This is such a grey area now and so many people get it wrong and it ends up backfiring on them. You really can promote yourself and your business without slashing prices. Yes, you can do it for FREE!
A common mistake is to run a promotion on a quiet treatment thinking it will draw people in, but a far better idea is to run a promotion on a busier treatment linking it to your quiet treatment. Doing this will give your existing clients a chance to take advantage of a new treatment AND it will also generate new business to a well established treatment….double whammy!
I always think it’s a bad idea to reduce prices. Once you do this you are really telling your clients that you can afford to do the treatment for less, or else how could you be doing it? I see treatment offers slashing up to 50% off a price. That treatment will never have the same worth to a client at full price ever again, and more often than not it kills sales of that treatment.
A far better idea is to do add on’s. This can be a free addition or upgrade to that treatment or a free gift, hopefully supplied free to you by your supplier. Always check what freebie gifts are available. You will be surprised what suppliers can give to you.
There is no point in having a great offer if no one knows about it, so you need to tell every client who comes into your salon. To successfully promote yourself and your business, your mindset should be that if you miss one person out you could really offend and upset that client. Don’t think of it as a sales pitch.
Another great idea is to email your client list with a call to action to get the phones ringing i.e. ‘only available to the first 20 clients who book so ring now to confirm your place’.
Direct contact will always get a far better response than standard advertising methods, and there are now so many ways to promote for free – including popular media such as Facebook and other social media sites.
The deal sites like Groupon are a popular offer route too but please, please be extremely careful! Once again, I have seen businesses really suffer and some go out of business at the lure of all these new clients. A lot of these clients could simply be Groupon Groupies who just chase the latest offer.
Often your own clientele suffers greatly because of the change in how the business has to run to cope with the extra demand. I have seen lovely salons literally turned into conveyor belts for little or no gain.
There are marketing specialists such as Catherine Trebble from Full Appointment Book Systems who have spent hours and hours on mastering the best way to make profit and maximum benefit from these deal sites, and I would highly recommend learning from an expert before jumping head-first in to offering a deal site deal.
