How to create marketing campaigns that get better results

How do you, a busy salon owner, communicate with your community of clients?

Do you have the time to call them up individually and ask them when they’d like their next appointment? Probably not.

Have you set up email marketing that sends a non-personalised, generic email or text inviting them to book their next appointment? Maybe. But is that going far enough?

In this article, we’ll explore the question of how to target your clients with a personalised approach.

Use a telephone, not a megaphone

Text or Email: The Stats

Did you know, according to recent research by Mailchimp, the average clickthrough rate of an email is 1.92%, so less than 1 in 50.

While that is nothing to sniff at if your goal is to keep a huge database of thousands of people warm, if you’re a salon owner who wants to fill next week’s diary, it might not be good enough.

The facts look very different if we ask the same question of text messages: Research shows The average open rate of a text message sits at about 99%, with 97% of messages being read within 15 minutes of delivery. And this makes sense, doesn’t it?

If you’re busy with something and you see a notification on your phone telling you you’ve got an email, you might be tempted to sneak a peak, but you certainly wouldn’t stand there and read it for 5 minutes, keeping your next staff one-to-one meeting waiting (unprofessional much?). But if you get a text, it’s almost impossible not to look at it.

There are good examples of where text and email are most appropriate (which is a whole new post), so for now if your expectation from your campaign is immediate ie; fill space in the next few days it’s a text message and if you are looking to share information in longer form then it’s email.

Salon App customers know that how long a client remains loyal to you is vital in being able to run a successful business, so we’ve built SMS and email messaging right into our product. In fact, we think it’s such a powerful tool that we’ve built our marketing model around it!

We call it: Relationship-Based Salon Marketing

Use a telephone, not a megaphone

When we think about good client relationships, they are personalised, friendly and don’t overstay their welcome.

So, when you use Salon App to interact with your clients, we include tools to make sure:

• It’s personalised – you address people by their name
• It’s tailored to the stage of your relationship, if they’re a new client, we speak as we’ve just met
• We contact clients using strategic touchpoints to avoid falling into the trap of over-generalising

In other words, we communicate with them as though we’re using a telephone, not a megaphone.

Over our (many) thousands of successful client interactions, we have been able to build the perfect client relationship management strategy. Without further ado, here it is!

Step 1: Attract. Tailor your communications to bring new clients through the door, and remember, they’re new! It’s not appropriate to act as though you’re familiar yet.

Step 2: Nurture. You have an existing relationship, so communicate as if you’re familiar.

Step 3: Reconnect. When a client is overdue, we reach out and talk to them like we have missed them and incentivise them to re-engage with us.

Following this simple 3-step process leads to much better results in terms of client rebookings and loyalty overall.

From here, you can turbo charge your efficiency by introducing a simple structure to each message that looks something like this:

• Personalise. (Hi Sarah! It’s been a while since we last saw you in the salon…)
• What’s in it for me. (As it’s your birthday next week, we thought we’d reach out to see if you want to book an appointment with our lead stylist – we want you at your best for your big day!
• Next steps. (Click here to book or call.)