Driving clients to your salon on quiet days or after someone cancels an appointment on short notice can often prove to be difficult. In those cases, you’ll find that having a ‘quiet day plan’ in place to put into action straight away (or even the night before), can really help. “Hmmm, a ‘quiet day plan’.” As soon as you mention the word plan, it suggests thinking ahead and doing something on purpose, doesn’t it?
Related | 7 Ways To Help Your Clients Spend More… More Often!
The Quiet Day Plan: 4 Elements To Keep In Mind
Planning for a quiet day doesn’t have to rhyme with complex marketing strategies. In fact, it’s pretty simple when you break it down into goals and needs. Your main goal is to drive client bookings. This goal, when broken down, looks something like this: you want to grab people’s attention, make them find you interesting, make them want what you’re offering and ultimately get them to take action. We’ll get back to that later.
How you achieve that, depends on the tools you have and the way you communicate with your audience. There are four main elements to your quiet day plan, and they all have to be in place for it to work.
1. A Clean Salon Or Spa Database
You need a list of people to contact, whether that be current or lapsed clients.
This is where a salon software solution can help. For instance, with Phorest Salon Software, in just a few quick taps on your keyboard, you can use the Client ReConnect feature or choose to identify the behaviour and spending patterns of your clients to target your offer. So if, for example, you wanted to identify the clients who haven’t been in for the last three months or those who came in and had a colour, then you can… but if you don’t use a system that allows you to segment your client database, then your marketing becomes very general and loses a bit of power.
For tips on how to grow your salon & spa email database, click here.
2. An Instant Means Of Communication
You want results on the day, don’t you?
The most logical way to get almost instant results is to send an SMS marketing message. That being said, you could still use email marketing or direct phone calls as part of your quiet day plan. You could use Twitter or Facebook ads, but if you’re not too familiar with building ads or if you don’t have a way to export your segmented client list from your software and use it as a target audience, it might not be the best option to turn to. SMS advertising, on the other hand, has a 99% open rate and produces on average a return that is 21X greater than your investment.
3. A Reason To Communicate
You don’t want to appear desperate, but you still have to communicate a sense of urgency (or scarcity). You could just say, “We’ve had an unexpected cancellation and… “ or, “We’re celebrating! Today only we’re doing “xyz” for “xxx”! Book now, limited availability.” It’s important that you get creative and communicate something that people can relate to. Phil Jackson, in a past Phorest FM episode, discusses communicating a message as he talks about email marketing in the hair and beauty industry. Tune in below:
4. A Structure
A strong structure will engage your customer, and for this, I recommend using the AIDA Structure:
- A = Attention
- I = Interest
- D = Desire
- A = Action
The job of the email’s subject line (or what you lead with in an SMS) is to grab attention. The two easiest ways of doing this are by getting people to recognise themselves or by using personalisation tags. Let’s take for example the first option. The headline might be, ‘Mums’. Now, if you’re not a mum, you won’t be interested, but if you are a mum, you’ll say, ‘That’s me,’ and recognise that this is something for you. The alternative, if you can, is to use the client’s name in your message: “Melanie, we haven’t seen you in a while. Get 100 TreatCard points on the house by booking your appointment today!“ Naturally, if an email or text has your name in it, you’ll just tend to read the rest of it.
The next step is to build interest. You’ve got to use whatever it is you’ve said in the headline, and take the client down the road with it. If you’ve said, “Is frizzy hair bothering you?,” then you might want to follow it up with “Here’s a new, simple solution to make it disappear for 10 days!” Bet I even got your interest, did I?
Next step is about tapping into their desires. This is where scarcity comes in. Use “today only,” or there’s “only three available” to make people think about taking action. You can find a list of exclusivity and scarcity words in this blog post.
Last but not least, don’t forget to indicate what exactly what they need to do to take action. “Reply to this text quoting XYZ!” or “Book online now!” They’ve got to be able to respond straight away.
If you get this quiet day plan right, within 10 to 20 minutes you’re going to start getting responses. You need your list, an instant way of communicating, a reason for getting in touch, and AIDA. Put all those elements into place and start driving bookings to your salon or spa!
Looking For More Than A One-Day Plan? Take The #30Days2Grow Salon Challenge!
Following its smash success in July last year, the #30Days2Grow challenge is back and aims once again at growing your revenue and your client base! Challenge yourself and join thousands of other salons to kick off spring with success!
From April 1st to 30th, 2018. Both registration and participation in the #30Days2Grow Salon Challenge are free. All you need is a little bit of drive, motivation and hunger for success!
Sign up here: www.30days2grow.com
Thanks for reading! #LetsGrow
