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? Today I'm gonna show you the referral system that actually brings clients in and it's got nothing to do with cards. All on Build your salon. 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? Is it just a feature of getting old that the weeks and the months and the quarters seem to fly by? I can't believe we're in July and I've got a whole bunch of New Year's resolutions I haven't even started yet today. My darlings, we are having an honest chat around your salon's referral program because I'm gonna predict that it's probably a bit of a waste of time, isn't it? I reckon you've had some fancy cards printed only to watch them gather dust. You told your team to ask every single client, but they forget or it feels a bit awkward and a bit pushy. You are putting in the effort and not getting anything back and it doesn't have to be that way. 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 say, where do you get your new clients from? And they say word of mouth. 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 capitalise on that? 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 a neighbour. I had this problem in my own salon for years, but I changed a couple of simple things and recommend a friend. Referrals went from an afterthought to something that I could switch on when I definitely wanted a boost in the salon. I'm gonna break down both things that I changed so that you can do the same thing. You don't have a referral problem because you're getting recommendations. I know you are. Otherwise your business would not be surviving. Our industry is built on recommendations, but you do have a distribution problem. You've probably got something in place, you may even have a 'recommend a friend' offer, but it is not reaching enough of the right people at the times that you need to make any difference. So that's what we're gonna sort out today with the help of your old Uncle Phil. Why do most salon referral schemes fail? It's not gonna be a surprise, but here's what normally happens. You get a few hundred beautiful expensive cards printed and they look fantastic and you put them in a little acrylic stand on reception, perhaps you've got to buy yourself a stand for them too. For the first few days everyone's terribly excited and you tell the team, 'Right, I want you to push these. I want you to ask every client.' For a few days they do, and then they get busy and the phone's going and someone forgets and then someone feels a bit awkward because the client didn't look terribly happy with her hair and the energy starts to fizzle out. Then those cards gather dust and they make it from reception onto the window sill, onto the product stand and back again. The thing that was supposed to be a growth engine in your salon becomes something kind of forgotten and a bit of clutter. The flaw in the whole model is that you are relying on chance, you're relying on your team member happening to remember to mention it to your client or it relies on a client noticing the card and your team happening to have the answers to the questions when they're busy at the checkout. We don't build systems on hope darlings, we build them on strategy. Leave it up to your team and I promise you it's not gonna happen. If they remember at all, they're only gonna talk to their favourite clients about it and that's not good enough. The second flaw is the offer that you put together. 'Refer a friend, get 10% off.' Let's be honest with you darling. 10% is not gonna raise a smile in your old Uncle Phil, let alone enough passion for me to go out there and start talking about your business. It's not gonna get anyone to change their socks, let alone their underwear and certainly not their salon. You are asking your client's friend to break a current pattern of spend, leave their current beauty therapist or their current stylist or their current aesthetician to go somewhere new, to trust a stranger with their skin or their hair, their face. That's a big ask. 10% does not feel like a fair trade for it. It feels cheap. Honey, there are times and places to be cheap. Save that for your Saturday nights, not for your salon. It's no wonder you've got a patchy promotion and a reward that no one cares about. You're getting disappointing results. Here's what we do. Two dead simple changes. Firstly, we get rid of the physical cards completely. It doesn't work. They just gather dust, they get faded by the sunshine and start looking a little bit cheaper, nasty. Instead, we're gonna put the referral offer out by email to every single client on your database, not just the ones that your team happened to be desperately in love with, to every single person who we think might be a good fit for referral. Fix number two is we stop running this promotion all year round and always on a scheme, fade into the background. You can't stay excited about something 12 months of the year. What we're gonna do instead is turn it into a short, time-bound campaign with a very clear deadline. The other advantages, apart from managing to maintain your interest over a shorter period of time, the other advantage you've got is you get to target when that promotion lands. We used to do it every August, which is why I'm talking about it now because August was a quiet month. We had space for referrals. What you don't want is a load of referrals coming in with a discount a few days before Christmas when you rushed off your feet anywhere. Those two changes are gonna start to do the heavy lifting. In one year, we managed in a short period of time, in a three to four week period over August, we managed to get over 50 new clients in one client referring 13 customers. Absolutely amazing results. The reason it worked though is because it became a system, it became predictable and we managed to switch that on every August for year after year after year and get consistently good results. Rather than hoping that people are gonna say nice things about my salon, I've systemised 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. The other thing we did was beef up the offer and made it much more generous. 10% is rubbish. We don't wanna be cheap. We want to offer something that makes your client look like a hero to their friend that makes the new person feel like they're really getting something very special. We used to offer a haircut. Bear in mind we're a hair salon, you have to translate this, but I know you beauty people are super clever. We used to offer a haircut for 10 pounds, as a discount of about 70 pounds. A huge discount. And that actually recognises the risk that your new client is taking. Then the client who does the referring, sometimes they don't need anything at all. But what we used to do is give them the 10 pounds as a credit. A service credit that they could use or even a retail product credit, which I preferred because we're white label products. So the profit margin's very good. If you want to, you can let them stack the rewards and that's what worked for us. We found a few customers would refer lots of people. Actually what I thought was gonna happen was lots of people would refer one or two people. It doesn't. We want something where we're going to allow people to refer as many people as they want to. 13 new customers, my god, that has some value for me. What we're gonna do is to get it live 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, if all you've gotta do is get people to show you the email they've been sent, then let's do that. We don't need to worry about discount codes and offer codes and all the rest of it. You're overcomplicating it and the tech is gonna get in the way. Talk to your team about it so they know what's going on. My God, watch the relief on their face when they realise they don't have to have those conversations with their customers. What do you think? What have I missed? What are you doing to make sure you're getting referrals in your salon business? I would love to hear from you. My email address, scrolling at the bottom of the screen right now, phil@buildyoursalon.com. I love hearing from my salon owner friends. Anyway, just a few short days until I'm coming all over the internet again with another dose of my Wise Owl wisdom. Until then, take care.