the Irish aren’t spending any money, largely because they don’t have any. Really??
That’s a surprise to Kerri Ann Ryan, owner of Water Lily Day Spa in Clonmel, Co Tipperary. Kerri joined the Inner Circle marketing & mentoring program in October, 2010. As she reports in this long email received this week, her sales and new client figures have gone through the roof.
“January until now, turnover has tripled already compared to last year’s figures.
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Water Lily Day Spa – thriving in the heart of economically-ravaged Ireland
717 new clients in the last 3 months due to the ‘Queen of Referrals program and loyalty card system. (Tried Queen of Referrals last year and it didn’t work. I offered vouchers worth 75 euro to my regulars and I couldn’t understand why clients weren’t interested. I was so frustrated as I believed this was such an amazing offer. Anyway, changed the idea around – now I offer 100 points on their Loyalty Cards and business is booming with referrals. I know you said if it doesn’t work one way try it from another angle.)
- Super Summer Offer (Hollywood Woman) Package: took in over 3000 euro in 1 week. Offer is available Mon, Tue & Wed only so it has filled up slack times, clients have upgraded their packages so my early week takings are sometimes better than the weekend now.
- Printed 5000 flyers with same offer last week. (Luckily I got your CD set in the post and on it you reminded a guy that if something works, do it again until it stops working. He seemed shocked at the idea and it made me realise what a bloody idiot I was for thinking the same way) Believe it or not, I wasn’t actually going to do this offer again for another while as I wanted to keep it “special” and “limited”. As soon as the huge tax bill came in the door I got the finger out fairly lively!! I intend to do a weekly drop to different housing estates in the area. (So far 10 new bookings and 4 bought the package also.)
- Off the tools finally. Still in Salon a lot, but now I finally have a chance to look around me and see what steps I need to be making for the future of the business. Also it is great to be able to give my clients my full attention and sort out any issues quickly.
- I am expanding the salon as I mentioned, to keep up with demand. I have hired a Manager now to deal with the staff and running of salon while I focus on Marketing. I am in the processes of implementing Julies Toolkit.
(Julie Piantadosi’s Total Salon Solutions polices, procedures and staff management system. Not yet available to non-Inner Circle member salons)
- To be honest I have done very little with the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit® so far. I haven’t even scratched the surface and I am thrilled with the results. The potential is HUGE! Half the battle is changing my mindset. When we first spoke last year you said to me that I should be aiming for March this year to be off the tools. Honestly, I thought ” I wish” but had at least a 100 reasons why it wouldn’t be possible. Originally I didn’t imagine myself being off the tools for another few years. Of course business is very hard in Ireland right now but if the customer service is right and you are implementing different ideas and offers at the same time, there is no reason for it not to work.
My goal is to get over to Australia next year to one of your Bootcamps. The facebook forums have been a godsend as they keep you motivated and add new ideas to the mix. I am delighted I joined WSM. I have come across a lot of other members and yourself also, who I now aspire to be like. Can’t wait to get all the Toolkit into motion and start planning a prosperous future.
Kind Regards,
Kerri Ann
Congratulations Kerri Ann. You’re an inspiration to all salon owners, and particularly your fellow Irish business owners.
by Greg Milner | Apr 20, 2011 | New Zealand, The Smell of Success
Every salon owner loves the thought of getting more new clients through their business. It means an increase in turnover, profit, more product sales and so on. But what it also means for a lot of salon owners is more time ‘on the tools’. And that’s scary when you are already working 50 hours a week trying to run a business, make appointments, do the GST, pay the wages, do the marketing and everything else on top of that!
Hana Snowden, Owner of Ataahua Day Spa in Lower Hutt, NZ
But for WSM member Hana Snowden of Ataahua Day Spa in Lower Hutt near Wellington, getting 10 new clients a week means FREEDOM.
Hana has been in our marketing and mentoring program now for 8 months and in that time she has seen her business grow and grow. Hana was a Beauty Therapist at the time of joining and has worked incredibly hard and taken lots of action to build her business. She soon realised the value of working ‘on’ her business instead of ‘in it’ servicing just one client at a time.
For those of you who have read ‘the E-myth’ you will be familiar with the concept of working more on your business as opposed to in it. For those who haven’t read it, it’s a MUST read so go out and get your hands on a copy asap!
Hana could spend an hour or 2 putting together her marketing campaigns that would bring her in lots of customers as well as thousands of dollars, instead of being in a treatment room making 50 bucks for a waxing appointment.
And this growth in turnover and customers allowed her the freedom to make the decision to pull herself ‘off the tools’ once and for all. She set a date (15th March) and told all her customers that as of that date she was a business owner, not a beauty therapist and would be handing her clients over to an employee.
Now I am not saying that being a beauty therapist or stylist is a bad thing. Rather being the owner of your business is a better thing, instead of being an employee/slave to it!
And Hana knows that should a staff member be sick, or someone leaves and has to be replaced then she can step back in, albeit temporarily, and cover for them – she has that option available to her.
And if Hana has been getting 10 new clients a week up to now, imagine what it will be like now that she can focus even more on the marketing.
10 new clients on average a week is 520 new clients per year. If each of those clients has a value to Hana of $1,000 each then she is looking at an increase in turnover of half a million this year alone. Heck, even if she kept just 50% of them that’s still a quarter of a million!
Too many business owners (not just salon owners) make the mistake of creating a job for themselves and becoming chained to their businesses. For many, the only way they feel they can make more money is to work more in the business so they can cover the bills. But the business will just continue to suffer if no time is being spent on the important stuff, the marketing and getting systems in place. And so the vicious cycle continues.
And I am talking from personal experience. Just over 4 years ago my wife Rachael was working as a Beauty Therapist in our salon D’Aguiar: hair.skin.nails in Auckland. She’d spend about 70 hours a week in there doing treatments, I would hardly ever see her, her hair was falling out due to stress and she was suffering severe RSI.
Just like Hana, we made the call (with the help at that time of Greg Milner) to pull Rachael off the tools, as nervous as we were that the clients would leave and the business would fail. Well, of course the clients didn’t leave, the salon flourished and today we own 4 massively successful businesses (including the salon which is run by a manager and we pop in maybe once a week).
If someone had told me 4 years ago that I’d be running 4 businesses then I would have thought they were mad and laughed in their face. But today, I understand the concept of working on the business, not in it. So I still have plenty of time to spend with Rachael and our new 2 week old baby. It’s all because of the world-famous Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit®
by Greg Milner | Apr 7, 2011 | Selling Salon Products, The Right Mindset
Inner Circle member Jane Mason of Pure Day Spa in Caloundra was facing a double challenge: not only was her primary market tourists – her spa is in a hotel, with little or no walk-by traffic – but she’s in the heart of the area devastated by the Queensland floods this past January.
As Jane writes below, she had to take MASSIVE ACTION – and used some classic “Sales Thinking” to come up with a clever twist on the famous Queen of Referrals system in the Toolkit.
It worked brilliantly – and Jane has generously shared the marketing pieces she uses in this campaign with other Members.
“It is quite basic and the letter could most probably do with tweaking. I rolled this out to 4 of my top hotels, as at a recent meeting they all said they were struggling and to be honest so was I (and looking at closing the door).
MASSIVE ACTION was needed. My salon has a 30/70 split in favour of the tourist due to us being inside a hotel and very little walk past. Although not directly flooded, a lot of my regular holiday clients are from Brisbane, Grantham, Toowoomba and the Lockyer valley.
The way it works is simple, I send the hotels 60 vouchers to the value of $25, which they can do with as they wish… Staff incentives, booking incentives, hotel Guests and residents.
When they run out they call and I take them some more. I keep track of the vouchers and at the end of the month the winning hotel gets a $100 voucher. Some of the hotels have gone to town with it, putting posters in lifts etc, others are a bit more discreet.
We gave out 240 vouchers in March and got back 67 (the girls also tried to upsell on the pedi’s so that in actual fact we didn’t give anything away).
The average spend per service $122.75. We have found that even if they don’t use the voucher the seed has been planted and they call us first without looking around town at what’s on offer.
We also had an offer that was value added that they couldn’t use the voucher on which the girls upsold (some were better than others at doing this). We have found that hotels that didn’t have them were phoning me to get in on the act so in April we have rolled this out to another 8.”
Now that’s what we call smart marketing. And obviously, getting results.
67 new clients at an average spend of $122 = YOU do the maths!
of the entire system.
by Greg Milner | Mar 3, 2011 | The Smell of Success
New templates for Inner Circle Member salons – see below.
The New Zealand economy – never robust since the onset of the GFC – is bracing itself for another hit in the wake of Christchurch’s $12 billion earthquake.
But for salon business owners like Cathy Davys, of Cathy Davys Hair Design & Day Spa in Wellington, such awful disasters are all the more reason to do what true entrepreneurs do best – in times of trouble, market harder, sell with more enthusiasm;
In other words, she abides by the advice of veteran sales trainer Zig Ziglar:
“Go out and sell something. Your country needs the business.”
“We did a special Christmas offer – we took it from the Members Only website – and took $30,000 from that one promotion. Along with a couple of other promotions we ran after Christmas, it gave us our best January/February ever!”
writes Cathy.
“In January we ran a special Diamond membership promotion, with a ticket price of $1,800 for a $2,400 value. We limited numbers to just 12, and sold them all in a week! That alone brought in $21,000. Clients love renewing, as they all run out at different times now its great for cash flow. Just need not to spend it:-)
“Now we’re about to launch a Platinum membership offer, $6,999 worth of hair & beauty services for $4,999. I’ll let you know how that goes, but if all 7 of them sell as expected, that’s another $34,993 in cash up front.”
Christchurch earthquake fundraiser
But it’s not all about cash for the business. Like many entrepreneurs, Cathy is discovering the benefits of ‘community responsibility’ to drive sales for the salon, with a special promotion to raise funds for victims of last week’s fatal earthquake.
“We are doing a fund raiser for Christchurch through our email to non-returning guests for a $30 cut and blow wave with funds going to help Christchurch Hairdressers. This will also help to get 2 new stylists up and running.
“I love Worldwide Salon Marketing!”
