The Art of Email Marketing: Maximizing Salon Sales and Strengthening Customer Relationships

Sit down and see what's going on with the Queen of Salons. Hair, beauty, and more successful tips for business owners. All on Build Your Salon. Hello, hello, hello, my salon lovelies. Phil Jackson here, your Queen of Salons, here with more nonsense for another week. And here we are marching towards the middle of May. My goodness, 16th of May this episode is going to be broadcast. And God, we'll be talking about bloody Christmas before you know it. I am hot off the back of my salon owners retreat in Lanzarote. My goodness, what a joy that was. Can't wait for the next one. And if you've already joined the waiting list for the salon owners retreat, I'm going to be in touch very soon with details. I've literally just launched to the people that came to the spring retreat. And what I've really enjoyed was the balance that we managed to strike between getting lots of business done. And we did focus and get some really good breakthroughs as far as people's businesses were concerned. And not only the one-to-one coaching, but the mastermind sessions are my favorite. And that collaboration between business owners is an absolute joy for me. But we had some really good breakthroughs on personal levels too. And just having that bit of space, that bit of time to reflect on how your business is serving you. It always begs those bigger questions about actually what kind of life it is that you're building. And I love those personal breakthroughs too. So I would quite happily do one of those every week. I think I'm just going to move somewhere wonderful, buy myself a massive 15-bed villa, and then we can just have retreats every week. It would be a glorious way of running a business, I think. Anyway, that's not what we're here to talk about today. And what we're here to talk about today is not a very sexy topic, I'm afraid. We're going to talk about email. I really want to reinforce the importance of email because there were one or two people on my business retreat who weren't using email marketing. Or they certainly weren't using it to its full potential. And I'm not going to take you on a step-by-step of email marketing and how we go about it. But I am going to try and convince you that email marketing should be a really important pillar for you. The one thing I will say, actually, is it does depend on who your customer is.

Because some customers just don't check email very much. And that means that the effectiveness of your email marketing is going to be hugely reduced. But for most markets, there will be people who will tap into email and get some really good success. I think it's an essential tool, actually, in most hair salons, beauty businesses, aesthetics businesses. Because I think it's a really powerful tool. I think it's a powerful tool for getting your message out there. But it's a powerful tool for building customer loyalty. And the way I like to think about email marketing is it's a bit like it shows my age now, darlings. It's about a bit like heading down the disco, isn't it? And social media for me is like that discotheque. It's that very crowded, very noisy space where we're just trying to catch someone's eye. But catching someone's eye is only going to get you so far into any kind of relationship. So if we want to communicate more with your chosen victim, if you want to communicate more with your customers, and want to build those relationships, we need a quieter space. And keeping them engaged, we certainly need that quieter space. And I think that's where email marketing comes in. So use social media to catch his eye, darling. But to hook him in and pull him into a relationship, we need to use email marketing. So I think it's a really powerful tool for building that customer loyalty, deepening that relationship in that slightly quieter space. Now, what most people fall in love with with email marketing, of course, is that it's really cost effective. It's never free. Even free email marketing software is not actually free. But it's relatively inexpensive compared to lots of other ways of promoting your business. It means we can reach lots of people without spending lots of money, which is awesome. And I think we've got a much better idea on whether that message is getting through. And I think it's quite hard in social media marketing to know whether our marketing is actually getting through to the right person at all. Whereas with email marketing, there's a whole bunch of stats which will be spat out of your chosen email marketing software that will tell you exactly whether you're resonating, exactly whether we're getting the job done. Now, I say that it's not free because anything that costs you time is not free. So even if it's a bit of free software, you've had to invest time in it. So I never think that email marketing is free. But compared to, for example, paid adverts on Facebook or Instagram, it is extremely cheap. And it's also, I think, a very inexpensive way of reaching your existing customers.

Because if we put a Facebook ad together and chuck it out to a target market and we're trying to resonate with our existing customers, well, it's only going to achieve that to a certain level. It's only going to hit so many of them. Whereas if we've got a decent email marketing database, we can reach nearly all of our target customers. We can reach all of our existing customers, deepening that relationship, building the brand and investing in communication with those customers. Email marketing is very easy to target. I don't see enough people doing this in our industry. So I think that those of us who are doing email marketing, we're getting very good at kind of those broadcast emails that go out to your entire database. Please don't call them newsletters, though, darling. Nobody wants to read a newsletter. If you're getting to the stage where you're doing a monthly newsletter with two or three news items, break it up, send two or three emails instead. They'll be a lot more interesting and you're going to get a lot more bang for your buck than you will just sending out a newsletter. But to be honest with you, there are lots of people who are trying to reduce the amount that hits their inbox. And a lot of people are searching for the term newsletter and then automatically unsubscribing. So don't call it a newsletter. But there are, I mean, if that's all you can do, then do that. I'd rather you did that than nothing. But I think there's lots of us that are getting good at those kind of broadcast emails. What we're not doing is targeting specific groups based on their interests or their preference or their previous spending behavior. So, for example, I don't see many people putting together. I don't know, let's say a laser hair, laser hair removal promotion targeted to, I don't know, let's say getting set for summer. I don't see many people doing that and specifically targeting at people who have had maybe armpits or facial laser hair removal. And I think that would be a really good market to try and tap into for that particular promotion. Or, you know, people that have maybe enjoyed a particular hair service in the past but not had it for six months. Why aren't we targeting them with a particular promotion around hair extensions or a particular type of hair color? Because if they've bought that particular service in the past, they're more likely to give it a go this time around. So I don't see that kind of segmentation, that targeting specific segments of your audience happening enough. We're not personalizing the messages.

And I think that we could be sending fewer emails but actually getting greater results if we personalize and segment a little bit more. Email marketing is a great way to increase sales by sending those targeted offers and promotions. We can encourage customers to make those purchases and that generates more revenue for your business. So we've got something that's very cost effective but by using it in a very targeted way can actually increase sales in a really useful way. So it's the first place I turn to any time there's a gap. So what I'm doing when I'm doing my one-to-one coaching is identifying gaps. So essentially it's trying to get a one-to-one client to be very specific about where they want the business to be this month. And usually that's a turnover target. Then we identify how much the business is actually going to generate this month. And usually there's a difference. There's a gap. And marketing is how we fill the gap. And the first place I turn to is email marketing because it just works. It just delivers results. Even if you find that people don't buy off the back of your email, by seeing the message by email we can usually close the sale a lot more easily when they come into the salon. So increasing sales is the big tick in the box as far as email marketing is concerned. Are you ready for some predictable in your salon business? How would you feel if you knew you could look ahead and rely on a certain level of income month after month? Would that stability help you become the confident, inspirational salon owner you were always meant to be? Or maybe you're looking for a way to stand out in a crowded marketplace by offering something truly unique. Salon memberships are what I know best and what I know more about than anyone else. It's my honour and pleasure to bring you my Salon Memberships Master Plan. Step-by-step training to help you get salon memberships into your business without overwhelm, without guesswork and without any missing steps. Head over to queenofmemberships.com for all of the details and a very special deal for my podcast listeners too. You'll love the simplicity of Salon Memberships and your clients, maybe even your competitors' clients will love them too. That website again is queenofmemberships.com. I can't wait to help you on your way to salon business success. But email marketing isn't all about sales. And if you're continually sending sales messages to your customers, they're going to get tired.

They're going to start going a little bit blind to what they're reading. They're going to stop listening to the messages that you're sharing. So what do we do? What else can we do? Well, we can use email to showcase your expertise and we can use email to just share valuable information to your audience. So I call this the palette cleanser. Every now and again, stop selling. Just share some tips or some tutorials or a bit of industry news. Something that positions you as a thought leader or an expert in your field. Maybe some before and afters, some case studies. So just share some really useful information. And I do this on a cycle of three. So my emails follow a three-month cycle. One month will be heavy hitting, hard hitting promotion. So usually that's around a new service or certainly a new service to that customer. And we push really hard, usually with some kind of discount or introductory offer. The second month will be a much more gentle sales sequence. And that's designed to increase the amount that the customer is going to spend. So essentially what we're trying to do is upsell them. Get them to take an extra service or an extra product on top of what they'd already planned to spend. And then the third month will be my palette cleanser. I'm just sharing amazing information. Just useful stuff that my customers might enjoy. Maybe it's even entertaining. If you've got the ability to write entertaining emails, my dear, you are halfway there. It's hard work. But honestly, the results you're going to get will be much, much better. But it's just something that your customer is going to enjoy reading. It's a palette cleanser. We're not doing that sell, sell, sell message. We've actually got something to change it up a little bit and change the flavour of what they're receiving in their inbox. And that helps us stay top of mind. Now, those information emails aren't designed to close a sale, but you will get some sales off the back of it because we're staying front of mind. It just reminds them, oh, yes, I must get round to booking that nail appointment. So when they need a service or a product that you offer, they're much more likely to remember your business and choose you over your competitors if you've stayed in touch. Now, this is particularly important, I think, when we look at the beauty therapy and aesthetic services, because hair, we're very lucky. Generally, if a customer comes to you for regular haircuts and then they decide they're going to have a hair colour, normally they will come to the same salon and have the same stylists even carry out those services for them. That's not the case with beauty therapy.

It's not unusual for someone to choose to go to one salon for their waxing services and go to a different salon for their facial services or their nail services. And some customers have two, three, maybe even more salons that they visit on a regular basis. But if the difference between you and your competitor is that you're sending regular emails to your customers, staying front of mind and your competitor isn't, the customer is much more likely to remember your business and choose you when they're looking at booking a service. I really like email for driving traffic elsewhere. So email marketing isn't just a means to an end of itself. By including links to your website or your blog in your emails, we're encouraging customers to visit your site, learn more about your products and services. So that means your emails can be a lot shorter, a lot snappier, a lot less formal, a lot chattier, because all the product information or the service information lives somewhere else on your blog or on your website. And also, if you're struggling to get some traction around your social media marketing, we can push customers over to there as well. Or perhaps you've got maybe even you've got a podcast or maybe you want to encourage customers to download some information somewhere else. So by sharing those links and pushing traffic from one place to another, it just encourages customers to visit other spaces, but it kind of keeps them in your ecosystem a little bit. And what I really love about email marketing is that we get to track our results because we're able to get those analytics that show whether people have received your email, how many of them opened your email, how many clicked on links and of course, how many made purchases. So these are all very useful metrics for us, but it's not guesswork. It's not like just throwing a message out there on Facebook and hoping it lands and you don't really know how many people saw it and we don't really know how many people were interested in it. With email marketing, we get a lot more in the way of detailed analytics that allow us to track our results, measure our progress. So we've got some amazing business benefits for email marketing and I really do encourage you if you're not using email at the moment, it's a massive, powerful tool to grow your hair or your beauty business. And the first step has to be to choose how you're going to send your emails out there.

Now, you're going to get into trouble very quickly if you use your personal email account to send emails to lots and lots of your customers. These bits of software are so clever these days, they're going to know straight away what's going on and you do risk losing your email account altogether. And also, we don't get those detailed analytics that I was talking about just by sending through Hotmail or Gmail. So normally, you're going to want to use something maybe like MailChimp. Lots of our industry loves MailChimp, usually because they don't pay MailChimp any money. I'm not a big fan of MailChimp, but it's out there as an option. I use a piece of software called ActiveCampaign, which is paid for, but it's a lot more sophisticated. And there are lots and lots and lots in between too. So research, compare different options, ask for recommendations, find one that suits your business need. Don't worry too much about what you're spending. Most of these bits of software, if they're not free, are very low cost. Compare it to what you would need to be paying on Facebook ads to get a result, for example, and you'll find that it's a lot cheaper than that. And then if you haven't already, we need to build an email list. So encourage your customers to sign up for your emails. And now we can do that by offering them exclusive discounts or promotions. We've got to make sure that we're complying with GDPR or your local version of email marketing privacy laws, just to make sure that we're avoiding legal issues. Normally, we can encourage customers just with something as simple as getting appointment reminders. So that will encourage them to share their email address with you. So start building that database, even if it's something you're not planning on doing now. Start building your email list now so that when we do get around to finally doing some email marketing, you've got some people to send some emails to. Then it's time to design and create your emails. You can use templates. You can make them very pretty. I don't. I don't do anything around putting images in my emails. They're not formatted in any way. What I try and do with my emails, because this suits my customer avatar, is make it feel like it's an email from me to you as a friend. And if it was an email from me to you as a friend, it wouldn't be called newsletter. It wouldn't have my logo in. It wouldn't have lots and lots of images and links in there. It will be short, chatty, concise, easy to read. And I find that that keeps my subscribers engaged and interested and compelled to open my emails in future. So I can share my news, share my promotions, share my tips, but in a very chatty, lighthearted way. And that means that I don't go crazy with the designing of emails. Some people really enjoy that process and some people want it to look like something that's been, you know, designed by a professional.

I personally don't go there myself. But most importantly, make sure you're analysing your results. So after you've sent your emails, make sure you're looking at your open rate, looking at your click-through rates, measure your unsubscribes. But don't get too hung up on unsubscribes. And certainly in the early days, when you very first start emailing, you will get a bunch of unsubscribes because you're changing the way that you communicate with customers. Some of them just won't like that. But of course, most of all, let's measure the sales that we're generating from our emails. So normally that means putting a specific offer or a voucher code or a discount code in an email so that we know exactly what came from that email. And then use that data to refine and improve your email over time. I'm not going to give you any targets. I'm not going to give you any really good open rates or really good click-through rates. All we want to see is an improvement because that shows that you're getting better at sending these emails over time. I hope that's been useful to you. I hope it's motivated you to send a few more emails in your marketing in the next month. If you've got anything out of today's broadcast, please reach out. Let me know. Phil at buildyoursalon.com. It's just me sat in a room with a hot cup of coffee guessing what it is that you want to hear. So if you've got something that you would like me to cover in a future broadcast, please reach out. Let me know. I love hearing from you guys. It's just seven short days until I'm coming in your ears again. And until then, take care.