May 15, 2015 — Jorrit Last modified on November 08, 2019
It is great to see that increasingly more salons are using email marketing. They usually do this by sending newsletters to their client base. The effect is that the recipients are more likely to book a new appointment because the email came with a great offer. But even if the client does not use that offer, he or she will have been reminded of your salon and your offerings.
And yet, most salons don’t use email marketing the right way. They use so-called spray and pray tactics, which means that you send the same email to all your clients while they have different interests. I recently received an email in my mailbox with the subject line “Brazilian wax” and inside was a discount. A great offer for the ladies, but it’s not meant for me. I’m a thirty-something year-old with a beard ;-)
“A consumer receives 88 emails per day on average” source
This is a real shame because it won’t compel me to open the email, and about 70% of the email receivers won’t do it either. What could happen as well is that a few subscribers will unsubscribe from your mailing list, and then you can never contact them again. Eventually, you will miss out on a chunk of sales, which is why I will tell you about the importance of segmentation in this article.
Firstly, make sure you have a great mailing program with which you send out your newsletters. Mailchimp is one of the best. It is completely free when you have less than 2000 subscribers and send out less than 12000 emails per month. It is also very user friendly and is easy to familiarize yourself with. Recommended!
Once you’ve set up a mailing program, it is important that you segment your client list. Salonized has a special link with which you can filter your clients based on various categories.
Take for example the “Bikini wax” email, and filter your clients on this treatment. You will maybe get 94 clients who once had a bikini wax at your salon. Select this group and send them a newsletter with this specific subject in the email subject line. You will see that the open rate of the emails will increase dramatically. Other examples of good segmentation you can see in the graph below.
Another example is to filter out all the clients that haven’t booked an appointment in the last 6 months. Send them an email with a special “we miss seeing you” discount, or something similar. You can even apply several filters to your client base so that you’ll reach out to that specific target group. Not too long ago I talked to the owner of a hair salon who filtered her list like this:
In this case, all the clients who once bought product X in her salon, and hadn’t booked an appointment in the last 40 days, received a discount on the product at the exact moment that product X was very popular.
By sending the right emails to the right clients and the right time you will increase your interaction with that client. This will benefit your sales and your clients will definitely appreciate this new form of marketing!
I’m gonna go book a bikini wax ;-)
Need help segmenting your client base? Feel free to contact me.
Jorrit is one of the founders of Salonized. He likes a joke, a beer and PSV. He also knows everything there is to know about online marketing and is happy to share this knowledge with you.
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