by Greg Milner | Jun 29, 2009 | Blog
Nail Salon Marketing Plan: when customers leave you, it isn’t ALWAYS bad news…
Last week we lost two of our long term Inner Circle members…and I couldn’t have been happier to hear from them.
No matter how good your business, no matter how much value you give, all businesses will lose customers from time to time, for all sorts of reasons. And the manner of that departure is a critical indicator of both the health of your business, and its future prospects.
Nothing gives us more delight here at Worldwide Salon Marketing as hearing that we have been instrumental in getting our Members into a position where they can sell their now-profitable businesses – instead of merely closing the doors and walking away, as so many are forced to do.
From Angeline and Andrew Griggs of Nails and Beauty with Attitude in Cairns, far north Queensland, a lovely letter to thank us for helping them realise their dream of business success:
“Andrew and I would just like to extend a warm North Queensland ‘Thank You’ for all your help and support over the last few years that we have been with you. It’s the end of an era for ‘Nails and Beauty with Attitude’, we have sold after 18 years and are looking forward to new adventures.
“We say goodbye for now and thank you for truly giving us the freedom to now do what we want to do. With many thoughts of gratefulness, from our family to yours, Andrew and Angeline Griggs.”
And from Maria Walsh, of Scentual Beauty Therapy in New South Wales, a beautifully-written letter describing her sorrow at having to leave the group for personal reasons, after taking her one-woman salon from a meagre $600 a week takings to more than $2,500 a week in less than a year…and still operating as a one-woman salon!
I have, with Maria’s permission, made her letter available here so you can read it in full (click on the pictures at left to enlarge them in a new window), but to paraphrase, “I learnt so much and you have given me a strength and boldness I never knew I had. In the beginning, I challenged the way some advertisements were worded (being a shy person!) but the response has been ‘That didn’t sound like you Maria but I would love to book this package because it sounds like just what I need!’ “
Of course, we also get a LOT of mail from Members thrilled to share their new-found success…and who wouldn’t leave the Inner Circle program for any reason.
Like Gail Smith, of Charmed Hair & Beauty in Morayfield, Queensland, who writes:
“…We are doing fantastic. 18 months on we have approx 1800 clients – growing by 15-20% per month. I joined the inner circle program in Oct 08 knowing I needed more information and inspiration and since then I haven’t looked back. My hair and beauty salon has grown consistently thanks to the marketing, my clients nag me about what promos are coming up and they are starting to pre pay just to make sure they don’t miss out.
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| Gail Smith of Charmed Hair & Beauty – growing by 20% per month thanks to Inner Circle membership |
“My salon target for the next financial year is over $500,000 and I am confident we will make it.
“When I first started using your type of marketing I had quite a few disappointments and failures and I will be the first to admit I fell on the old blame game – this just won’t work for my salon – its obviously just a bad idea, etc and one thing I learned is, that no matter what piece of marketing we’re given it can work, if you use it at the right time, to the right clients with value added offers that other salons would look at and say ‘no way am I giving that much away’.
“So I thank you, Greg and your wonderful team (had some great conversations with Jill and Jemma, too) you have helped me grow so much and I know I have still heaps more to learn – and share.”
IF YOU ARE NOT YET A MEMBER: If you do not yet have the done-for-you marketing tools, strategies, support, mentoring and continually-updated material that these and hundreds of other Members have used and are using to make their businesses successful, you are fighting your battle blindfolded with one arm tied behind your back.
by Greg Milner | Jun 23, 2009 | Ask the Experts, Salon Advertising Tips
Salon Internet Marketing: How to Stop Others Sabotaging Your Salon Marketing
This salon got 40 new clients in two days – no thanks to their local newspaper…
Interesting case this week which shows just how vigilant you need to be to stop people sabotaging your marketing efforts.
Untrained staff will do it all the time, if you let them. Phone rings madly after your ad comes out, only to be met by “uh…sorry, don’t know about that offer, hang on, I’ll ask someone…”
That’s something that IS under your control, and only YOU can fix it. But what about when your local newspaper refuses to publish your ad because ‘it’s against the law…”!!!?
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| Inner Circle member Tamara Jones of Beauty Bliss in Cairns, Queensland – 40 new clients from a single $300 ad on page 23 of the local newspaper. But no thanks to the newspaper itself. |
It happend to Inner Circle member Tamara Jones of Beauty Bliss in Cairns, far north Queensland.
“At first they point-blank refused to run my ad at all,” says Tamara, “Then they refused to let me use the word FREE!”
Turns out that some fool at the newspaper had half-read – and totally misunderstood – a recent case where the consumer watchdog had clamped down on an internet company pretending to offer free bonuses which weren’t actually free, they were hidden by inflated prices.
Rightly so…but for the newspaper to interpret this as a blanket ban on the use of the word ‘free’ was clearly nonsense. I know this because, being the diligent reporter that I am, I personally phoned the relevant mouthpiece at the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and got it from the horse’s mouth.
“Are you saying that it’s now illegal for businesses to give away stuff for free?” I asked the spokesman.
“Not at all,” he said, “all we’re doing is stopping people building the cost of so-called bonuses into an inflated price for the original product,” he said.
Sometimes, bureaucracy is a a condom on progress. But its effect is magnified a thousand times by officious and ill-informed employees mis-interpreting the ‘rules’ and needlessly preventing perfectly-legal marketing.
So what happened to Tamara’s ad?
On a happier note, Tamara persisted with the idiot newspaper rep. With no time to check the facts with the authorities, she agreed to change the word ‘free’ to ‘bonus’, and let the ad run last Saturday.It was published way down in the paper, on page 23.
“We had 21 bookings on Saturday, another 17 on Monday, more on Tuesday, and the phone is still ringing. 40 bookings so far, and the ad is scheduled to run again Thursday. I am so impressed. Of these bookings, only 2 are existing clients. My new therapist was supposed to be only working 3 days a week, she’s already doing 5 days…this is great for us, the salon is buzzing again, thank you to all the staff at Worldwide Salon Marketing…!”
Forty new clients…let’s say she keeps only half of them for the long term…and each is worth say $1,000 a year. So that single $300 could well have added $20,000 a year to Tamara’s sales. That’s pretty good leverage.
INNER CIRCLE MEMBERS: Want to see the ad Tamara used? Log into the Members Only ‘sealed section’ and navigate to Getting New Clients – Beauty’ and you’ll find it in .jpg format you can download. Hair salon owners: don’t give me grief about ‘oh, that’s for beauty, we’re a hair salon’. Instead, think: “How can I make this work for my hair salon…?”
by Greg Milner | Jun 17, 2009 | The Smell of Success
Sample Marketing Plan For Hair Salon: Jane and Niki’s $200,000 Salon Sales Boost
Nothing, but nothing, breeds success in the salon & spa business (or any other business) like ACTION.Thinking won’t do it. Planning by itself will achieve nothing at all.
American music legend Ted Nugent says it best: “What you need most to be successful is a dream, a dedicated work ethic, and an alarm clock.”
He means it literally – getting out of bed, early, and getting stuck into it. And, as Dan Kennedy writes in his latest newsletter, in the broader sense it means “recognition of urgency, a keen sense of the passing of time, a firm and even violent rejection of the ‘if not today, we’ll get it tomorrow’ mentality.”
Our most successful Inner Circle members embrace this philosophy.
Jane Dowling and Niki Koutrakis of Talking Beauty in Hawthorn, Victoria – proof that being shy is no barrier to success.
At the Road to Riches salon & spa marketing seminar in Melbourne on Monday, jaws dropped when Inner Circle members Niki Koutrakis and Jane Dowling of Talking Beauty stood at the front of the room and proudly revealed how their business had taken off…regardless of the economy, swine flu and any of a million other obstacles, real and imagined.
“In the 11 months since getting the Worldwide Salon Marketing system in July 2008, we’ve put an extra $200,000 in the bank,” Jane told the audience.
This is NOT an isolated case. And neither is it dependent on being blessed with a certain peronsality type. Jane and Niki are both very quietly spoken, shy people. Other IC member salon owners are outgoing, confident and loud. It doesn’t matter. Action is something anybody can take, no matter whether you’re a wallflower or a showgirl.
Lidija Siskopoulos of Enigma Hair in North Perth, WA – $24,000 from a single Toolkit membership promotion.
Lidija Siskopoulos of Enigma for Hair is another case in point. Lidija collected her Toolkit from our office on May 21. Within 72 hours, she’d made an extra $9,000 in sales, just using a Membership letter she found in the kit. In the following three weeks, that figure shot up to $19,000. Take a look at Lidija’s photo – this is clearly not the picture of shy retiring type.
Among the many hundreds of Inner Circle members around the world, we have every personality type imaginable – drivers, emotives, analyticals, amiables and every shade in between.
None of that matters.
I read recently about one of America’s top salesmen. This guy was so shy, he could NEVER sell to anybody face-to-face.
His only means of communication with prospective clients was the telephone. Yet, for decades, he was the very top salesman in his field in the entire country.
You do NOT have to be a genius, a star, a show-stopper, a leading light to be successful in this business. You just have to educate yourself on what works, get the tools, and follow the system.
by Greg Milner | Jun 2, 2009 | Salon Advertising Tips
IC member Marnie Kallmeyer – discovered why advertising in glossy magazines can be TOXIC for your business, if you do it the magazine’s way instead of our way…
Yet more evidence, if any were needed, that the publishers of magazines are more interested in how advertising looks than how effective it is for the people who pay their bills – the advertisers.
Inner Circle member Marnie Kallmeyer of Beauty Image reports this week the frustrating experience of paying up-front for a full page ad in a bridal magazine. The magazine not only
a) refused to run her strong direct-response ad, they
b) told her there was too much text in it (!!), then
c) provided her with their version – the horrible, useless, space-wasting piece of ‘pretty’ junk you see below.
When Marnie objected and said ‘forget it, I’ll cancel the ad and have my money back’, the magazine refused to refund her!!
I spoke to Marnie today and here’s what she said:
The more you get accustomed to ‘our’ style of emotional, effective direct-response marketing, the more you become a marketer of your business rather than simply a stylist or beauty therapist, the more you will encounter this kind of idiocy among certain sections of the media.
Big lesson: ignore these fools, take your advertising dollars where they will be effective.
Big prediction: this magazine will inevitably join the ranks of so many others who refuse to run advertising that attracts customers – in the tank. The advertisers clueless enough to accept the magazine’s stupid rules soon wake up that their money is down the toilet, pull their ads, and the magazine sinks like a stone.
by Greg Milner | Jun 2, 2009 | New Zealand
Beauty Salon Marketing Strategy: We get (lots of) mail…
Does ‘our’ kind of marketing work?
Just a couple of the many emails we receive each week from IC members all over the world…these from New Zealand members to our NZ franchisee Chris and Rachael D’Aguiar-Sanders:
From Lorraine Burke, of Loaf in Christchurch:
Just listened to your recent CD no 28 which has fired me up ……..and also jogged my mind to write and tell you how wonderful your help and support has been for me over the last few weeks………It’s so nice to know you’re not on your own and support and encouragement at the end of a phone……….so thank you so much for that. Loaf has been up and running now for 5 weeks in which although I have been chasing my tail….. I have managed to start my marketing…I just want to say how thrilled I am at the response.
If one ad can do so much in 2 weeks what will all the other marketing systems bring? I placed the autumn makeover ad in one of the local newspapers, I have just done a tally and have reached 22 new clients………wow……. Out of them, 15 have rebooked….will get onto the ‘how to rebook’ section soon with my staff so we can make that at least 99%!!!!
So just doing the sums that’s
an extra $2178.00 that we wouldn’t have had ……(as well as the hidden advertising by people talking)… so over a year that’s worth $24,640.00 per year and that’s without retail recommendations to our clients. So thanks again Rachael, I’m looking forward to our next coaching call and all the support you will be giving me over the following months…I hope one day I can return the favour and do something for you.”
From Paul Davis of Pure Skin Clinic, Auckland:
“We decided to take on someone to help us with the clinic as we have tried many things our way with very little success!
After looking around we decided to take on the Worldwide Salon Marketing team and thank god we did! It has been a great help to us to see where we were making the mistakes and to see immediate results!!!
Chris and Rachael have been there whenever we have needed help, which when you are trying to get things moving in the right direction GOOD help is what you need.
We totally recommend the system at Worldwide Salon Marketing and certainly have no regrets.”
