Seasons greetings,
As we wrap up another eventful (and again pretty abnormal) year, we look back and reflect on the things we learnt, that can be of value to salon, skin clinic and other business owners.
So in no particular order, here are 5 highly important things we learnt in 2022.
1. Be VERY vigilant in keeping your Facebook account secure
Mid this year my personal Facebook account was hacked. Only the hacker wasn’t interested in my personal account. They instead then accessed my Business Manager and proceeded to place fraudulent ads for some locomotive toy in America (!) on not just our ad account, but a bunch of our client’s ad accounts as well.
It didn’t take long to be discovered and Facebook promptly deactivated all ad accounts, but not before the hacker had managed to spend THOUSANDS of our own and our clients ££££ across our ad accounts.
Cue upset clients (rightly so) and a whole ensuing nightmare getting both their money back and their ad accounts reactivated. And to this day, nearly 5 MONTHS LATER, this issue still hasn’t been resolved.
Numerous clients still haven’t got their money back, the case continues.
I wouldn’t wish the stress this has caused on my worst enemy.
Reader, if you’ve not set up 2-factor authentication on your social media login, do it now. Especially if you are running Facebook/Instagram ads and MOST DEFINITELY if you also manage ad accounts.
Facebook can be ridiculously slow in dealing with these matters and it can be very frustrating trying to communicate with them. So, keep your account secure.
You’ve been warned.
2. A receptionist or team member with great phone skills can be HIGHLY valuable
If you have a receptionist or staff member with a great phone manner, run leads campaigns and utilise their skills.
This one applies across the hair and beauty industries but is particularly true for skin clinics, offering aesthetic and advanced skincare treatments.
Marketing for leads is common for salons and clinics. Some businesses will contact their leads and suggest they book, others sit back and wait….
If you have a front of house team member who is a people person and they’re great on the phone, or another one of your staff fits this description, utilise their strengths and get them contacting your leads ASAP after they opt in!
A warm, friendly, helpful phone manor makes a HUGE difference in your leads-to-paying-clients conversion rate. If your lead finds the caller helpful and pleasant, even if they don’t want to book straight away (and most will not), that good first impression goes a long way and will get more bookings.
A team member with a confident phone manner and who enjoys helping people is a big asset that can add thousands of ££££ in bookings revenue each month. Be sure to incentive them with commission or a target reward and utilise your superstar’s skills.
3. Your marketing list is more important than ever
Thanks to the success’s salons have experienced with social media advertising over the past 18 – 24 months, more and more hair and beauty businesses are spending money on social media.
There is a real state of FOMO in these industries and the mindset now seems to be that if you’re not advertising on social, you’re not running a salon properly.
(This is of course completely false thinking, as many of the businesses advertising on social are not seeing a return and wasting their hard-earned money).
So as different salon ads on people’s newsfeeds increase and said salons fight to stand out more with big offers or eye-grabbing creatives, results can diminish as you and your competitors all advertise to the same target audience.
Instead, try focussing on your assets that you own and cost little to promote to: your email and text message subscriber’s database.
It is perhaps worth mentioning at this point that we often create marketing campaigns for a salons that consist of promoting an offer to both new clients using digital and their OLD clients via email/SMS.
The latter in the first 2 months produces 3 – 5 times more bookings and a staggeringly better ROI.
After all, email costs nothing and texts are very cheap.
Start sending out an offer of the week/month to your marketing subscribers. These people are mostly customers, your lowest hanging fruit.
OR better yet: create an “old client list” of all those previous clients who haven’t visited in at least 12 months, and market your new client offers to them with email and text.
4. An email list is valuable, but your SMS list is GOLD
As a follow on to number 3, this one cannot be left out.
Whenever a salon gives us an old client list to market to, we always recommend we both email and SMS them their offer.
On average SMS gets 3 – 4 times more leads than email.....
....safe to assume then: 3 – 4 times more bookings.
This makes sense; after all email typically will only get 20 – 40% open rates. With SMS almost everyone you send a text will receive it.
There are software’s that allow you to send bite-sized messages for just £0.03p. The returns on investment can be spectacular.
5. This was not your typically December (sadly).
In that many salons simply were not booked up like they usually are before Christmas. It seems the cost-of-living crisis had a real effect this winter, with people making cutbacks everywhere to make ends meet.
Which sucks for the hair and beauty industries. Even the discount vouchers we sell, which even in tough times sell well at Christmas, sold poorly this year.
It has been a tough ride with more lean months to come it appears.
But this will pass.
….Like moths to a flame….
Scott Dance
Founder
December 2022