How to Get Salon Referrals That Actually Work

Go on, admit it. Your referral cards are sitting in a little plastic holder on reception, gathering dust, aren't they? Well, today I'm going to show you the referral system that actually brings clients in, and it's got nothing to do with cards. Hello, hello, hello, my salon friends. Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons, coming all over the airwaves with another dose of my Wise Owl wisdom. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope, as we steam into July. My goodness, where's the year going? How did you cope with that hot weather? We're in a little bit of a cooler spell here in the UK, and I have to say, we can't cope with the heat, can we? How was business for you, though? Did you manage? Did you cope? Perhaps we ought to do an episode on coping with the hot weather, but lots of my salons moving appointments around, opening really early in the morning. Look at what people do in hot countries. They don't work through the hottest bit of the day, and I think it might be a really useful template. You can set your summer hours. It doesn't have to be chiseled in stone, but mostly I've found that salons have coped pretty well, even though the people to install air conditioning are booked up for months and months and months now, I expect. Anyway, what are we talking about today, my darlings? Well, we're having an honest chat about your salon referral program, because I'm going to predict that it's probably a bit of a waste of time, isn't it? I reckon you've got some fancy cards printed just to watch them gather dust, and you've told your team to ask every single client, but they forget, or it feels a bit awkward and a bit pushy. You're putting in the effort and not getting anything back, and it doesn't have to be that way. And the reason I want to go back to this topic, and we have talked about referrals on the Build Your Salon podcast before, is because so many times I go into salons, and I ask, where do you get new clients? And so many times they say, word of mouth. And if word of mouth is the most important marketing pillar in your salon, don't you think we should be doing something to try and capitalize on that, to make the most of it, something to build strength around that marketing pillar, rather than just waiting for Doris, who's been coming in for the last 15 years, to happen to mention it to her neighbor. And I had this problem in my own salon for years, but I changed a couple of simple things, and recommend a friend or referrals went from an afterthought to something that I could switch on whenever I wanted a boost in the salon.

And I'm going to break down the things that I changed so that you can do the same thing too. You don't have a referral problem, because we know that you're getting recommendations. I know you are, otherwise your business wouldn't be surviving. Our business is built on recommendations, but you do have a distribution problem. You've probably got something in place, you might even have a recommend a friend offer set up, but it's not reaching enough of the right people at the times you need, and that's key, to make any difference. So what we're going to sort out today, with the help of your old Uncle Phil, is your salon referral scheme. So why do most of those schemes fail? Well, it's not going to be a surprise, but here's what normally happens. You get a few hundred beautiful, expensive cards printed, and they look fantastic. And then you buy a little acrylic stand, and you pop them on reception. And for the first few days, everyone's terribly excited, and you tell the team, right, I want you to push these referral cards. I want you to ask every single client. And for a couple of days, they do. And then they start to get busy, and someone forgets, or someone feels a bit awkward, because the client didn't look terribly happy with her hair, and the energy starts to fizzle out a little bit. And then over time, those cards gather dust, and then you move them from reception onto the product stand, and then they end up on the windowsill, and then back again. And something that's supposed to be a growth engine in your salon becomes a bit of clutter, and something that's kind of forgotten about. And the flaw in the whole model is that you're relying on a team member happening to remember to mention it to your client. Or it relies on a client noticing the card, and your team having the answer to their questions when they're busy at checkout. But we don't build systems on hope here on the Build Your Salon podcast, do we, darlings? We build them on strategy. If you leave it up to your team, I promise it's not going to happen, at least not consistently. They're only going to talk to their favorite clients about it, and that's not good enough. The second problem that I see is the offer that people put together. They say something like, refer a friend, you get 10% off. Let's be honest with you, darling.

10% is not going to persuade me to change my underwear, let alone change my salon. You're asking your client's friend to break a current pattern of spend, to leave their current beauty therapist or their esthetician or their stylist to go somewhere new, to trust a stranger with their skin or their face or their hair. That's a big ask. And 10% doesn't feel like a very fair trade for me. It feels cheap. And honey, trust me, there are times and places to feel cheap. This is not one of them. Save that for your Saturday nights, not for your salon. It's no wonder you've got Apache promotion and a reward that nobody cares about and you're getting disappointing results. So here's what we're going to do. Two dead simple changes. Firstly, we're going to get rid of the physical cards completely. They don't work. They just gather dust. They get faded by the sunshine, start to look cheaper, nastier. Instead, what I'm going to ask you to do is to put your referral offer out by email to every single client on your database, not just the ones that your team happens to remember, not just the ones that are their favorites that they don't mind talking to about these things, to every single person who we think might be a good fit for a referral. Fix number two is we stop running this promotion all year round. Things that run all year round fade into the background. We can't stay excited about something 12 months of the year. So what we're going to do instead is to turn it into a short time bound campaign with a very clear deadline. The other advantage, apart from managing to maintain your interest, is that we can target when that promotion lands. So the reason I'm talking about this now is we used to do this promotion every single August because August was a quiet month for us. As soon as the kids break up, we struggle to get mums through the door. So we had space for referrals. We don't want a load of referrals coming in with a discount a few days before Christmas when you're rushed off your feet anyway. Those two changes are going to start to do some of the heavy lifting. In one year, in a short period of time, in three or four weeks over August, we managed to get over 50 new clients with one client referring 13 customers. Amazing results. And the reason it works is because it's become a system. It's become predictable. And we managed to switch that on every August year after year and get consistently good results.

So rather than hoping that people are going to say nice things about my salon, I've systemized it. I've rewarded it properly. And I've made it much, much easier for all of my customers to hear about it too. Emailing the offer means that everyone hears about it. We're not relying on the team and those awkward conversations anymore. Honestly, your team is grateful. They don't want to have that chat. They've got plenty to remember already. Now, the other thing that we did, and in fact, I said it was going to be two fixes. Here's fix number three. We beefed up the offer. We made it much more generous. 10% is rubbish. We don't want to be cheap. We want to offer something that makes your client look like a hero to their friend and that makes that new person feel like they're getting something really very special. So we used to offer, bear in mind, this is where we're a hair salon. So you've got to translate this, but I know your beauty people are very clever. So we used to offer a haircut for £10 and that's a discount of about £70. So a huge discount and that recognises the risk that that new client is taking. Then the client who does the referring, well, sometimes they don't need anything at all apart from being asked. But what we used to do is give them £10 as a credit. So it was a fully liquidating offer and they could have that as a service credit or a retail credit. Sometimes I prefer a retail credit because we have a lot of white label products and the profit margin is very good. And if you want to, you can allow the rewards to stack up. And that's what worked for us. Because what we found was that not many people will refer, but those few customers that refer will refer lots of people. They'll refer more than one person. So we allow them to stack. We want them to send as many people as they want to. So 13 new customers, my God, that's got some value for me as a business owner. So what we're going to do is get it live in your salon as soon as possible. Get it set up for the summer. Choose your generous two-sided offer. Get your emails together. Figure out a way for it to track. Honestly, don't overthink it. Keep it really, really simple. All you've got to do is get people to show the email that they've been sent. And let's make it happen. Don't worry about discount codes and offer codes and all the rest of it. You're overcomplicating it. And then the tech is going to get in the way. Talk to your team so they know what's going on. Watch the relief in their face when they realize they don't have to have the referral conversations with their customers. And let me know, what do you think? What have I missed?

Reach out and let me know. What are you going to do to make sure you're getting referrals in your salon business? I'd love to hear from you. My email address, scrolling at the bottom of the screen right now, phil at buildyoursalon.com. You know I love hearing from my salon owner friends. Just a few short days until I'm coming all over the internet again with another dose of my wise hour wisdom. And until then, take care.