E-Marketing Professionals

Creatively Finding Solutions to Salon Marketing Problems

A couple of weeks back I was working with a lovely lady called Adele on how to run her first email newsletter to her clients. Adele is a great therapist, she has no staff and she looks after everything herself. Adele LOVES to give her clients her full attention when they are receiving a treatment from her. We were trying to figure out how to handle the probable surge of appointments that would come from the enewsletter. Specifically Adele needed to work out how to handle personal callers who call to the door when she is already busy with a client. These people would not have an appointment to see Adele. As I pointed out to Adele, this was a much better problem to have than her current problem of not having enough clients in the first place! This IS an interesting situation though, because obviously as a one-person operation, it’s not appropriate to have a receptionist—way too costly. We discussed the possibility of putting a sign on the desk inviting people to leave a message when the desk was unmanned, as the salon was busy. I had my reservations about that, as I feel it was conveying the message that the person was unwelcome. A more disturbing reservation I had was the whole question of security—an open door and an unattended desk… We decided to treat this problem to some creative thinking. Adele decided to put a plaque on the wall outside of the salon with the name of the salon and “By Appointment Only” on it. In the enewsletter Adele was going to play this up further by inserting in the following paragraph in the middle of her offer: “As you know, The XXXX Beauty Salon here in (name of street) is a ‘by appointment only’ salon. There is just me, dedicated to giving 100% of my attention to 1 person at a time in an unrushed, relaxed atmosphere”. This let the clients know Adele’s high standards of care, and it also explained that this was best possible reason why she couldn’t cater for walk-ins. Adele ended up with a whopping 15% of her list purchasing her offer from her e-newsletter. This gave Adele the incentive and motivation to continue with her newsletter, as this was her first attempt at this sort of on-line marketing. So you see how you CAN turn around a potential problem if you apply a little creative thinking to the problem!