In the salon business, success is ultimately determined by the ability to attract new customers to your salon or spa persistently. The quality of your staff and services comes later because eventually, you need customers first to showcase the craft of your teams.
You can maximise the productivity of your staff only when they get more clients.
You already know that the more customers you have the more revenue you’ll make.
If you’re looking for the best ways to attract new salon clients, you’ve come to the right place.
In this article, I’ll sum up the most effective ways to attract new customers to your salon or spa. Salon and spa businesses can be highly profitable if done right. But you need to understand how to effectively attract new customers.
What you will get from this article today:
Let’s dive straight into the salon customers’ acquisition strategy.
1. Online Visibility
When it is the time when everything is digital, it is a no-brainer for your salon to go online. Online visibility will help discover your salon by new customers looking for a service. It can help in your brand building and can drive unique visitors to your salon. It’s important to know where your customers spend most of their time online. There are multiple ways and platforms where you can increase your salon’s visibility. You can increase your visibility by paying for displaying your ads digitally.
1.a. Facebook & Instagram Ads:
Facebook ads are the most cheapest and effective way to get more unique clients. You may already have tried Facebook ads but there’s a right way to do it for maximum effectiveness. I’m not talking about boosting posts, it is just not that effective. You have to run proper lead generation campaigns on Facebook.
If you have done it already in the past then it’s well in good but if you haven’t then there is no need to worry.
Facebook ads are a no-brainer for acquiring new customers.
As a salon owner, you don’t need to be the perfect marketeer at everything. You can hire an agency for that but investing a bit of time to understand Facebook ads can save you a lot of commission fees. Here are a few steps to launch your Facebook/Instagram campaign.
Pre-Requisites: I have assumed that you already have a Facebook page and Instagram account.
1. Go to your page settings
2. Open Meta Business Suite.
3. Click the option create ads.
4. Select an audience type or add keywords related to your audience
5. Select your budget according to the campaign goal
6. Select the platform- Instagram or Facebook
7. Click the promote button and there you go…
Video Ads or Story Ads? Which One Is Better?
Video Ads: Video ads have a higher engagement rate and in a salon/spa business it would work wonders if you promote your video of serving your clients. You can choose a format whether in a story format or in a regular post format.
Graphic Post Ads: Post display ads also work fine but I would recommend going for a video ad if you want the best results to acquire new customers at your salon.
1.b. Google Pay-Per-Click ads:
You can increase your online visibility by opting for google pay-per-click ads. There are multiple types of google ads formats to choose from like Facebook ads.
You can have banner ads, video ads, google maps ads, top search results ads etc.
You can pay google to appear at the top for a particular keyword.
For example, You wanted to promote a keratin treatment offered at your salon in Bengaluru, so you will have to bid for the keyword keratin service in Bengaluru. If someone searches this keyword then your page will appear as the first result. Google is smart enough to place your ads at the place where your desired audience hangs out.
Google have multiple paying options, but the pay-per-click is the most effective and cheapest.
In this payment option, you will have to pay for every unique click at your store.
Steps To Launch Your Google Campaign:
1. Make an Adwords account at google.
2. Choose the type of campaign. For example Leads Generation
3. Research the volume of keywords and shortlist them.
4. Follow the criteria required for a particular ad format.
5. Decide the budget and you will get an estimated audience size for your business.
6. Launch the campaign and you’re ready to go.
1.c. Get Listed Where Customers Can Find You:
Imagine you’ve just moved to a new city.
And you realize you just need to get a keratin treatment. Now.
What do you do?
If you’re like most other people, you’d pull up your phone and look for salons in your nearby area.
In most cases, this search would be done using Google. But you can also use salon appointment booking software like Zylu to get listed and can acquire new clients at your salon. Zylu also optimises your salon menu so that it appears when anyone searches your salon.
2. Digital Appointments
Salons have been using conventional methods like notebooks, calls and excel to register appointments. Which is an outright mess and can be easily tempered or destroyed. Eventually, the salon ends up losing customers and the opportunity to acquire new ones.
Salon appointment booking apps help customers to find your salon and book appointments from anywhere. They help you to get discovered in your nearby areas and can bring you a ton of customers. By leveraging the software, your customers can directly schedule an appointment and you get notified.
Therefore, your appointments are being taken passively. Hence, you can focus more on your clients and their satisfaction.
You can showcase your menu and can manage your salon entirely through the mobile app.
It can be a great growth lever for you to acquire new customers.
3. Get Reviews and Feedback
Your customers can typically post feedback on google my business, Facebook page, your website or appointment booking apps.
There are of course many other places but these are the most common ones. These are critical parameters for measuring your salon’s quality.
If you have bad ratings, it will typically mean that your services ain’t worth it and you will lose a lot of customers.
If you have a good rating, your salon would be shown at the top of someone’s search for salons in your nearby area.
The best way to get ratings is to simply ask your customers. You can also automate the rating process with good salon software.
Whenever someone will take a service, it will automatically ask them to review your services. This way you can get hundreds of reviews at your salon.
You can read my review of the top 5 salon software in case you get to have the right one for your salon.
4. Incentivise Referrals
A loyal client is the best promotor of your salon and you know this already.
It’s the most strongest and organic way to get customers at your salon. Many salons do not even need any kind of marketing strategies because they have loyal customers that spread the word for them.
Imagine if you can control this and can trigger your customers to spread the word for you. There are a few ways you can do this.
1. Ask your customers to leave reviews so that they can help others to decide.
2. Reward clients who bring in new customers to your salon.
How to set up a client referrals program:
A client referral program is a way to incentivize your salon clients to get new clients for you. You must be already getting new salon clients through the door based on referrals today but placing an incentive to this can make a big difference.
Clients that come from referrals are more likely to become loyal customers. So there is no reason to not invest in it.
You need to make a good discounting strategy. Do not give direct discounts, it just strains your profits. Instead, you can give them value-added services. Try to make it something where they feel it’s really worth the effort.
Keep the value of the offer the same for both the referrer and the referral receiver.
For example, You want to promote a manicure service. So instead of providing discounts, you can offer them free nail art for both referrer and receiver if the referrer brings you a new customer.
If your client is able to give some specific value to the person they are referring to, the likely hood that they will refer goes up even further.
5. Coupons Or Cross Promotions
The thing you need to do is to market your salon locally because that is where most of your customers hang out. But before you go after more customers, you must make sure your current customers come back.
You can distribute discount coupons and offer them a discount on the next service for walk-in customers.
This can be a part of your retargeting strategy. You can even partner with your nearby businesses to share your coupon and in return, you will share theirs. Let’s say there is a restaurant nearby your salon that has the same type of audience as yours. You can partner with them and can ask them to cross-promoting each other.
You can share exclusive coupons with them to share with their customers at the time of billing and in return, you will do the same. This way you can get access to their customers.
6. Trackable Coupons and pamphlets
You might have already distributed coupons and pamphlets nearby your salon. But usually, you don’t know where it goes.
You can use trackable coupons to track how many scans you get to your coupons or pamphlet. This way you can manage your coupon distribution and can make it more effective.
Conclusion
New salon clients are the soul of the business.
The strategies I’ve listed in this article are, to my knowledge, the most effective ways of getting new salon clients.
It’s a process that you need to learn with time. But it’s worth investing some time to grow your salon.