Salon Superstars – Inner Circle Member of the Week: Linda Gordon

by Chris Sanders on 11/08/09 at 11:58 am

The salon ad campaign that brought in 56 new clients in 5 days: “We placed the ad in the New Zealand Herald and Aucklander on Thursday and again in the Herald on Sunday. The total cost for the 3 ads was $1760, and by Monday afternoon we had 56 bookings…and the phone is still ringing!”

One of the most commonly asked questions I get from new Inner Circle members is ‘What happens if a salon down the road joins the program and is doing similar marketing?” …to which my answer is normally something along the lines of, “well firstly you are better to be in the program than not as you will have such a huge upper hand over the salons that are not members.

Secondly, what makes your salon different from the salon down the road? By this I mean ‘what is your unique selling point or USP, that would make me choose you over the other salon regardless of whether they are an Inner Circle member or not.

And thirdly, do you really care what the salon down the road is doing?

Linda Gordon, owner of Arya Day Spa in Auckland

I had an interesting conversation with Linda Gordon of Arya Day Spa about a month or so ago which was very similar to this.

Linda joined the Inner Circle program at the Auckland Road to Riches Seminar and during our first coaching call she asked why we would sign up her salon, which is only about 2km down the road from our salon.

My answer, well it went like what I have written above. And if I believed for one minute that joining salons to our Inner Circle program in the local area was going to be to the detriment of our salon, then I wouldn’t do it.

But I like to walk to talk, so there are at least 2 salons within the vicinity of our salon that are in the program. All these salons are experiencing massive results. Paul Davis of ‘The Pureskin Clinic’ down the road in Ponsonby has seen his Salon grow 20% per month since joining the program 5 months ago, and now Linda Gordon is getting these exceptional results from her marketing. Both these salons give the customers completely different messages from each other, and from our salon. That’s what makes them stand out.

So you can imagine, when Linda emailed me this week to tell me about the ads she had run in the New Zealand Herald had brought in a total of 56 new clients in just a couple of days, I was over the moon for her.

“We placed the ad in the New Zealand Herald and Aucklander on Thursday and again in the Herald on Sunday. The total cost for the 3 adverts was $1760, and by Monday afternoon we had 56 bookings…and the phone is still ringing!”

So this campaign has brought in to date $5544 and if only 50% of these clients become regular customers worth around $1500 per year to Linda, then this campaign has just increased her annual turnover by $42,000.

(NOTE TO INNER CIRCLE MEMBERS: log into the Members Only ‘sealed section’ here and navigate to “Getting New Clients” where you’ll be able to download the ad that Linda used to get 56 new clients.)

You see our real competition is not the salon down the road but in fact it is the Supermarkets and Chemists that sell all the cheap cosmetic and hair products to ‘our’ clients.

I had one of those stomach turning conversations with Julieanne Narbey of ‘Hair @ Yours Mobile Salon’. Julieanne used to work for one of those competitors (something a bit like ‘Shampoo n things’).

In her own words she said, “I was amazed at how many people would come into our shop having just had their hair done literally 10 minutes earlier and would buy the product they needed for their hair. I asked why they hadn’t just bought it from the salon and there response was almost always that the hairdresser hadn’t told them about the products or attempted to sell them anything.” Is this going on in your salon on a daily basis and costing you serious amounts of money?

But back to Linda, congratulations on being our Salon of the week and long may I keep hearing these success stories from you!!!

Rating 3.00 out of 5

A post by Chris Sanders

Chris and his wife Rachael D'Aguiar own a successful salon in Auckland - so successful, thanks to their involvement in the Worldwide Salon Marketing Inner Circle program and the tools and strategies in the Essential Salon Owner's Marketing Toolkit that they grabbed the opportunity to become the NZ franchise of WSM.