Bold Thanksgivings

 

     Being thankful is good for business and good for your soul too. I am so very thankful for my clients and you should be too. How exactly are you thanking your clients for their loyalty. A few years back I had started a salon with just a handful of clients and 5 years later had a full book with a waiting list. How did I do this you might ask? Marketing and marketing and more marketing. My brain just has a marketing setting that is usually on high most of the time. I am always thinking of ways to market myself and my business. The holidays are a great time for marketing. One of my best marketing promotions was an anniversary thanksgiving program. It is not for the timid, in fact it's downright bold but to those that can bear the risk factor is yields fantastic results. Put this in place at your own risk.  You can choose to send this promotion to a select group of VIP clients, or send them out to everyone in your data base, like I did, all 450 of them. It went like this. I sent out an offer, in the good old fashioned mail that had a gift certificate for $15.00 good toward any salon service and another matching $15.00 Gift certificate for them to give to a friend, that had never been to my salon. The holidays is a perfect time to change it up and offer it as a reward to your loyal guests. It said Dear Valued client, With the coming of the holidays at our salon there is much to celebrate. We continue to grow and meet so many new wonderful people like you. We offer our most sincere appreciation for your loyalty in our never ending quest to bring the best of ourselves and the latest in the beauty industry to our guests. Please take advantage of our gift to you, a certificate for $15.00 toward any salon service. It is also through your generous client referrals that we continue to grow. If you have a friend that you would like to share our salon experience with please offer them the New client certificate. If you need more than one don't hesitate to ask and we would be happy to provide extras. Thanks again from the bottom of our hearts. Your team

  The actual letter

   The strategy was twofold. I rewarded my clients for their loyalty plus I offered them a free gift for one of their friends.  A little extra incentive to get them to try my salon. I mean who isn't looking for that perfect gift for everyone on their list?  I know what you are thinking. That's over thirteen thousand dollars in free services...are you crazy? Which was exactly what my sister told me. However statistics show less than 10% of any offer gets redeemed. So say every one of my clients took advantage of their offer. Ok that's 15.00 per client and considering my average client spend over 2 thousand dollars with me every year, that really not much to reward them. But on the flip side of that most of my services are over 30 dollars so if every one of their friends brought them in it would generate over 6 thousand dollars. Plus I have the opportunity to win them over as a guest, doubling my clientele. Big risk, big reward, even if 10% return with the gift card that's 45 new people with the potential to turn into loyal clients. This was a tremendously successful promotion for me and over the years I have tweaked it to my top 20 per centers, you know the ones that make up 80% of your business? That 20 percent. However you feel you can use or tweak this promotion to suit your salons needs I encourage you to try it. You really have nothing to lose and more clients to gain because that's smart marketing.