StudioTracker
Well-Known Member
Communicate with your existing customers
Loyalty of customers is vitally important especially during difficult economic times. Your best immediate sources of additional profits and increased business are your existing customers. They know you, they trust you, hopefully theyve enjoyed doing business with you, satisfying the experience is key to maintain customer loyalty. This is essential as it is normally five to ten times easier to get an existing customer to buy from you again than it is to get someone to buy from you for the first time. A salon software system can help you with this by simplifying the process of capturing, storing and organising client data. This information can lay the foundations for your promotional campaigns.
Key questions you should ask yourself are: how often do you communicate with your existing customers? What do you have to offer your existing customers? What are you not offering existing customers that you could be offering them? When did you last send a letter or email your customers? Did you measure the response? When did you last call them? What would happen if you doubled your contact with them this year? When you do communicate with them, what more could you be doing to clearly explain the specific benefits that they will experience?
2. Adopt a number of forms of marketing techniques
Most small businesses rely on one or two familiar, tried and tested forms of marketing. However, if you only use two marketing streams and one or both of those dries up this creates a problem. Having multiple marketing techniques helps stabilize your business and helps your business grow. In order to maximise the effectiveness of these approaches you should test a number of different methods on a small scale, this will allow to you assess what works and what doesnt. For example, in additional to your advertising efforts you could implement a recommend a friend campaign or a friends and family promotional late-night opening and compare which is most effective at attracting new customers by asking them to quote a promotional code upon booking. Again, it is a good idea to have a software system in place to track each campaign and this will also enable you to contact customers by sending out promotional information via SMS, which is direct, fast and relatively cheap.
3. Run effective advertising
It is essential that you measure the response to all of your advertising in order to evaluate whether or not it represented a viable investment and to shape your future investment decisions. It is worth asking how many people responded to your ad, how many of those were converted to a sale, whats that worth to you? Some practical advice: an attention grabbing headline is essential, one change in headline can produce a 50-100% increase in response, the ad itself needs to appeal directly to the interests of your target audience.
4. Focus on the benefits that your product or service offers
People dont buy your product or service. They buy the benefits that your product or service offers them. In the beauty industry these benefits are largely hedonic, meaning they relate to pleasure. So spend some time getting clear on what exactly your benefits are and then make sure that you articulate them precisely in all of your communications.
5. Utilize Internet Marketing
If nothing else businesses should engage in online marketing research in order to collect data about their customers, prospects and competitors. Online marketing provides marketing power to local businesses owners. Businesses can reach a vast audience online quickly and more effectively than traditional marketing methods. It is also important to use email marketing effectively; many businesses still do not collect the email addresses of everyone who contacts them. Every time a business fails to capture someones email address theyre turning down the opportunity to contact them for FREE, for weeks, months and years ahead. Once you have Email Addresses use them!
You can use email to thank people for their business, make them a special offer, give them a free article or report, send a newsletter, recommend a product or service they may be interested in, ask for referrals, share some news that may be interested in or ask why theyve not done business with you.
Loyalty of customers is vitally important especially during difficult economic times. Your best immediate sources of additional profits and increased business are your existing customers. They know you, they trust you, hopefully theyve enjoyed doing business with you, satisfying the experience is key to maintain customer loyalty. This is essential as it is normally five to ten times easier to get an existing customer to buy from you again than it is to get someone to buy from you for the first time. A salon software system can help you with this by simplifying the process of capturing, storing and organising client data. This information can lay the foundations for your promotional campaigns.
Key questions you should ask yourself are: how often do you communicate with your existing customers? What do you have to offer your existing customers? What are you not offering existing customers that you could be offering them? When did you last send a letter or email your customers? Did you measure the response? When did you last call them? What would happen if you doubled your contact with them this year? When you do communicate with them, what more could you be doing to clearly explain the specific benefits that they will experience?
2. Adopt a number of forms of marketing techniques
Most small businesses rely on one or two familiar, tried and tested forms of marketing. However, if you only use two marketing streams and one or both of those dries up this creates a problem. Having multiple marketing techniques helps stabilize your business and helps your business grow. In order to maximise the effectiveness of these approaches you should test a number of different methods on a small scale, this will allow to you assess what works and what doesnt. For example, in additional to your advertising efforts you could implement a recommend a friend campaign or a friends and family promotional late-night opening and compare which is most effective at attracting new customers by asking them to quote a promotional code upon booking. Again, it is a good idea to have a software system in place to track each campaign and this will also enable you to contact customers by sending out promotional information via SMS, which is direct, fast and relatively cheap.
3. Run effective advertising
It is essential that you measure the response to all of your advertising in order to evaluate whether or not it represented a viable investment and to shape your future investment decisions. It is worth asking how many people responded to your ad, how many of those were converted to a sale, whats that worth to you? Some practical advice: an attention grabbing headline is essential, one change in headline can produce a 50-100% increase in response, the ad itself needs to appeal directly to the interests of your target audience.
4. Focus on the benefits that your product or service offers
People dont buy your product or service. They buy the benefits that your product or service offers them. In the beauty industry these benefits are largely hedonic, meaning they relate to pleasure. So spend some time getting clear on what exactly your benefits are and then make sure that you articulate them precisely in all of your communications.
5. Utilize Internet Marketing
If nothing else businesses should engage in online marketing research in order to collect data about their customers, prospects and competitors. Online marketing provides marketing power to local businesses owners. Businesses can reach a vast audience online quickly and more effectively than traditional marketing methods. It is also important to use email marketing effectively; many businesses still do not collect the email addresses of everyone who contacts them. Every time a business fails to capture someones email address theyre turning down the opportunity to contact them for FREE, for weeks, months and years ahead. Once you have Email Addresses use them!
You can use email to thank people for their business, make them a special offer, give them a free article or report, send a newsletter, recommend a product or service they may be interested in, ask for referrals, share some news that may be interested in or ask why theyve not done business with you.
