by Greg Milner | May 28, 2010 | Australia, Marketing Superstars, The Smell of Success
Hair Salon Marketing Template Superstar: Message from a Doting Grandmother!
Now we’re being credited with creating babies!
At Worldwide Salon Marketing we’re dedicated to creating wealth and financial freedom for salon and spa owners. But we never thought we’d be thanked for making babies as well.
As Maureen Hardman writes, daughter and long-term Inner Circle member Cherie Underwood has been able to get married, start a family and work from home thanks to the success of direct response salon marketing she discovered in the WSM Inner Circle Marketing & Mentoring Program.
“When we purchased the salon nearly 3 years ago the old salon owner had implemented some of your strategies as she had hard copies of some of your marketing material, so at some stage she must have been a member.
“We know she had increased the business by about 25% in two years prior to her selling, due to an increase in her marketing strategies. Since joining WSM we have further increased our sales by at least another 25% by following your most recent ideas etc.
When we first purchased the business there were 2 additional full time staff (plus the owner) who had been there for a total of 9 years. They both left within 6 months, one opening up at home and taking about a quarter of the clients. (She left when Cherie returned from her honeymoon). Soon after this, with the help of the marketing templates in the Toolkit, birthday vouchers and fabulous offers, seen many of those clients return.
“We now also have someone on reception as inspired by WSM so we do not miss any calls, walk-ins etc (this is a must). The ex-employee is now working in a bar down the road (bitter sweet!). Because of this increase in sales we have put on an additional full time beauty therapist and Cherie has been able to start a family without any hesitation and will now predominantly work from home. Your stuff works and without it I may not have been blessed with a beautiful grandaughter!”
by Greg Milner | May 26, 2010 | Selling Salon Products, The Right Mindset
How much money’s slipping through YOUR fingers?
The Sales Prevention Department’s alive and well in my part of the world, and I’ll bet my mother it is in yours, too. The world seems to be lurching from one financial crisis to another – first the GFC, now Europe on the brink thanks to massive debts – and yet so much of it could be solved if only sales people did nothing more than their job; to take the money people are begging you to stuff into your cash registers.
You don’t have to smart to be successful in sales. Just SHOWING UP is usually enough.
But most can’t even get out of their own way. I’ve been shopping for a new car, but if my experience is typical – and I fear it is – then it’s a mystery to me how car dealers, and the salesmen they employ, manage to feed their kids. And this is by no means restricted to the car industry.
Hint: how much money is slipping through your own Sales Prevention Department?
Example #1: Six months ago I decided on one of those up-market, outrageously-expensive European models. Phoned a nearby dealer, arranged to meet a salesman at the showroom, sat down with some kid in his twenties, ticked all the options I wanted, roughly added up the bill to somewhere on the nasty side of $120,000, suggested he might want to sharpen his pencil for a quick sale, and told him to send me a final figure. He had both my email address and my phone number.
I never heard from him again. Maybe he got snatched by aliens. Or his dog, fed up with not being fed, ate him. I have no earthly idea, but it’s the sort of nightmare that should be keeping his boss awake all night, staring at the ceiling.
Example #2: Bemused and somewhat perplexed by this, I simply refused to follow him up and try convincing him to take my money. I left it a few months – still nothing – so last week I started shopping again. This time a different dealer for a different make. Found one I liked, and with the young salesman in the passenger’s seat, took the thing for a test drive.
Back at the showroom, I told him I wasn’t going to commit to a new car for the next two or three years without spending at least a couple of days with the vehicle first, so he promised to get back to me about loaning me the car over the following weekend. That was last Saturday. Today is Wednesday. Still haven’t heard from him.
Example #3: Unwilling to waste any more time dealing direct with yet another Sales Prevention Department face to face, I instead went shopping online. On the most popular car website, I find two or three examples of the car I’m looking for, all at different dealerships across the country. (And by now I’d switched preferred models. I figured if the previous idiot’s sales skills were so lacking, his dealership’s service levels would be similarly inefficient)
I complete the online forms to make an inquiry, and hit the submit button. Four days later, not one of those dealers has bothered to respond.
Now, it’s not as if I’m buying a built-to-price, poverty-pack Korean tin can. I’m spending north of $100,000. And they don’t want my business???
Laughably, the website every dealer in the country uses to sell their cars clearly doesn’t trust the dealers either. It’s just sent me an automatic email, inquiring as to whether I’ve been contacted, and asking if I’d like them to give the dealers a gentle nudge. I presume something like “Gee, some jerk is trying to buy a car from you, wondering if you’d lower yourself to actually give him a call sometime.”
I don’t think so. Let them drown in their own sloth.
Here’s what’s instructive for all salon owners:
Think this kind of sabotage isn’t happening in your business? Do so at your peril, ‘cos it is. It happens in every business. Be paranoid. Paranoia is good. Every single time your phone rings, it’s ‘cos you’ve spent money making it ring. And every time that prospect falls through a canyon-size crack, it’s money wasted. Sales begging, not made. Profit left sitting on the table.
Be paranoid enough to mystery-shop your own business. The results can be terrifying. That’s why most business owners don’t. Just last week, one of our recently-joined Inner Circle member salons asked us to do it for them. Senior IC coach Annette Gomez booked herself in for a two-hour session. The salon owner thought his business was doing ‘okay’, but when he read Annette’s report, detailing at least twenty glaring, obvious-to-any-customer ‘service failures’, he just about had heart failure. But to his credit, he got stuck into fixing them.
But at least he had the courage to get it done in the first place. Most salon owners – in fact most owners of most businesses – have a head-in-the-sand attitude when it comes to this kind of detail. Folks, this stuff IS marketing.
I advocate ruthlessness. Many a time I’ve had a salon or spa owner on the phone, complaining to me that a staff member “….won’t do what I want her to do/say…” – and my instant and repeated advice is; fire them. Now.
The danger of effective marketing is success….getting more and more customers, who quickly find out you’re no good.
by Greg Milner | May 13, 2010 | Ads that Have Worked, Marketing Superstars, New Zealand, The Right Mindset
Hair Salon Template: NZ Salon Marketing Superstar, Toni Cunningham’s Autumn Mailbox Drop Reaps Fantastic Rewards!
If there is a common theme amongst our successful My Social Salon members it’s that they ALL take massive action to get the results they want for their business. And Toni Cunningham of Decadence Salon in Palmerston North, New Zealand is one of those MASSIVE ACTION taking salon owners.
Toni Cunningham, Owner of Decadence Salon in Palmerston North, NZ
Toni joined the program back in December 2009 and has seen her salon’s weekly turnover increase by significant 20% in that time. And the great thing about Toni is that she doesn’t get deflated or defeated when she does a campaign and doesn’t quite get the results she wanted, because she has so many other successful salon marketing campaigns on the go that she is always getting great results from different areas.
When I get calls from ‘non inner circle members’ telling me that their marketing isn’t working, I normally ask them what marketing they have done, to which the response is something like,
“Well I delivered 37 flyers into mailboxes 8 weeks ago and I haven’t heard back from anyone yet…”
It is simply not enough, and the results will show that.
Many Salon owners have been slaves to their business and staff, not paying themselves a wage for 1, 2, 10 even 20 years and most of these people have the perception that marketing is a waste of time and has to be expensive, but it isn’t. There are so many low cost strategies if not FREE ways you can market your salon.
Read on below to see how a low cost mailbox drop brought in $4158 for Toni Cunningham in the month of April…
“Hi Chris
Just wanted to let you know that April was our best month (even bet Christmas) it’s fantastic to see the salon growing continuously every month. I have to say couldn’t have done it without WSM.
I have to say it’s really rewarding after my husband and I have dropped 500 flyers to go into the salon and see 10 messages on the phone and then the calendar just fills up, its great.
The team gets such a kick out of seeing the calendar fill quite rapidly.
I have only been in the program since December and have seen some great results, have made a part timer full time ,and we are in the process of hiring another stylist.
If this is what we have achieved in the last 6 months I say bring on the next 6 months.
Last month we took massive action, we did our monthly newsletter, Kids Free Hair Cuts Flyer (in school holidays), Autumn Flyer, along with all the New client letters, birthday letters, Raise the dead letters.
By far the Autumn package was the most successful, we are dropping 500 every week and getting amazing results. It cost $45 for flyers and envelopes and we booked 42 packages at $99 and what is even better, is 34 were new clients.”
And from chatting with Toni recently she dropped another 500 flyers around the neighbourhood in the first week of May and got another 9 bookings (49 in total so far). And of course these results do not include all the new and existing clients she got from her other marketing campaigns.
So Let’s break things down.
500 Flyers plus envelopes cost Toni $45.
She delivered 2000 flyers over 4 weeks in April, so the total cost for the flyers and envelopes was $180.
Each of those 42 clients spent $99, so an immediate income of $4158 (this does not include any retail sold).
Let’s say on average each new client is worth $1000 per year to Toni and that half of the 34 new clients became regular clients. That would be an increase in annual turnover of $17,000.
Not a bad return for a $180 investment.
Well done Toni and keep up the excellent work!
by Greg Milner | May 4, 2010 | Marketing Superstars, The Smell of Success
Inner Circle Premium member Sarkis Akle of Hair by Phd – dramatic increase in sales and new clients since upgrading from Lite
Salon Appointment Book Template Hair Salon Marketer of the Month: Check out these brilliant results
Sarkis Akle, owner of Hair by Phd in Parramatta, Sydney, only upgraded to the Premium program from Lite in February this year. The effects on his salon’s sales has been dramatic.
It’s a testament to the power of good salon marketing copy… and implementation.
Here’s what Sarkis says:
Got some figures that I would like to share with you guys.
These are based on a comparison between April 09 and April 10, keeping in mind in 09 we had record turnover for our business and we are not working off a small base.
1. Turn over up 16.5% from $62,926 to $73,346
2. Rebooking up 19.5%
3. New clients up 104%v – 95 new clients this April.
4. Total clients up 11.9%
5. Retail up 8%
6. My personal takings are down. All the growth has been with the staff.
7. Avg client sale is only up by $3.50, however with the amount of free services we have done it’s still pretty good.
8. We sold 25 of the $99 Mother’s day packages last week, just through in salon promotion.
Thanks to you guys, I am so pumped about my business. My dream is to pay all my debts off and finally be able to buy a home for my family.
Thanks Guys!
Hearing from salon owners like Sarkis is what makes my job the best in the world – giving people the tools, and the knowledge, to make more money for themselves.
Congratulations Sarkis. You’ve won a special WSM prize, it’s in the mail!
by Greg Milner | Mar 25, 2010 | Website Marketing
Luxury comes cheap in Bali – and they get people through the doors with efficient, sophisicated marketing
Rightly, you no doubt have zero interest in my recent five-day break at a luxury private villa near the beach in Bali, where the staff outnumbered our party of eight by two to one, and you couldn’t move without a butler polishing something or mixing you a clever drink by the pool.
But you might be interested in how we came to be there, and how a little island in a third-world country has profitably embraced the kind of marketing that any salon owner can do, but few bother with.
When I first visited Bali 35 years ago, it was a dirt-poor backwater of rice paddies and fishing villages. Electricity was a rarity.
But for many Australians, for whom Bali is but a few hours flight away, the island’s allure these days is as a holiday in a tropical paradise offering a vast choice of luxurious, cheap accommodation, where the people are almost embarrassingly courteous, civilized and welcoming.
In the mountain villages, among the rice paddies and melon groves, the people are still poor by western standards. Yet on a bicycle ride down the mountain from the volcano at Kintamani to the cultural center of Ubud, we were greeted endlessly by smiling children dressed smartly in school uniform.
But the astounding growth of tourism in the relatively-affluent coastal resorts like Seminyak has spawned a new breed of Balinese; well-educated, hard-working, industrious. (Unable to sleep one night, I walked outside into the dark, warm tropical air at 4am to find a lone security guard patrolling the villa grounds, and was taken aback when he cheerfully stuck up a conversation in very passable English. A security guard!)
But the pay, even for the best jobs in the big villas, is low. One of our butlers told us he earned the local equivalent of about $170 a month. Which explains why you can build a luxurious three-bedroom villa, including land, for less than $250,000! Five full-time staff, maintenance and utilities will set you back $1500 a month.
Typical among Asian countries, small businesses – and there are thousands of them, tiny shops all selling the same sarongs, handbags and wood carvings – have absolutely no earthly idea about even the most basic direct response marketing methods – ‘my’ kind of marketing. They’re all competing on price alone.
But the island’s (often foreign-owned, locally-managed) luxury accommodation industry has become very sophisticated at cheaply and efficiently reaching a global market that was all but denied it until a few years ago, save for the laborious and clunky work of travel agents.
To find our villa on the coast near Seminyak, I didn’t even leave my desk. Google ‘seminyak villas’ and you’ll discover brilliantly-executed websites that give you virtual tours of the property, location maps, vast numbers of photos, testimonials, nearby restaurants, tour operators, even menus you can choose to be cooked by your private chef. You can book online, you can phone them up, or you can get your travel agent to do it for you.
Here’s the villa we settled on – for less than $100 a night per head.
They leave nothing to chance. As I often say, the more you tell, the more you sell. The Balinese accommodation industry has discovered the immense power and efficiency of the web to generate leads, drive sales, confirm bookings. They might not be the most adept at other forms of media – direct mail, outdoor displays, print media advertising etc – but in this particular media, they’ve become slick, sophisticated and experienced.
It’s a lesson in doing one thing, and doing it well.
