Income stability is essential for any industry, but it’s even more vital with salons in the wake of past shutdowns and work restrictions. To be sure that your salon’s income offers some sense of financial security in 2023, look to these measures to help improve your bottom line.
In addition to ensuring a steady stream of new clients using lead generation and other tactics, prioritize your salon’s client retention and work to improve your income by boosting client frequency and increasing add-ons.
Establish Benchmarks & Make a Plan
Run Your Numbers
Before diving into how to execute income-driving tactics, set some benchmarks for where you are currently by looking at your data. The best way to examine this information is by using the reporting options within your salon software.
A client analysis report is one way to examine how your customers are interacting with your business, while a client retention performance report will tell you how well your employees are retaining their clients. These reports are a good overview of client spending and retention.
Run a sales report for a given date range, sort by client name, and look for totals of all sales. Dive deeper to find the number of times clients have visited your business and the number of days between those visits within your chosen date range. This is your benchmark for client frequency.
Generate an appointments report to find the number of appointments booked during a date range, a pre-booked report to show the number of times a client pre-booked an appointment at your business, and a rebook report to show during a date range if they scheduled a future appointment. Now filter by service provider to see which clients booked for themselves versus the salon booking for them. These data sets offer a benchmark and will help you identify the success of online and appointment pre-booking.
Analyze Away
Review your data, look for patterns and opportunities, figure out averages for the number and frequency of client visits, then set some goals and make a plan to reach them. The goal is to up the frequency of salon visits for each client, plus each ticket total with add-ons whenever possible. A good starting point is to add 1-2 extra appointments for the year for every client and to increase their ticket totals by at least 10%.
Implement Your Plan
Boost Retention
To keep your current clients happy, consider offering a rewards program in your salon and promoting incentives to drive more sales. Your clients will love accumulating points for regular purchases that they can cash in later for products or services.
A good rewards program can encourage more spending but can also help shift other client behaviors. Just decide what actions you want them to take and reward them accordingly. For example, if you want to increase online bookings, add reward points for each appointment clients book using online scheduling. When they see the reward points accumulating, they’ll want more, bringing them a step closer to making the behavior a habit.
70% of consumers would be more likely to recommend a brand with a good loyalty program. (Source: Hubspot)
You can also use auto emails and auto texts to remind people that they need to make their next appointments should they not have anything on the books.
Up Frequency
One way to increase how often clients come into the salon is by using Online Client Scheduling (OCS). In addition to the 24/7 convenience of scheduling whenever they remember to do so, OCS also comes with some unexpected perks. It’s not just lessening the burden on your reception team but also encouraging more visits. Here’s how that works:
The average amount of time between client visits changes based on how the appointments are booked. If clients call to make appointments or pre-book in person during a salon visit, the time between appointments averages five weeks and six days. However, when booked online, that time between appointments drops to four weeks and five days. If you do the math, you’ll find two additional appointments per year for each client that books online.
So, to save time, help fill every open slot, and increase the frequency of client visits, offer Online Client Scheduling. Here’s why:
- 32% of salons and spas say that online booking is the most important feature of a salon’s website.
- 70% of salon and spa appointments are booked from mobile devices.
- 28% of bookings happen in the evening after salons close.
- 18% of bookings happen during the early mornings before salons open.
- 54% of bookings that happen during working hours are made on the go.
(Source: WebinarCare.com)
Encourage Add-Ons
For every client who comes through the door, make it a part of the conversation to offer other services to increase the ticket total of each visit.
Here are a few easy add-on services:
- Deep treatments
- Glossing treatments
- Pre- or post-color deep conditioning treatments
- Pulling color through the ends for regrowth clients
- A lip, chin, or full-face wax
- Brow services: tweezing, waxing, color
- In-chair massage options
Take it a step further to add on services when there’s a cancellation, an adjacent open spot with another service provider, or for the client’s next appointment:
- Hair extension services
- Texture services
- Smoothing services
- Waxing services
- Massage services
- Facial services
- Brow services
- Lash services
- Makeup services
- Nail services
You can also count retail as an add-on, especially if the client is not purchasing their products with you:
- Make recommendations for products and styling tools based on your expertise and knowledge of their hair.
- Take advantage of suggestive selling features within your software to help recommend products at checkout.
- Make product recommendations while your client is in your chair, at checkout, or even send a recommendation after the service so they can shop online with you.
- For clients who buy home care from you, suggest other products like skin and body care or bath products that you carry in your salon or online store.
You might also like: Simple Ways to Upsell & Cross-Sell in Your Salon
Monitor Your Success
Now that you have some ideas to help increase client retention, improve the frequency of visits and upsell to add on – have at it. Just be sure to track your success and adjust your tactics and offerings as you go along.
Leave a Reply