One of the greatest frustrations for many salon & spa owners is NO-SHOWS! They’re expensive, time-wasting and profit-sapping. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In this webinar, recorded with successful Brisbane salon entrepreneur Anita Clements of Twisted Desire, watch and listen carefully as Anita explains how she eliminated no-shows forever – and discovered many other ways to take money from clients UP-FRONT.
Quotes
“I feel I’ve moved from Hairdresser to Business Women”
“You have my back”
What changes have happened?
” The biggest change is now my VIP events are profitable now – they were not before”
“My Staff are now interested in marketing where as before they were not – we’re making money now”
Taking deposits “I was very nerves to begin with but now with any VIP night we take money up front”
How did you implement taking deposits? ” We started doing this in January, we took a big hit because of not taking deposits. I felt very nerves about taking money off existing cleints. So we started small and any new cleint that is having any chemical treatment has to pay a deposit. We have a script and we have no problems with people paying them. ”
What did that do to your no shows.
“We have almost no no-shows now. We have got rid off all the time wasters who would book and not turn up”
“Our salon is now full of good customers”
What happens when people say they do not want to pay a deposit”
“Well it just means that we don’t get bad clients”
“If they don’t want to pay a deposit they can always just pop in and if we are not busy we will see them without a deposit”
“They tend to spend more money when they pay a deposit because the bill on the day is less”
“its made us a little more exclusive than the salon down the road”
“Its almost been a year and we’ve not had one person not show up or not call us”
“We take deposits for VIP events – if you pre pay you get a great package on the night (no discounts just added value) and mostly we are getting money from our existing cleints”
“The last VIP night we made $3,000 just from 2 packages and they could not wait to book in”
“We are doing the local Christmas market and take a stall and we are selling vouchers there at the festival”
“We’re also do the Christmas tree thing off the membership site – we don’t change a thing just run it straight off the system”
“We also did an Events and pre-sold Mini Membershps and made $9,000 – then I got scarred and pulled the pin but I should have done more”
“We don’t need bank loans anymore we just pre sell a mini membership – it just becomes a game, its no longer any struggle!”
In my daily newspaper, a story that shows just how little even experienced business people know about pricing, value propositions and marketing. If you own a salon or spa and want to charge premium prices for your salon body treatments or hair styling, this story is a classic example of how not to do it – and a lesson in how you CAN do it.
A reader had written a glowing letter of praise for the magnificent quality of food and service at one of my city’s top restaurants. “Very stylish, with interesting, tasty and creative food.” he wrote. “The service was almost faultless too, thank you.” And then came the “….but.”
“A smallish plate of (beautifully cooked) pieces of suckling pig and a little bowl of sauerkraut was…$55. Oh, COME ON…! Is this just cynicism? Do you just think people will pay this because they don’t want to be thought of as uncool by complaining…?”
The diner’s complaint was justified, because the restaurant had failed to justify its high price by providing value. And yet, that value was easily explained, had the restaurant’s management bothered to find out how to do so.
In fact, they had the answer at their fingertips. Yet they blew it. Sarcastically, they wrote to the customer thus:
“As far as going into detail and explaining our prices for you we won’t bother. We’re sure you don’t email big companies such as Calvin Klein or Armani and ask them to explain themselves for the expensive prices for a pair of jeans or a white T shirt.
“We serve good quality food that has had a lot of love and hard work go into it.”
Huh? As if other restaurants charging half the price serve lousy food thrown together by trained monkeys? Dumb. Yet they had the right answer at their fingertips. In the very same article, the restaurant’s part-owner and high-profile chef David Coomer detailed exactly the right justification for charging top dollar – yet, ignorantly, this brilliant sales information is presumably kept a secret from the company’s customers.
Each pig costs us about $180 to buy. It is air-freighted clear across the country from Victoria, and collected at Perth Airport by restaurant staff. By the time preparation, garnish and labour costs are added, it doesn’t leave much of a margin.
“If you were a rational restaurateur, you wouldn’t bother,” said Mr Coomer. “But we want to be perceived as people who are dedicated craftsmen serving very good quality food.”
Er, how on earth are they going to be perceived as dedicated craftsmen, if they don’t tell the story, shout it from every available rooftop. If I were Mr Coomer, I’d be instantly re-printing the menus, complete with the story of each and every dish. E.g.,
“For our suckling pig, we personally select only the best available animal from a specially-certified farm, approved by our part-owner and master-chef David Coomer, (name of farm?) in the cool highlands of sub-alpine Victoria. Each pig costs approximately $180. Most restaurant food supplies are trucked across the Nullarbor Plain to Perth, a distance of 2,500 miles, however we believe in only delivering the very best and freshest food to our diners, so instead of trucks, our animals are air freighted at a cost of $70 each. At Perth Airport, our restaurant staff personally meet each arriving aircraft to inspect the purchase and ensure it has arrived in perfect condition….”
Etc etc. You should by now be getting the picture. There is Magic in the Details.
Too often – and this applies to salon & spa marketing as much as the marketing of any other business – the owner assumes that the customer has no interest in the process, only the end result. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hark unto me; there is case study after case study of smart entrepreneurs turning the actual process into a ‘business within the business’, not only generating another revenue stream, but using the process as means of not merely justifying the high prices of its products, but making the customer feel intensely excited about paying those high prices.
Case in point: premium European car manufacturers such as Mercedes and Porsche have erected massive museums in the grounds of their plants, tied to tours of the factory where customers can watch their car being built.
Schlitz beer – telling the story, revealing the DETAILS, turned Schlitz into the world’s biggest
Famous US brewer Schlitz was the biggest in the world for decades, thanks at least in part to advertising which – unlike other companies – extolled the process by which their beer was made. (See example on this page.)
There is much to be learned and even more to be implemented in your salon or spa business from this. Do you simply present your customers with the end product and assume they know how you arrived at that product? Is your method of pricing little more scientific than the ‘Flinch Test‘?
(Explanation: the Flinch Test is one of three common pricing methods used by all businesses. Method #1: Look around at what everybody else is charging, and take an average. Method #2: figure out what a product or service costs you, and simply add a margin. Method #3: stick any old price tag on the thing, and if the customers don’t flinch, keep pushing it up until they do.)
The restaurant had a magnificent story to tell, yet failed to do so, and its only defence against price criticism was arrogance. That’s not stupidity, it’s ignorance. There’s a difference. Stupidity is not being ignorant, it’s being ignorant and refusing to educate yourself despite an abundance of information at your fingertips.
For those salons that have either been through or are currently in one of our Worldwide Salon Marketing programs, you will be very familiar with our ‘Hollywood Woman’ salon template.
This salon marketing template, which comes in many designs, has been the backbone of everything that WSM stands for when it comes to direct response marketing. It really seems to press all the right buttons, not only with salon owners around the world, but also customers of salons.
In fact, I would hazard a guess that the Hollywood Flyer has been hands down the MOST successful marketing piece ever written for the hair/beauty industry, generating millions in revenue for salons.
If there was an ‘Oscars’ for marketing flyers, this would be a multi-award winning one!
Veronica Leigh and her new Jack Russell Puppies! – stunning success with the Hollywood Woman salon template
So it was great to hear from New Zealand salon owner Veronica Leigh of Simply Exquisite in Riccarton, about her latest campaign, using…you guessed it, ‘The Hollywood Flyer’.
I paid Veronica a visit in person recently to do some in-salon training and she told me that she wanted to get some new clients through her business, so she used the Hollywood flyer as a mailbox drop in her local area. Here’s what Veronica had to say…
“I am very, very pleased with the results from this mailbox drop. I dropped 500 a week and by the time I got back after a couple of hours I had messages on the answer phone wanting to book it! Certainly got me motivated to get off my butt and keep taking action. In total I have had 30 bookings in just a few weeks!”
So what’s so special about the Hollywood flyer? Well it has everything that every successful marketing ad should have…
An attention grabbing headline that makes people want to read on
An offer so irresistible that it can’t be ignored
A guarantee that removes the risk for any doubters
A call to action and scarcity that makes people want to call now, not in 6 weeks
Testimonials to prove that you’re so amazing at what you do
And probably the clincher…the name ‘Hollywood’ itself immediately springs to mind images of glamorous actors and models. And let’s face it, at the end the day your customers are not buying waxing or haircuts from you. They are buying hope, sex appeal and glamour!
Add a salon owner who is not afraid to ‘get off their butt’ as Veronica so rightly put it – and you have a formula for success!!!
Well done Veronica, it’s an absolute pleasure to know you and have you in our program…and I adore your little Jack Russells by the way!
Are you hiding your business personality under a paper bag?
Two emails, from opposite sides of the planet, got me thinking this morning; what is it about personality that makes so many business owners do everything in their power to hide it from their customers and potential markets? It seems to me that most salon & spa owners bend over backwards to use their ‘professional’ image as a shield, deliberately protecting their own life stories from the people who give them money. Or want to give them money.
One email came from a WSM Member and owner of a large and very up-market spa in the Middle East. My team and I had been working with this very talented and driven businesswoman on an extensive re-design of her online and offline marketing. At my request, she’d sent me absorbing details of her up-bringing in Russia, her childhood love of all things fashion, beauty and glamour, her move to Dubai as a young single mother knowing no English or Arabic, and the fascinating story of how she finally shunned the party life and established her now-successful spa in the heart of the city.
I wrote her a new biography based on these ‘personal’ details, complete with pictures of her with famous people such as Ariana Huffington of the Huffington Post, and Italian fashion guru Roberto Cavalli, for use in all kinds of media, online and offline. She wrote back,
“Can we skip all that personal stuff and keep it only professional?”
There followed a long, detailed and incredibly bland ‘shopping list’ of her achievements and business milestones. I wrote back:
“I disagree. It’s precisely that lack of ‘personality’ in most company executive profiles that makes them all so ‘beige’ and dreary. People in business are generally so afraid of exposing any sign of having a real personality or personal history, hiding it behind a purely ‘professional’ front, that they all tend to blend seamlessly together in a blur of sameness. Do you really think Sir Richard Branson would be where he is now, do you really think Steve Jobs (Apple) would have been able to create such a huge company, if it weren’t for their willingness to put their private lives out there, to allow people to see who they were as humans (and very flawed humans at that), not just ‘professional’ business operators?”
The success of Apple, and of Virgin, and of thousands of other business household names, wasn’t because they merely created great products or services, or had excellent ideas. It was people bought the story of their creators.
The problem – and the obvious solution – is this: people want to do business with people, not merely faceless, professional, one-dimensional entities. The more you cover that up, hide it behind mere ‘branding’, the more difficult it becomes to differentiate your products and services from a thousand other ‘me-too’ competitors.
The second email was a request for my comment on the ‘re-branding’ strategy of a nationally-franchised spa chain. I’ll preface this by saying that the entrepreneur behind this chain is obviously driven, talented, progressive and the owner of a very sharp business brain. But my opinion was sought purely on the re-branding exercise he’d just spend a not-insubstantial amount of money on. So I replied:
Well, on the face of it, re-branding a business is all terribly important for the owners of that business. Years ago, the Commonwealth Bank paid a consultant more than $1million to design a new logo, of which the bank was extremely proud, but I doubt any of the bank’s customers gave much of a toss about it. They care about what interest rate they’re paying on their mortgages, and the service they get from the people at their local branch or at the call centre.
As always, people put self-interest first, and there’s daylight between that and anything a company does or says about itself.
Which is why I’ve never paid the slightest attention to our own brand imagery. A graphic designer threw our logo together in half an hour years ago, and I’ve never bothered to change it, because I don’t think any of our Members pay any attention to it. The fact that our systems and processes help them make more money is really our brand.
From a pure branding point of view, it’s probably more important to your franchisees and prospective franchisees, because (presumably) it makes them feel they’re part of a more polished organisation.
But in the overall scheme of things, no, I don’t believe spending large amounts of money on pure branding exercises can ever be measured in terms of Return on Investment. I’ve always taught people to spend money on the things that measurably bring customers through the door, which is direct response marketing (online or offline), lead generation, upselling and cross-selling, and branding should always be a by-product of that process. Unless of course you’re a big publicly-listed company and have lots of shareholders money to spend.
Now, it would be mere dogma to claim that ‘branding’ has no place or value in small to medium businesses. But in isolation, absent any measurable, complementary and supporting systems and process for getting customers through the door…and absent the essential ingredient of personality…branding alone cannot do all the heavy lifting.
The entrepreneur came back with a very well-argued case for ‘brand-awareness’, particularly for the benefit of franchisees and employees, and ended with “Let’s revisit this conversation in 6 months and see what the results are:-)”
Yes, let’s do that. But whatever the results, it’ll be damn-near impossible to look at any figures – positive or negative – six months from now, and say with absolute certainty that ‘re-branding did that’.
I’ve lost count of the number of times over the past 10 years I’ve been accused of advocating ‘tacky’, so-called ‘unprofessional’ or ‘cheap’ marketing for salons and spas. In one memorable instance, a member of the ‘upper echelon’ of the beauty industry, a veteran of some 30 years, approached me during a marketing seminar I was giving and snootily told me “no self-respecting proper company would lower themselves to using your sales & marketing tactics.”
Well, I told her then, and I’m here to tell ya now, she was wrong in every possible way.
Have you heard of Time Magazine? Yep, the very same, establishment publishing giant that’s documented the movers and shakers of the world since 1923.
Like all publishers, Time makes its money from advertising, and to a less extent, subscriptions.
Now, nobody would ever consider Time Magazine any kind of hip, brash, swashbuckling outfit. Certainly not the kind of ‘old-money’ business that’d consider doing something even remotely ‘trashy’ or lowbrow just to boost its market share.
Um, well, yes they would.
Here’s a Time offer that arrived in WSM Director of Online George Slater’s mailbox this week. Yes, a full-color, four page direct mail piece offering
FREE WATCHES!
…in exchange for a drastically-discounted, 54-month subscription. (Watches. Time. Get it?) Now, for the serious student of marketing, this is worth studying. There’s nothing new here. Time is using one of the oldest, tried-and-tested, bait ‘n switch marketing strategies in the book. Because they know that people will often buy the product just to get the free bonus.
You see this exact strategy every time you browse your local newsstand; a free DVD or CD, glued to or packaged inside the magazine. Only a handful of people actually want the magazine. But many more just want the bonus CD. In Thailand, the Talisman Billiards Company gives away a free golf shirt with every order over $100. “I do see people increasing their order just so they can get the free shirt,” says Talisman owner Tony Jones.
This strategy works in almost any business. Salons and spas are no different. Got a cupboard full of products you haven’t been able to give rid of? Give them away, with an offer tied to an appointment for a service. “Yours Free” has for more than a century – and remains – one of the most powerful phrases in any marketing arsenal.
Have you heard of Time Magazine? Yep, the very same, establishment publishing giant that’s documented the movers and shakers of the world since 1923.
…in exchange for a drastically-discounted, 54-month subscription. (Watches. Time. Get it?) Now, for the serious student of marketing, this is worth studying. There’s nothing new here. Time is using one of the oldest, tried-and-tested, bait ‘n switch marketing strategies in the book. Because they know that people will often buy the product just to get the free bonus.
Billiards Company gives away a free golf shirt with every order over $100. “I do see people increasing their order just so they can get the free shirt,” says Talisman owner Tony Jones.
