by Greg Milner | Apr 20, 2009 | Getting Salon Clients Quickly
Tanning Salon Marketing: A Salon Owner’s Story – One Decision CAN Make All the Difference
Lisa Gray of Beauty Naturally in Sandgate, Qld, shares the strategies that saved her business from extinction – and put money in her purse for the first time in years.
(Play the interview recording below and listen in as Lisa describes how her business has taken off.)
By the beginning of 2008, Lisa Gray was at the end of her tether. Years of running herself ragged had left her with little energy, even less money, and the ‘ideas cupboard’ was bare.
Lisa says you ‘could have fired a cannon’ through her little beauty salon on the northern fringes of Brisbane. But as is so often the case, the teacher appears when the student is ready, and Lisa was ready.
In the next 12 months, her sales rose from $170,000 to $230,000, including a 25% increase in product sales. Her return bookings rate rose from a meagre 40% to 68%. She took on between 9 and 15 new clients every month. But the biggest change is her new attitude to her business.
“I get excited about actually having a business,” says Lisa. “I’m not so stressed, and when you’re not so stressed you’re more creative, you’re more at ease with yourself, you enjoy what you do. I actually look forward to staff trainings and staff meetings!”
“It’s exciting, it’s not a drain, and I don’t feel negative, I feel very very positive.”
Here’s just a partial list of the ACTION Lisa took to turn her business around:
1)Distributes a flyer offering a Toolkit-inspired $99 special offer to 500 local homes every month. “This has been brilliant, we get a regular flow of new clients from this.”
2)Sends out the series of New Client Letters in the Toolkit to each new client every week. “They work very well…largely responsible for our higher re-booking rate.”
3)Has implemented the Queen of Referrals program in the kit. “Our clients are loving this…”
4)Sends out a monthly newsletter. Not every quarter or every couple of months, every month, using the Newsletter Templates in the kit. “I get a fantastic response from these newsletters…”
5)Started running a regular, small, lead-generating ad in the local newspaper. “A great response…”
6) Hired a full-time receptionist. “Amazing what a difference that’s made to sales…”
And that’s just the start. As Lisa says, “All this and I haven’t even scratched the surface of the whole Inner Circle program and the Toolkit!”
by Greg Milner | Mar 4, 2009 | Ask the Experts, Salon Goalsetting
Marketing Plan For A Beauty Salon: How do YOU Compare with This Salon Owner??
History is a great teacher. In 1944, General Eisenhower assembled the greatest invasion force in history to storm the beaches at Normandy.
Eisenhower knew that anything less than MASSIVE, overwhelming force, and the Allied attempt to drive the Nazis out of Europe would fail.
It remains a source of mystery to me why so many business owners don’t get this lesson. Regularly, I get email from salon & spa owners who moan that ‘I sent one of your letters to 30 of my clients and only got one appointment…’
Or, ‘I ran one ad…on page 68, down in the bottom right hand corner…and I didn’t get any response…”
One letter? To just 30 people? Well, what do you expect? What else did you do?
It’s a well-known law that action and results are inextricably tied together. Yet it’s a never-ending source of bemusement to me that so many salon & spa owners have massive expectations from minimal action.
So it’s instructive to look below at what’s required to get BIG results. And it shows clearly that the 80/20 rule applies in all things… Clearly, only 20% of salon & spa owners are prepared to take this kind of action, but they make 80% of the money in the entire industry.
Inner Circle member Lisa Conway of Marinelli hair only joined the IC program and received her Toolkit in mid-2008. At the members-only closed-door networking session after this week’s Road to Riches salon marketing seminar, Lisa told me how, until she joined the program, she had spent years in fear, afraid to make changes in her business, afraid to confront lazy staff, afraid to take any action.
All that changed when she ‘saw the light’. In this email Lisa sent the day before the seminar, she reveals a partial list of the action she’s taken, the marketing she’s implemented, in just a few months…
“I got thinking about what I have introduced or changed in our salon since I joined the program and got the Toolkit last July….
1.Send out SMS to a data base at a moments notice with deals to make the phone ring.
2.Collect and use Email to send special offers
3.Advertise with huge success in the local paper.
4.Letter drop our area
5.Put flyers on car windscreens
6.Stand in the street outside our salon handing our brochures
7.Give away $50 vouchers in coffee shops to faces I don’t know.
8.Queen of referrals program
9. Raise the dead letters
10. Birthday $10 vouchers
11. Made a fabulous brochure using an offer and great testimonials
12. Thank you for choosing us letters and $10 vouchers
13. Introduced another retail line so we have two now
14. Went from never doing any treatments in salon to doing 30 a week
15. From not one package to consistently doing packages
16. Weekly staff group meetings
17. Weekly staff training in salon
18. Weekly staff one on one
19. Introduced a fabulous system that puts all staff behaviour into 4 simple groups (Attitude, team, skill and Neglect) easy for us both to track and understand.
20. Display the salon’s weekly takings in lunch room showing both great and not so great work.
21. Know my average dollar sale and watched it go up
22. Know how to find so much more out of my computer
23. I have used movie tickets, holidays and chocolate as staff incentives, not just money.
24. Have staff that gets to work on time and has had their breakfast.
25. Have a staff birthday club that we go out for breakfast.
26. A manager who can now manage staff issues with out me.
27. Cleared out the staff I had with bad attitudes
28. Made our 100% money back guarantee common knowledge
29. Ring all colour work one week later to check if client is happy
30. We regularly back the computer up more than once every day.
31. Dialled up and joined a conference call
32. Listen to disks sent every month that motivate me.
33. Raised my price across the board twice
34. My on the floor time is now 4 hours twice a week.
35.I asked one client to find somewhere else to have her hair done.
36. Renovated the salon completely from 6 stations to 10 and 2 basins to 3
37. Know what % my staff cost me, know what it costs to open the doors
38. Sent my staff to another salon to get their hair done for the experience
“I have enjoyed this journey very much, I would never have believed this much could be done in such a small space of time not to mention watching my profit go up and my anxiety level go down. I am looking forward to the next chapter………….. Lisa.”
So, no fewer than thirty eight specific changes, actions and outcomes… and the biggest outcome of all, a massive $60,000 increase in sales in the 5 months August-December 08 compared with 07.
How do YOU compare with this list?
by Greg Milner | Feb 18, 2009 | Hiring Salon Staff
Worldwide Salon Marketing: Hard to find Staff? Here’s how to get a flood of applications…
Peter Drucker is widely recognised as the world’s most famous business consultant, who declared that “Because its purpose is to create a customer, a business has two and only two functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results. All the rest are costs.”
Which is perfectly true, and in the beauty business, one of those costs is unavoidable; staff to deliver the innovation (or service) to the customers your marketing is bringing in.
Aside from marketing issues, finding the right staff is by far the biggest challenge facing 99% of salon owners. Which is why we developed a unique way to at least partly solve that challenge, and it’s brilliantly successful.
The Worldwide Salon Marketing Staff Finder Service
“We’ve used this method twice… both times, we had inquiries from prospective staff members within minutes of placing the ad. In fact the first time we used it, we had no fewer than 47 applications within two weeks, and hired two fantastic new team members right off the bat!” says Rachael D’Aguiar of D’Aguiar’s Hair.Skin.Nails in Auckland, NZ
And this works no matter where you are in the world. (And it’s FREE for Inner Circle members.) Here’s how it happens…
Step #1: you download a Free Report in Word format. The report is titled
“The Crucial Questions You MUST Ask – and the Answers You Need – Before You Sign Up for Any New Job.”
Step #2: You modify the report to suit your salon, and email it back to us.
Step #3: We upload the report to a special web page we create for you.
Step #4: You run a classified ad in the employment section of your local paper, and/or online. This ad (we give you the wording) directs prospective staff to the website where they can enter their name and contact number, and only then download your Free Report.
Step #5: You get an instant email with that person’s contact details.
Bingo! You’ve instantly captured the names and contact details of anybody who is obviously wanting a change of job!
We provide this service free for Inner Circle members. Non-members pay $329 and they can run the ad for as long as a month.
IF YOU WANT NEW STAFF NOW:
Inner Circle members: email Karan in our office karan @ worldwidesalonmarketing.com and he’ll organise it all for you, free.
Non-Members: call our office to inquire about pricing. Australia: 08 9381 6621, USA 602.490.0637.
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 | Jan 27, 2009 | Blog, New Zealand
Marketing Plan For Hair Salon: New Zealand salons get local access to Inner Circle support
IC member and now New Zealand representative for WSM, Rachael D’Aguiar. “All we did to be successful was copy what works. If we can do that, we figure most other NZ salon & spa owners can too…”
Beating the recession has suddenly become a lot easier for Kiwi salon & spa owners; they now have local access to mentoring and marketing tools developed by Australia’s Worldwide Salon Marketing.
Following expansion into the huge US salon & spa market, the company has appointed Auckland salon owners and long-term Inner Circle members Rachael D’Aguiar and husband Chris Sanders as sole NZ agents of its Inner Circle marketing & mentoring program, and the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit™.
“We beat the recession and actually grew our sales – so we figured we could help other Kiwi salon owners do the same!”
According to Chris and Rachael, their Auckland salon D’Aguiar Hair Skin Nails has enjoyed a huge growth spurt in 2008 as a result of using the direct response marketing tools and strategies in the Toolkit.
The couple will be duplicating the successful Australian business for NZ salon owners, including conducting training seminars, individual coaching sessions for members, group coaching calls and supplying on-going and updated, proven marketing support.
Rachael is already well-known in New Zealand as the voice of Whitcoulls’ TV and radio campaign, as well as one of the Huggies Mums.
Chris Sanders has a background in events management, including the recent David Beckham visit, and the NZ tour by (Spandau Ballet’s) Paul Young and Tony Hadley.
“Being successful in business isn’t about being a genius, it’s just copying what others have done and applying it,” she says. “That’s all we did. And if we can do it, hundreds of other NZ salon owners can do it too.”
NZ salon owners can contact Rachael or Chris on Auckland 09 441 6906
