Worldwide Salon Marketing

Salon Marketing: How to Get ‘Lost’ Customers Back

by Greg Milner on 10/02/10 at 2:57 pm

'Raising the Dead' - or getting 'lost' clients back into your salon is a case of testing several offers and seeing which ones work best.

I’ve written about this several times before, but it’s worth re-tracing particularly because of the large number of salon marketing ‘newbies’ who’ve recently joined the Inner Circle Lite program.

For their minimal weekly subscription, Lite members are not entitled to individual coaching, even individual answers to questions, however when there are enough questions on a similar topic I’ll post a ‘group’ answer here. And it’s probably useful as a refresher for Premium members anyway.

Salon professionals who signed up for Lite when it launched last week are just now receiving the templates for what we call the ‘Raise the Dead’ series of direct mail pieces  used so successfully by hundreds of our Premium members to get ‘lost’ clients back into the salon. Every salon has ‘em, every salon wants ‘em back.

(Check out more about the Lite program here.)

But it’s brought a rash of questions along the lines of

“I don’t understand – are you really proposing that we offer lost clients a FREE service?”

Well, a couple of caveats.

First, the downloadable templates in the Lite program – in this case the Raise the Dead letters – are just that; templates. They are examples of how to do a direct mail campaign, but the sample offer contained in them is not set in stone.

However, a great deal of ‘sales thinking’ has gone into these pieces, and here’s how it goes:

• Your ‘lost’ clients are pretty much just that. If you haven’t seen somebody for three months or more, they’re not clients any more, they’re prospects. The only advantage you have is that you know their name and address. I.e., you can market to them in the most direct way possible – with a letter, an envelope and a stamp. (Well, you certainly should have their names and physical addresses, if you’re doing your job as the marketer of your business!)
• There’s a reason they haven’t been in for a long while. Either they’re pushing up daisies, or they’ve moved to another town – neither of which you can do much about – OR (worse) they found no compelling reason to come back to you, or (worse still) they found a compelling reason NOT to come back to you.
• To get them back, you have to make a compelling offer, one that must be responded to, that cannot be ignored. That’s not necessarily a free offer, but free is a much more compelling offer than asking them to come back and spend money, when they left you in the first place because they were dissatisfied – or at best, not delighted – with whatever they got last time they were there.

Now, here’s the clever thinking – and to do this properly, you need to know your own numbers for this:

1. First, do the sums: what is an average, regular client worth to you in say, a year? Let’s say for the sake of the argument, $1,000.
2. Second, if you got, say 10 ‘lost’ clients back into the salon, based on your average retention rate, how many of them do you think you’d keep re-booking for the long term? Let’s say five of them.
3. So, in the Raise the Dead letters, let’s say you make an offer of a free cut ‘n color – or a free facial, or body wrap, or whatever – valued at say, $139. (These are my numbers, don’t get bent out of shape because they’re not your numbers. Do some lateral thinking.) But it doesn’t actually COST you $139 to deliver the service… particularly if you make this offer for a Monday or Tuesday only and you’ve got staff sitting around picking their noses anyway.
   It might cost you say, $15 in product.
4. So for this example, it’s cost you $150 to deliver 10 of these freebies, to get ten former clients back in. But, based on your average retention rate, you’ve re-booked 5 of them, and those 5 are worth a total of $5,000 over the next year. For a ‘cost’ of $150.

You can do anything you like with the numbers. But the thinking is sound. And there is only ONE way you’re going to find out which numbers work best for you – testing.

If you find offering a freebie isn’t working, do something else – but whatever you do, don’t simply offer a discount. All that does is train your clients to expect discounts. And believe me, that is NOT the market you want to be in.

The now-famous series of Raise the Dead letters - Inner Circle Premium mebers report responses as high as 25%

FOOTNOTE: The ‘Raise the Dead’ series of direct mail pieces I talk about here is the now-famous one featuring Rupert the Dog. They are certainly NOT your standard, dreary ‘professional-looking’ letters that most business owners send out to their prospects and clients in the delusional belief that looking ‘professional’ will somehow be compelling enough to get them to pick up the phone.

Arguing that ‘I couldn’t possibly send something like that to my clients, they’re far too sophisticated for that’, as one salon owner did at our most recent Salon Profit Secrets seminar, is akin to insisting the world really is flat. As one of our Inner Circle Premium members wrote to me recently, “I sent out the first letter in the series and got one or two responses. Then I sent the second letter and got a massive 25% response – amazing!”

What YOU think about your marketing is irrelevant. The only opinions that matter are those of your customers, who vote with their credit cards.

A post by Greg Milner The odd idea, a bit of prodding, a nudge here and there, a little fun, and the occasional dose of brutal reality. Greg is co-founder and CEO of Worldwide Salon Marketing, a writer, direct response marketing consultant, specialist marketing systems adviser and coach. He (sometimes) accepts private consulting clients.

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