Listen to Amber Ahmed, of Amber Esthetics Spa in Montreal, Canada. Amber joined Worldwide Salon Marketing’s Client Attraction System program and in the next three months her sales literally more than doubled as she rolled out the direct mail campaigns, in-salon promotions and online marketing systems.
Take a look as Amber talks about how she ramped up sales so dramatically – and takes us on a quick video tour of her newly-built spa in the heart of Montreal….
All NEW Mothers Day advertising, posters, fliers – instant downloads for Members
We’re adding dozens of new salon advertising and marketing templates to the Members only ‘sealed section’ website site every month – in March, a completely new series of templates for one of the BIGGEST salon marketing events of the year.
Mothers Day is a big day for salons & spa marketing all over the world. It’s when thousands of salons make (or should make!) a large part of their annual revenue.
But so many face the thought of marketing with a shudder – all that work!
Not for Worldwide Salon Marketing members. As always, we provide our members with fresh direct response marketing templates – for all the major Marketing Trigger Events – throughout the year.
You’ll find them in various sizes and formats, both US and A4, postcards, posters etc.
The new templates join literally hundreds of done-for-you advertising only for salons & spas, in the world’s biggest specialist library for salon & spa marketing.
All you do is simply download them from the website, edit them to suit your own salon’s offers and specialties, enter your own business name and address, and bingo – instant advertising! Never again stare at a blank computer screen, not knowing what to write or how to lay it out.
These templates are being continually produced by our copywriting and graphics team, adding to our vast library every month.
The Members website is a storehouse containing literally years of proven, done-for-you direct response marketing templates. They’ve been downloaded, tested and proven to grab salon clients fast, all over the world.
Online marketing, email, SMS, newspaper ads, radio ads, salon posters, client letters – you’ll find them all on the Members Only website.
Not yet a member?
Still sitting in front of a computer screen, tearing your hair out, not knowing what to put in your ads?
Groundhog Day – waking up to the same/same every day
Yesterday was Groundhog Day for me, right down to looking in the mirror and, if I squinted, Bill Murray was looking back at me.
The catalyst for this hallucination was (yet another) conversation with a salon owner terrified of putting her prices up. As she talked, I could feel the anxiety oozing down the phone.
“I can’t put my prices up,” she wailed. “I only put them up six months ago, my customers would leave in droves if I did it again…”
Well, what did they do the last time you put your prices up…did they leave in droves then?
“Well, no…but I just think I’d be too expensive…”
Oh dear.
Entire theses have been written about pricing, there are squadrons of professors who do nothing else but talk about it, analyze it, agonize over it.
But I’ll keep this simple, and put it in terms that any salon owner can understand. This is not about academic study, it’s about what works. So roll up your sleeves, and start thinking. Because buying product at wholesale, adding a margin, and using that as your only guide to pricing ain’t no salon marketing plan.
Stay with me here.
First, there is more misunderstanding, dis-information and plain hogwash written and taught about pricing than almost any other subject under the broad umbrella of ‘business’.
Perhaps the biggest misunderstanding is the difference between value, price and cost – that is, the vast gulf between the value a customer or prospect perceives, the actual price charged, and the real cost to the business owner to deliver that product or service.
And part of the problem for many salon owners is, frankly, the low esteem in which they hold themselves, their ability, professionalism and standing.
It’s why most salon owners reading this would fail the ‘Picasso Test’.
Pablo Picasso
Picasso was sitting at a café in Paris, idly sketching. A woman walked by, recognized him and stopped to ask if he would be so kind as to sketch her, and charge whatever he thought was appropriate.
Picasso obliged, and three minutes later, there it was – an original Picasso.
“That will be 5,000 francs,” Picasso said.
“But it only took you three minutes!” she exclaimed in shock.
“No,” he said calmly, “it took me all my life.”
Of course, had Picasso simply charged for his time on that particular task, he would have had a difficult job justifying the price.
You see, the big mistake most business owners make when figuring out how to price a product or service, is doing it based on what it actually costs them. E.g., they’ll say to themselves, ‘this widget cost me $X to make/buy in/provide, so I’ll ad an 80% markup’.
It is a blinkered, nay, blindfolded way to price anything, because it completely ignores
a) The value that product or service might have in the eyes of the customer (perceived value)
b) How it’s price might be lifted considerably by adding more perceived value with low or no-cost items/treatments/services (eg free samples you got from a supplier)
c) Any other value you can add to it through the messages/stories/testimonials/personal qualifications in all your advertising and promotional messages/flyers/letters…
Price and value are entirely different things, and value is in the eye of the beholder. It has nothing to do with price.
To me, spending $3,000 to live on a boat for a week with friends, miles out to sea – no shops, bars, restaurants, movies – it’s great value. But there are thousands who wouldn’t do that if they were paid to do it.
To my wife, a week in Bali for $1,000 including air fares is great value. Me? I’d rather gouge my own eyes out with a sharp spoon than spend a thousand bucks to meander endlessly around market stalls shopping for cheap sarongs.
All of which brings me to another point about price and value.
The more narrowly you identify your target market, the more precisely you craft your message to match exactly the wants of that target market, the less and less important the issue of price becomes.
Golfers will pay anything to get that perfect swing.
Anglers will move heaven and earth – or pay someone to do it for them – to catch that prize fish.
For example, say you sell cellulite treatments. Which do you think is going to create more value, a headline which says
“Anti-Cellulite Treatments from $495”
Or a headline that says
“For Young Mothers who are Embarrassed About Their Unsightly Cellulite – At LAST, The Zero-Pain, Breakthrough New Treatment That Melts Cellulite and Gives You Back Those Smooth Youthful Thighs! WARNING: Men might look at you – and wish.”
In fact, the second headline is deliberately designed to create desire, offer a painless solution to an identifiable problem, and specifically include (young mothers) only those prospects wanted, while deliberately excluding unwanted prospects.
Furthermore, it doesn’t even talk about price, which would only be addressed in terms of value in the body of the piece, backed up of course by all of the components of a good emotional direct response ad – a strong guarantee, scarcity, before and after photos, testimonials etc.
(All of the elements you’ll find in the templates in the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit™)
The last point I want to make about price is this: the purpose of re-inventing what you sell, of creating packages, is to blur the lines of distinction between your business and that of your rival salons, to create for yourself a distinct difference, so that prospects and customers simply cannot compare you with the opposition on price alone.
The better you get at this, the more you tip the playing field in your favour. Business is NOT about playing on a level field. It’s about giving yourself an unfair advantage. Unfair to your competitors, that is.
And reducing the issue of price to the point where it’s a non-issue.
If you have ever thought that marketing won’t work for your salon because you are in a small town then you should watch this video.
In this short clip, Suzy Poole owner of Body Divine in Kerikeri shares how she has taken her salon from a pretty dire state of affairs to a busy, profitable business in under a year, with big plans for expansion.
I was visiting Kerikeri for a couple of days this week and decided to pop in for a cuppa with Suzy and check out her salon. And I was really impressed with what I saw.
Suzy has created her own economy, while others around her continue to struggle on. In fact, Suzy’s business is growing so fast that she is in the process of expanding her existing salon and building a hair salon out the back.
What stood out the most on my visit to Suzy’s salon was the energy that she puts in to marketing her business, it’s clear that she has a great attitude, is incredibly passionate about it and a real ‘massive action’ taker.
And while I was in the salon clients were walking in and asking to buy one of her mini memberships that she had just released that morning. And as you’ll hear in the video, one customer even left a cheque in her mailbox with strict instructions so she didn’t miss out on one of only 10 memberships released!
Check out the video here….
For those of you who are not familiar with Kerikeri it’s a fairly small town in the Bay of Islands, population a few thousand.
Thanks for the grand tour of the salon Suzy and keep up the excellent wor
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
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®
![[VIDEO] Salon Marketing in Canada – how this salon doubled sales in 3 months](https://worldwidesalonmarketing.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Amber-Ahmed-doubles-sales.jpg)
