Sure, all of those things – ensuring the ‘public face’ of your business is clean, well-groomed and wears a smile is important. But it’s at least as important to put the same kind of effort into the systems, tools and tricks that get customers through the door. And by that, I mean salon marketing systems, and the ‘sales thinking’ that needs to go into them.

Thumbing through a local suburban newsletter this week, I stumbled on page after page of truly awful marketing. My staff scanned a few of these, so you can get a better idea of what I’m talking about.

Collectively and individually, these examples are about as lousy and useless as advertising gets. There are dozens of mistakes in all of these ads, I’ll point out just a few. (And see if you can identify them with your own marketing efforts.)

Let’s take this little gem of an ad. It’s right up there with the worst ads in the world. Hard to know where to start with this one, but let’s try

1) the headline. Er, there isn’t one, unless you count the name of the business. And almost without exception, your business name is the last thing you’d put at the top of your ad. In Dallas a few years ago, I met a guy whose industrial fan business changed it’s name from HVLS Fan Company to Big Ass Fans*. Now that’s a name that’d pass for a headline. This one ain’t.

2) Price. There’s nothing else going for it. And, like most business owners who’ve made not the slightest attempt to educate themselves on any form of marketing, those who compete on price alone are on a slippery slide to oblivion. There’ll always be somebody who’ll undercut you. And in this case, even the price is airy-fairy. The mere use of the word ‘from’ sets off warning bells.

3) Story. There’s no story here to involve the reader. No compelling reason to read the ad at all.

4) there’s no proof. Why should I use this salon, other than on price alone? There’s not an ounce of evidence here that I’ll get what I’m paying for.

This ad isn’t much better. If the very BEST, most compelling thing this business can say about itself is that it’d like to ‘welcome Emma Harris to our team of highly qualified therapists’, they’re in deep trouble. There’s everything wrong about this ad, I’ll analyze three.

1) It makes the mistake of talking about the business, not the customer. ALL people act out of self-interest first. The unconscious first question in any reader’s mind is

‘what’s in it for me?’

In this case, a new therapist (big deal) at a salon I’ve never heard of. Be still, my beating heart.

2) It immediately set’s the tone for the business by offering a 50% discount. Put aside that discounting is evil and profit-sapping by its very nature, the ’50% off’ statement is meaningless anyway. 50% off what?

3) Like the ad above, there’s no compelling story here. What does ‘hair free’ mean? How do they do it? Will it hurt? Who’s had it done, and what do they say about it?

Here’s another one, from the same paper. (They must have all listened to the same ad sales rep; “Have a look at what all the other advertisers are doing, and do something pretty much the same.”)

This one makes the same mistake as Example #1 (name of the business at the top of the ad) plus a few extras.

1) A picture that wastes an enormous amount of ‘selling space’ without selling anything. Who are these people, and why are they in the ad?

2) There’s nothing even resembling an offer. Having read this ad, what is the reader supposed to do…cut it out and stick it to the fridge?

3) The bullet points are meaningless. Under new management? Didn’t know the last management, so why would ‘new management’ mean anything to me? ‘Subiaco service without Subiaco prices’? They’re price cutting. If they knew how to charge ‘Subiaco prices’, presumably they would. Business is about making a profit. ‘No appointment necessary’? It means they let customers call the tune, not the other way around.

By and large, these ads and thousands of others like them (yours too?) are little more than expensive business cards. If you want to make your marketing work, you have two choices:

1) Spend years studying great advertising, learning how to write copy that sells, implementing that knowledge, testing and measuring it in your salon. OR

2) Do it the easy way. Apply for a 30-day Test Drive of the Inner Circle Premium program, get the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit®, get access to the Worldwide Salon Marketing international network of entrepreneurial salon & spa owners (via the members only forums, our live seminars etc), and short-circuit your learning curve with advertising and other marketing that’s already been tested and proven to work.

More than 600 current Member salons around the world can’t all be wrong.

* Thanks to failing memory of a very brief meeting 5 years ago, I had originally written here that the company had changed it’s name to revive the business. Nancy Smith of Big Ass Fans wrote to gently chide me that in fact the company had been very successful before the new name, and had made the change as a result of customer comments about the size of their fans.

“But we do appreciate the plug,” says Nancy.

]]> http://www.worldwidesalonmarketing.com/advertising-tips/salon-advertising-tips/salon-marketing-why-salons-fail/feed 1 http://www.worldwidesalonmarketing.com/advertising-tips/salon-advertising-tips/salon-advertising-its-salesmanship-stupid http://www.worldwidesalonmarketing.com/advertising-tips/salon-advertising-tips/salon-advertising-its-salesmanship-stupid#comments Tue, 30 Mar 2010 00:52:06 +0000 Greg Milner http://www.worldwidesalonmarketing.com/?p=2812 More evidence, if any was needed, that the beauty industry’s obsession with ‘pretty’ but ineffective marketing is completely wrong-headed and inaccurate thinking.

The Big End of town advertising agencies are at least partially to blame for this. For years, the big ad agencies have conned their clients -- mainly the big international product suppliers -- into spending millions on ad campaigns that pander to the ego and award-craving of the ‘creatives’ at the agencies, rather than the need for the marketing to actually sell something.

Typical of the usual crap that passes for beauty industry advertising...nothing that SELLS.

(Naturally, that idiocy has filtered down through the ranks to the point where the owner of even the smallest beauty salon or hair salon (our Members excepted) believes that a pretty picture, the name of the salon, and a phone number will somehow bring a stampede of customers. And they’re bitterly disappointed when it doesn’t, nearly always blaming the media.)

Finally, one big Madison Avenue-style ad agency has acknowledged the uncomfortable fact that advertising is about selling something -- and it’s no surprise that it’s the agency founded by the greatest salesman of all time, David Ogilvy.

Ogilvy and Mather has announced a competition that celebrates selling as an art form and science to be admired rather than looked down upon. Entries are being accepted from 15 countries -- via a video you upload to You Tube -- and to make it more interesting, the product they’ll have to sell is pretty ordinary -- a standard red house brick.

“If you can sell a red brick, maybe you can sell anything,” said Mat Zucker, executive creative director for the OgilvyOne New York office, who came up with the contest.

Here’s the video Ogilvy is using to promote the contest….

www.youtube.com/watch?v=edZpR_Qd8rk

If you've watched TV in the last year or two, you'll have seen this guy

On Saturday morning just gone, as I was contentedly reading the paper over a nice cup of tea, my delightful wife Michelle casually mentioned that

“oh, and by the way honey, we’ve been invited to a demonstration of that kitchen thingy this afternoon at your brother’s place.  I thought you’d like to take a look, so I said yes.”

I groaned. “Er…gosh, yes darling. I can think of nothing better. The only other thing I’d rather do is have root canal surgery.”

(Of course I went. Happy wife, happy life.)

The ‘thingy’ was one of those all-singing, all-dancing gadgets, called a Thermomix. German-made, can’t buy it in stores (can’t even buy it in America, apparently), only sold by in-home demonstration. And eye-wateringly expensive – mere coin-change out of $2,000.

My brother’s wife, a glamorous but practical woman, had raved about it. They even took it with them on their boat, she said.

Seven minutes after that, immaculately-kneaded dough had been removed from the Thermomix’s bowl and was baking in the oven. By the time the bread was ready, a steaming, al-dente seafood risotto had emerged from the very same device.

And I, the skeptic, was already reaching for my credit card.

So was the only other couple there.

Such is the power of demonstration.

You can talk till you’re blue in the face about your product or your service. But nothing beats the power of demonstration.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for two years, with no electricity, you cannot have missed the ShamWow guy, Vince Shlomi  (“You following me camera guy?”) flogging absorbent towels on TV.

They’re his own product. He got them made for him in Germany (“You know the Germans always make good stuff…”) and told NBC he’d “sold literally millions of them…”

Here’s what’s instructive:

Advertising is – rightly – described as Salesmanship in Print. But no matter how compelling an ad, it’s like comparing a pushbike to a bulldozer when it comes to the power to drive prospects to hand over their cash.

Yet so many salon & spa owners are somehow disappointed when their (poorly-crafted) ad, flyer or letter fails to generate a stampede of hungry customers.

So here’s the trick: make it easy for your ad, flyer or letter to do its work, by not asking it to do too much.

If all you ask your ad to do is to get prospects to put their hands up and say ‘hey, I could be interested…’ – and then get them in for a powerful demonstration of what you’re selling, you’ll find your response rate goes up dramatically.

Selling hair extensions?

“FREE 24-minute Demonstration Reveals How Women with Longer Hair Can Have Better Sex Lives, Attract Richer Men – Call NOW, only 12 Places Available!”

Flogging cellulite remedies?

“Embarrassed by Unsightly Cellulite? Give me just 7 minutes and I’ll show you how you can eliminate it forever, with no exercise, no surgery, no pain – FREE in-salon demonstration 7pm Monday, Only 11 places, book NOW and you’ll walk away with a FREE Mystery Gift valued at $28 000 000 000!”

Let your advertising raise the leads. If you’re selling a big-ticket service (say, over $100), don’t make your expensive advertising beat it’s brains out on a lost cause.

Sell with the demo. It’s that powerful.

Prior to being an Inner Circle member Lynda was your typical salon owner, chasing a dream to have a salon bustling with customers and money flooding out of the till, whereas in reality her dream was dragging her down and the only thing flooding in, were bills, bills and more bills.

And as I say to new inner circle members, joining the program doesn’t instantly qualify you for a salon full of customers and bags and bags of cash.  No, you still actually have to put the work in to make that happen, which is exactly what Lynda has been doing day after day, week after week, month after month.  And it is this MASSIVE ACTION that has seen her salon grow consistently each month, employ her first staff members and become the leading retailer in South Auckland for her product range.

Lynda Moodley Owner of Lynnel's Hair Studio, Manukau

Since joining the Inner Circle program in 2009 she has seen her rate of new clients increase each month.  In October she had 35 new clients, in November she had 46 new clients and in December she had 47 new clients.  And I think it is fair to say that with her advertorial in January she will be breaking some more records this month….

Editorials and adverts (advertorials) are a fantastic way to promote your salon and more often than not will result in a much higher response rate than just an advert alone. It is a way to tell people a bit more about your salon and make them feel like they already know and trust you before they walk through your doors or call you.

If you are thinking about advertising in your local paper it pays to ask them (especially if you are a new advertiser) if you can have some editorial with your advert.  Sometimes they will give you this for free in the hope of you advertising more with them in the future.  Alternatively some papers will want you to lock in to a contract for x amount of adverts before they give you editorial space.

Lynda ran a 10 week advertising campaign with the paper.  The first 9 adverts did not include editorial and the response rate was 2 – 3 bookings per ad.  The advertorial in week 10 generated 27 phone enquiries, 15 bookings (12 of which were new clients) and an immediate income of $896.

Each new client would be worth on average $1000 per annum to Lynda, so the advertorial has potentially increased her annual turnover by $12,000.

Needless to say Lynda has found out what works best for her salon and will continue to run an advertorial column each month.

Members, click here to see Lynda’s editorial

And here’s what Lynda has to say about being an Inner Circle member…

“On many occasions I would sit in my quiet salon and think what on earth am I doing chasing a dream but there’s so much stress. I needed to be able to talk to others that are in my industry and understand exactly where I’m coming from and yes the inner circle program provides just that and definitely much much more.

Being a member of the inner circle program has decreased the stress level in my life in terms of marketing, gone are those days of sitting hours and hours in front of the computer screen and trying to figure out where to start with an advert.  By being a member of the program we as a salon on average are doing 20-25 new clients in a month. October this year we did a record of 35 new clients and we have just broken that record again with 46 new clients in November.

My coaching calls are definitely my favourite. I am always excited to talk to Chris because I know even if I have had a low month he’s always there to encourage me and get me motivated. The other aspect of the program that I enjoy is the fact that everything is done for me all I have to do is just change my details and off goes the marketing.

Our most successful campaign that seems to work for us is the Hollywood Woman’s Hair Package. Every month we put out at least 2000 flyers and on average we get a return of 15-20 new clients taking up this offer and definitely topping that with retail sales.

According to my supplier Lynnels retails more products that any other salon that they supply in South Auckland

I spend at least 5-7 hours if not more on marketing each week. Just about every chance I get I’m in front of my computer going through the kit and getting an advert sorted.”

And all of Lynda’s hard work hasn’t gone un-noticed by her husband too….

“Well, my precious husband sees all hard work I have been putting into my business as well as still being a mummy and a wife so he decided to honour me and buy me my dream car. I drive it very proudly with my salon magnets on both sides of my car which includes a $99 offer and frequently I notice people at the lights or round abouts reading my magnet.

Check out Lynda's new BMW!!!

My goal is to be DEBT FREE, to be full time off the floor and definitely expansion in terms of employing staff. We have just employed another hairdresser because I cannot carry the work load on my own.

And my advice to people who are thinking about joining the Inner Circle program is ‘DON’T HESITATE. You have nothing to lose. If you are looking at closing the doors to your business don’t do it the inner circle program has the answers you are looking for and the mentors are amazing.  If you shut the doors to your business you probably will lose the very thing that can catapult you right into your financial freedom. Give the program a try, you have everything to gain.”

Well done Lynda, you really deserve these fantastic results from all the hard work you are putting in….keep it up!!!

If you want the results that Lynda is achieving then you need to join the Inner Circle program TODAY and get your own copy of the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit®. Go here to see if you qualify for a 30 Day Money Back Guaranteed Test Drive of the entire system – completely risk free.)

Yes, it IS a real, full-page newspaper ad. Compelling? I think not.

If you ever doubted that the lunatics really are in charge of the asylum, this should dispel those doubts.

Check out this actual full-page ad, taken from the newspaper I was reading this morning.

Double click on it to open in a new window so you can get a better look.

Yep, it’s 95% blank white space.

This ad happens to be for a university, but I’ve seen this kind of insanity applied to many businesses. I have little doubt that the academics at this institution decided they needed a smart, big name advertising agency to help them attract fee-paying students.

The agency guys must have seen them coming, and rubbed their hands together with glee. I can imagine the conversation around the agency boardroom table now.

“This’ll be easy, those academics are clueless. We’ll just spin them a story about how all that white space will make their university look really cool,” says one.

“Yeah,” says another account executive, “but the best bit is, we can show them how awfully clever and groovy we are by whipping up a single line of text, surrounding it with all that white space, and charge ‘em a fortune for a full-page ad!”

Typical shock expressed by an advertising victim who's been 'had' by so-called ad agency 'account executives'

Oh dear. Another advertising victim.

Listen up, dear salon or spa owner. Here is the lesson:

Blank, white space never sold anything. Neither did blank space in ANY color.

Any time an advertising sales rep tries to tell you to ‘keep it simple, not too much text, lots of blank spaces, it looks better that way’, here’s what you need to do:

Get some chloroform, and sedate him quickly. If you can’t bear to shoot him on the spot, and get blood all over your salon floor, at least take him out back and hog-tie him to a post in the car-park. Then go back inside, and fill every square inch of your advertising real estate with text that tells your story in as much detail as you can possibly cram in.

Use before and after photos. Testimonials, as many as you can fit.Tell the WHOLE story, every single time you do any marketing.

Don’t waste a single square inch of your expensive ad.

Anybody proposing to spend your hard-earned salon marketing dollar on plain white space is, to use a colloquial Australian term, a wanker.

Maybe if business owners spent less time tooling around on Twitter and more time actually out on the street selling something, the world would be a healthier place.

Speaking of wrong-headed thinking, Exhibit #2 is a scan of a story from yesterday morning’s newspaper.

According to Deloitte, the international accounting firm, Australian executives are ‘lagging behind their US counterparts in the use of social media like Facebook and Twitter and missing out on key benefits…”

I must be missing something here. The Australian economy is one of the strongest in the Western world, having failed spectacularly to sink into recession, unlike the US economy. It would seem to me that Australian executives are too busy making profits to bother much with tinkering about on MyFaceWitter, while their American counterparts stare dolefully at their little phone screens, pinning their business hopes and dreams on a miracle suddenly leaping out from their Twitter page and paving the streets with gold.

Good grief.

Can't think what to put in your salon's ad or flyer? Take the 'headline test'

Couple of weeks ago we took a call from a very disgruntled Inner Circle member, who complained she’s followed the Toolkit templates to the letter, done everything she’d been instructed to do, and got zero response.

She’d had 10,000 salon marketing flyers printed up and distributed to mailboxes for miles around her salon, and got not a single booking.

This was not a good call. This is why I tend not to take calls in the office.

So we got her to email us the flyer she’d wasted so much money on. And instantly spotted the reason for its failure.

She’d forgotten to include a fairly critical element.

Her phone number.

Put that aside, and it was a terrific piece of direct response advertising.

My point here is, you have to get EVERYTHING right to give yourself the best chance of success. Leave ONE thing out – testimonials, a guarantee, scarcity, a means of response – and you’re selling yourself short.

So let’s start with the most difficult thing first. The headline.

Do you get that horrible ‘blank screen syndrome’ when you’re racking your brains trying to come up with a compelling ad to fill your salon with clients?

Lazy salon owners, lacking the tools and templates our Inner Circle members have at their fingertips, usually resort to some kind of lame discounting, throw in a pretty picture or two, a dreary list of everything they do, and let the whole thing fizzle out with a phone number at the bottom.

Very few bother to put thought, care and attention into the very first thing anybody sees when they’re reading your ad or flyer:

The Headline.

It’s the ‘ad for the ad’ – It’s only got one job, and that’s to compel the reader to keep reading.

Lazy salon owners tend to look around at what everybody else is doing, and copy it. And in most cases, that means using the name of the business as the headline for the ad. We call it ‘marketing incest’ – works pretty much like real incest, sooner rather than later everybody just gets

Dumb and dumber.

Nobody but YOU cares about the name of the business. The headline has to be about the customer, and what’s in it for them.

So here’s a simple test, a filter you can use to test how effective your ad’s going to be:

“Take away EVERYTHING except the headline and the phone number.”

Now, take a look at it. Is it still going to work, still going to get people to pick up the phone?

Example:

I’ve taken two ads, stripped out everything except the headline and the phone number. Which one do you think is going to get the phone ringing?

Example #1:

Contours Hair & Beauty Clinic for all your beauty needs.

Phone 000 000 000

Example #2:

Attention Ladies! New Glam Makeover Package Valued at $297 – Only $99 – Guaranteed to Contain No Illegal Sexual Stimulants. However, Men Will Look at You…

Phone 000 000 000

So the next time you’re writing an ad or flyer, put it through the Headline Test.

If YOU want the kind of tools that our Inner Circle members are using to generate serious CASH despite ‘the economy’, you should immediately apply to become a Member of the Worldwide Salon marketing Inner Circle program, including the world-famous Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit®

GO HERE to complete a no-obligation Pre-Application Questionnaire and you might qualify to be one of just 30 salons each month who join the program all over the world – and double their sales inside 12 months!

Are you shouting your marketing message at deaf ears, using the wrong media?

Many times every week, we interview prospective Inner Circle members about why they should be accepted into the program, get their very own Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit®

And almost invariably, to the question ‘what kind of marketing are you doing right now, or have done in the past?’ we get an answer like this:

“Oh, I’ve tried mailbox flyers/direct mail/newspaper ads/Yellow Pages/radio…(take your pick)…and IT doesn’t work/it’s a waste of money/it never got any results….” Blah blah blah.

And it always amuses me. What they’re actually saying is

“I couldn’t make it work…for me.”

If mailbox flyers ‘don’t work’, then why do ya reckon that every night when you go home, your mailbox is overflowing with ‘junk’ mail from every kind of real estate business under the sun? Would they keep doing it, week after week, month after month, year after year, if IT wasn’t working? No company has a bottomless pit of money.

If the Yellow Pages was a complete waste of money, it would seem to me that almost every company on the planet is staffed with

The Dumbest People in Dumb Town

Because you’ve gotta ask yourself, surely they wouldn’t keep shelling out year after year if the thing didn’t produce a result?

If newspaper advertising was nothing more than a black hole that sucks down money like a vortex and never spits anything back out again, newspapers would a) never have got off the ground in the first place, or b) would long ago have gone out of business, their only source of oxygen cut off en masse.

But it’s pretty typical. Salon owners – most owners of small businesses, in fact – blame the media when their marketing doesn’t work. It ain’t the fault of the media. It’s yours, for lack of clear thinking.

Most business owners get the process all backwards. They book space in the newspaper/Yellow Pages etc, then they think about what to put in the ad. And because they’ve done the last thing first, with no ‘sales thinking’ the ad usually ends up looking like nothing more appetizing than a business card.

Here’s the process:

1)    Marketing message. What are you going to say to your target market that is compelling, that cannot be ignored, that is unique, that must be responded to?

2)    But the best marketing message on the planet is no better than the worst marketing message on the planet if it falls on deaf ears. Who are you going to say it to – and by deliberate strategy, who are you NOT going to say it to? Are you specific with your preferred target market, or are you just going to throw mud at all of ‘em and hope some of it sticks?

3)    Finally, when you’ve figured out what compelling message you’re going to deliver, and who you’re going to deliver it to, the media pretty much chooses itself. (Hint: you’re hardly going to create a great offer appealing to debutantes/young brides-to-be, then book a full page in ‘Seniors Week’, are you??)

Be intelligent with your marketing. Do the ‘sales thinking’ process in the right order. Identify your target market. Create a compelling message/offer just for them. Only then do you choose the media you’re going to use to deliver that message to that market.

Once you get the process right, you’ll find that in fact, with better Direct Response methods applied to the copy, whichever media you choose is going to work a whole lot better for you.

Inner Circle member Marnie Kallmeyer of Beauty Image in Wembley, WA; increased sales by $160,000 in a single year.

“How I came back from the brink of bankruptcy and turned my failing beauty business into a sales powerhouse – in less than a year.”

The very best part of my job is knowing – with more and more proof every day – that our salon marketing tools and systems are at least partly, and in many cases wholly, responsible for helping more salon owners make more money than any other single product or service in the entire industry.

This week’s story is typical of so many.

When Marnie Kallmeyer of Beauty Image in my own home town came to us two years ago, joined the Inner Circle coaching program and got her Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit®, she was almost at the end of her tether. Failing business, too few customers, the stress causing cracks in her marriage. A story many reading this post would be familiar with. (And Marnie’s salon is in a wealthy suburb, the kind of place where if you’re going to get run over, at least it’ll be by a BMW or Merc)


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She was almost at the end of the road…but not quite. Overwhelmed by the task, Marnie got her Toolkit, and then let it sit untouched on the shelf…. for more than a year! She’d taken Step #1 – making a Decision. But she’d then dropped the ball, and didn’t follow through with Step #2: Action.

Finally, in December 2008, Marnie was literally two weeks away from bankruptcy. The house had gone, and the business within a nano-second away from closing the doors.

“I remember you telling me once that the teacher will appear when the student is ready,” Marnie told me this week.

“By December, I’d had your material for nearly 18 months and I had barely touched it. I was so depressed, scared, overwhelmed – and yet somewhere inside me was a voice that kept telling me that I didn’t want failure to be my story. I so wanted a better story to tell people.

“So I took the Toolkit off the shelf, gritted my teeth, and said to myself ‘it’s either this or give up’.

There is nothing quite like the prospect if imminent death to send adrenaline through the veins. 18 months after making The Decision, Marnie finally Took Action, and threw herself into implementing the marketing tools in the kit. By January this year (2009) Marnie was seeing results. It fired her up, and she threw herself into the task of turning herself from being a technician, into where the real money is – being a marketer.

It worked, spectacularly.

“I compared our end-ofJune figures with the same 12-month period the previous year.

“I was astounded. In the 12 months to June our little salon did an EXTRA $160,000 in takings – and almost all of that increase was from January this year,” she said.

Example:

How to Sell $28,000 Worth of IPL Hair Removal Treatments in a Single Month

Marnie created a great OFFER to sell her IPL hair removal treatments, then did up flyers to paste all over the salon, and a big poster for the front window. (Zero cost, high impact). This campaign involved no newspaper advertising, no mailbox flyers, no direct mail. Just a single long-form email to her clients, and the promotions in the salon.

She created two packages, one at $1,369 (with leg area) and one at @ $1,149 (without leg area).

At $1149 (without leg area) we sold 9 packs worth $10,341
At $1369 (with leg area) we sold 13 packs worth $17,797
total = $28,138  and 22 packs.

There are only a few not doing their faces, but most are and I absolutely insist they must purchase our Vitamin C serum and our SPF to assist their “new look’ we are working on. Most have also added cleansers, moisturisers along the way at some point.
That  is another $184 from them and of course helps to give them better results. We also upsell Microdermabrasion and Peels along with the IPL tretments, $40 a peel and $100 a microderm.
We ran this for all of July and I allowed a couple extra to do this in August. Perhaps 7 weeks in total.
We have a couple who are taking the mickey out of this, but most are great and some talk about doing their faces but just run out of time and get too busy.

Allowing only 4 months worth means it is enough to get them started… but as IPL usually needs 5-10 treatments it means tthey are seeing enough to have made a differnce but not quite enough to finish.. so I will of course recommend they keep going…. individual,expensive treatments or perhaps I’ll let them do another course at the same price.. but then they may only need to use 2-3 visits instead of 4 again… fingers crossed. Hopefully I should get a good 6 month plus flow on from this promo.

WANT THE EXACT EMAIL AND POSTER MARNIE USED? Log into the Members Only ‘sealed section’ and you’ll find it under ‘Marketing to Existing Clients’

Marnie also uses a machine called Formostar to provide body wrap treatments, and had more success with an  advertising campaign she ran in two local newspapers. She combined a Formostar offer with another offer for eyelash extensions.

“Usually I sell HEAPS of lash appointments, and a few Formostar treatments -  but this ad brought it the other way around.. I sold so many Formostar packs that we can no longer take any new clients for it, at least for the next 3-4 weeks while people finish their packages.

“I wanted to target NEW clients as with either treatment they are on the bed for at least an hour and that gives us the chance to ‘tell’ them about everything else we do, and mostly they do end up having other treatments done at some point with us.

With the lashes we upsell face waxing and tinting, another $50 odd depending on what and then usually they end up having other waxing etc. They need to come 2-3 wekly for their lash refills so it usually times well for other waxing and also see other clients regularly that are doing/talking about other treatments.

The Formostar is 2-3 times a week  so they are always seeing other clients having had other treatments and lots of people leaving with lovely lashes!
I line up the walls with promo and reading material and it usually works.  I have got in some slimming coffee and tea and great body/cellulite creams  so up-selling those too.

I have done 1 ad in the (daily paper)  that I went halves with another salon – cost about $280.00.

Result?

Sold 23 packages for a total $10,350

(The ad I forwarded you cost $204.60)

I must say I haven’t counted the creams and coffee total… tsk tsk.

WANT THE EXACT AD THAT MARNIE USED? Log into the Members Only ‘sealed section’ and navigate to “Getting New Clients – Beauty”

That’s a total of $39,000 from just two promotions, only one of which involved attracting new clients. It’s these results and many more like them that have changed Marnie’s life dramatically.

“Thanks Greg for giving the great tools and for all of us happy enough to share what works.”

If YOU want the kind of results Marnie is getting, you need to be a Member of the Inner Circle program, complete with your own edition of the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit®. Go here to see if you qualify for a 30 Day Money Back Guaranteed Test Drive of the entire system – completely risk free.)

Okay, it's a meaningless picture...but how else am I going to illustrate an article like this and not end up on a porn site?

I’ve hesitated about writing this article for more than a week now. I don’t shock easily, but a conversation I had with a new Inner Circle member last week left me gob-smacked, delighted and laughing out loud all at the same time.

That conversation is directly related to one of the key marketing strategies I teach our salon and spa owner Members: the importance of marketing to niches. The biggest mistake salon owners make is trying to be all things to all people – and by doing so, being nothing to anybody. The more narrowly you define your target market, the more precisely you can craft a compelling message that market, and that market alone.

And you can obviously have more than one target market. But whatever you do, don’t jump up and down in the ocean. Nobody will notice. Jump up and down in a puddle. Or a series of puddles.

There are riches in niches.

Hold that thought for a moment. For most salon owners, identifying a target market is little more sophisticated that this: get a road map, turn to the page where your salon is, put a paper cup over it, and draw a circle around the cup. It’s called geographic marketing and it’s valid, but dangerously simplistic.

Kylie Campbell, Inner Circle member and owner of Chocolate Vanilla, a particularly appropopriate name for a salon with a delicate specialty service....

It was this question to Kylie Campbell, one of our newest Inner Circle members last week that produced an answer that almost floored me. Most of the time, I get the usual bland response – “well, we specialize in facials/waxing/hair extensions/blah blah blah” – hardly unique.

I was expecting much the same this time, but she caught me completely off-guard when she said “oh, we do all the usual beauty treatments, like waxing, hair removal, microdermabrasion, eyelash extensions and…er…

Anal Bleaching.

Right about now you’re silently screaming TOO MUCH INFORMATION! (And no, I am not going to describe the process…)

But there’s a valid lesson in this, even if it does get a kind of “eewwww” reaction.

Yep, this Kylie had done a brilliant job of  identifying a target (I use the word advisedly) market; in this case a very narrowly-defined, easily accessible niche of predominantly gays, trans-sexuals, transvestites, strippers and other such inhabitants of the ‘dark side’ who (apparently) hold in high regard a lighter pigmentation of that hitherto unmentionable small area of the human anatomy.

Now, I’ve been teaching direct response marketing to salons & spas for a long time. Talked endlessly about the need to ‘slice-’n-dice’ markets into small, manageable bite-sized chunks, to concentrate marketing resources so you don’t waste bullets on targets that don’t matter. It’s MUCH easier to market to a niche that’s an inch wide but a mile deep.

Some ‘get it’. And reap the rewards in multiples. But most don’t.

However Kylie understood the concept perfectly. Cheekily, cleverly, she took it one step further and named her new salon

Chocolate Vanilla

Here’s how Kylie describes the process she went through to identify her niche market…

Now, I am NOT suggesting you all rush out looking for bums to bleach. There are hundreds of niche markets, groups of people with common interests, jobs, affiliations and buying habits. You can buy lists of ‘em. Or create your own.

Here’s what’s instructive: smart marketers identify a target market before creating a marketing message. Indeed, you simply cannot create an effective ad, letter or any other marketing piece until you’ve narrowed your target market. (Hint: it’s as much about deciding who you don’t want as it is about working out who you do want.)

Be grateful that I avoided the temptation (mostly) of turning this article into a pun-fest.

FOOTNOTE: The reason this salon owner joined the Inner Circle program and got the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit that comes with it is obvious; she’d identified her target market very well, now she needs a system of templates for advertising that’ll attract that market to her salon like moths around a light globe on a dark night.

If you want the same, you might qualify for a 30-day Test Drive of the entire system – go here.

Salon owner Jemima Richards used a series of linked sales letters straight from the Toolkit to triple her marketing response

Call me old-fashioned – somebody did once, and I said ‘fiddlesticks’ – but it’s a mystery to me why so many salon owners (even some Inner Circle members, who should know better) just do NOT get one of the simplest, easy-to-implement salon & spa marketing strategies I have ever taught.

Well, from Jemima Richards of Sync Detoxify Nourish Regenerate yet more proof – if any more were needed – that this strategy DOES work, works brilliantly, and all you have to do is implement it.

Says Jemima:

“Had to just let you know that we have been laughing a lot around here because I am an idiot! The reason for the laughter is the amount of return we are getting (using your strategy) and how many more bookings we are getting from the 2^nd and 3^rd letter.

“You always said it, and not that I didn’t believe you…if only I had been doing this all along…!”

What Jemima is talking about is the proven direct mail strategy of a linked series of letters to a list of customers or qualified prospects. Most businesses send one letter, and no matter what response they get, presume the rest are simply not interested, and give up.

It is a fatal marketing mistake. You leave untold amounts of money uncollected, sitting on the table.

Hear this: if you are tempted to do a one-shot mailing and stop there, save your money. They don’t even feel the breeze.

As Jemima says – and we have proven over and over and over again – you’ll often get a BIGGER response off letters #2 and #3 than you will off the first letter.

It is precisely why the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit™ is FULL of these linked, sequential letters, for a multitude of purposes and events, e.g.,

• The ‘Raise the Dead’ letters for getting ‘lost’ clients back. Written specifically for this purpose, with fun, from Rupert the Dog.
• The New Client re-booking letters, a series of three.
• The change of season letters to existing clients

..and a ton of other letters for every imaginable purpose.

“Oh, I couldn’t do that, my clients would think I’m pestering them.”

No, they won’t. Here’s the truth: clients leave you because of neglect, not because you’re sending them nice letters.

(And if ONE client complains, are you going to use that as a pathetic excuse to ignore the rest of your client base?)

NOTE: you do NOT have to re-invent the wheel, slave over a hot computer, struggle with what to write – it’s ALL in the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit™