24. How to get referrals to WORK in your salon

Hi everyone, this is the weekly Build Your Salon podcast with me, Phil Jackson. I'm here with the tools you need to generate the profits you deserve so that you can lead a fuller life. Welcome, and today we're talking about recommend a friend and referral schemes. I see lots and lots of salon owners through my networking. I'm also a coach and a mentor, and I'm also a really nosy person, so I look through lots and lots of salon windows. We all know that recommend a friend schemes and referral schemes make excellent business sense, because if you've got a loyal, dedicated customer who keeps coming to the salon and spending good money with you, chances are she knows some people who would enjoy your salon experience as well in the local area. So it makes sense to reach out to her and reward her for sending some of her friends to you. So where is it that we go so wrong? Why do I see so many unimpressive recommend a friend schemes? And why do I hear from so many salon owners that they're not getting excellent results? Well, I think I've identified three ways, three fundamental flaws in most people's recommend a friend schemes, which I'd like to share with you today in the hope that you can do a slightly better job. The first is that they don't maintain customer interest. They don't grab customer interest. And I see two things going wrong here. The first is I don't think very many of your recommend a friend schemes are generous enough. If you don't know the lifetime value of your average customer, go back to episode 16, go through the calculations again, because I think you're going to find that you could be a lot more generous with your recommend a friend scheme. You could be rewarding your customers with a lot more, but also you could be coaxing people into the salon with a much more generous initial offer. The other thing I think people do wrong and very bizarrely, I've seen people rewarding their customers with something that just doesn't interest them. I've seen some very strange incentives being handed out to customers in exchange for recommendations. I think a recommend a friend scheme should be all embracing and try to appeal to as many of your customers as is absolutely possible. And when you think about it, the one thing every customer for your salon has in common is the fact that they are a customer. So it makes sense to reward them with something that they're going to enjoy. So I would reward them either with a service that they will be booking anyway, or a product they will be buying anyway, or make it simple, reward them with a gift card. The second way I see schemes going horribly wrong is they fail to maintain the team's interest.

If you look back at the number of promotions that you've run in the salon that have gone really, really well. And I'm talking about those that really get some traction behind them. I bet there's not too many, but I bet that also the promotions that you're running where everybody in the salon got behind the promotion. And that's really hard with recommend a friend because there will be some people that need recommend a friend. There will be some people that need to build their column and get more people through the door all day, every day. There will be other stylists or technicians or therapists that actually don't need recommend a friend because they're pretty much fully booked all the time. And there will be other people working in the salon who it doesn't really interest. So it's very hard to get traction with your recommend a friend scheme. Also, if you think about it, we're already asking our team members to get our customers to rebook, which they hate doing. Secondly, we're asking them to recommend products to our customers, which they also hate doing. And now we're going to ask them to do recommend a friend as well for those customers. They're just not going to buy into it in the way that you want to. You could run the best staff meeting that you've ever run. And I guarantee your recommend a friend scheme will start to lose steam really quite quickly. So you either need to do that fantastic meeting and run your scheme in a really, really vibrant way that gets everybody bought in and reward those people that don't need to run recommend a friends anyway. Or, controversially, try and find a scheme that doesn't rely on the cooperation of your team. That you could take the team out of the equation with recommend a friend. And that's what I do in my salon. Finally, I think the third floor is that we get time scales wrong. When you think about it, the attention span of a customer is actually quite small. If she's in the salon for an hour, chances are you've got her attention for that hour. If you hand over a recommend a friend card, I can pretty much guarantee she's not going to think about it again until she's lost her keys one night and she's rummaging around in the bottom of the handbag and the card comes out by accident. At that point, she will either act on it or throw it away. Unless you've got a recommend a friend scheme that can reach out to people when they've left the salon, I don't think you're going to get the kind of impressive results that you truly deserve. Also, in the salon, I think that the attention span of our teams is quite short.

So if you run a really good team meeting, launch your recommend a friend scheme to your entire team. I think they'll be excited about it for two or three days. I think they'll remember it probably for about a week more. After about two weeks, it's probably run out of steam. The problem with that is if your average visit period is anything like my salon where you're not seeing all your clients in a two week period, you're seeing them over four to six to eight week period. You're only offering that recommend a friend scheme to a really thin sliver of your clientele. So I think you should be taking your recommend a friend scheme out of the salon. You need to be reaching people at home. How you do that is up to you. I think you should be either writing to them or emailing them. I hope that's been useful to you. Have a look at your recommend a friend scheme to see if you can identify in those three categories where you've been going wrong. If you need more help with your recommend a friend scheme, I have put together a paid for training package, which is available at buildyoursalon.com slash referrals. Have a little look at that. I expect there's a cheeky discount over there for you as well. But where I run my recommend a friend schemes, I don't have any involvement with my team at all. It's entirely run from my office or from my laptop at home. And also I'm reaching out to people through emails. And in that training scheme, all of the emails and the sending schedule is done for you. So take a look at that. Otherwise, I hope you've already subscribed to this channel. If not, click subscribe now. I would hate you to miss out on the content I'm putting out every week. And I will see you again next Monday. Take care. Hey everyone, it's Phil again. I hope you enjoyed the episode. If you did, please subscribe and be sure to tell your friends. For more help and information on running your salon and your life, head over to buildyoursalon.com. I'll see you there.