In this Strategy...

• How often should you mail or contact clients?

• Scores of salons & spas download the new Yellow Pages advertising guide

• Back Issues

Joanne Philpott of Bucks, UK: 'thanks to the Toolkit, January sales up nearly 30%...'

We Get Mail

For every salon owner who complains that 'nothing works', there are 10, 20, 30 Members who say 'phooey to that!' - like Joanne Philpot of Buckinghamshire, in the UK....

"After 20 years in the beauty trade I applied just one of the ideas in the Toolkit and have just had my best January EVER!  A slump in the economy?  PAH!  Using the Toolkit, January generated 20,000 pounds in sales which is 6,000 pounds better than we have ever done before." Joanna Philpot, Mayflower Health & Beauty Clinic, 35 Mayflower Way, Beaconsfield, Bucks, HP9 1UG

How Often Should You Contact Your Clients?

During this week's tele-seminar with salon marketing stars Tracey Orr, Anne Holleley and Rebecca Skehan, one attendee piped up with this very relevant question: can you contact clients TOO often?

I have a rather simplistic approach to this, one that sounds brutal - and frankly, most salon owners are too timid to adopt it - but one that has stood me in very good stead for years in my own businesses:

"Mail to them till they buy... or die"

But to explain: the best sales and marketing minds in the world agree that it's almost impossible to contact your clients too often. As a rule of thumb, your clients should get at least one 'touch' from you every single week of the year.

Sound impossible? Think for a minute. Fifty two touches a year doesn't mean you're pitching something to them every single week. A 'touch' can be any one of dozens of 'points of contact'.

Let's have a look at this in detail, and break it down into bite-sized chunks.

Newsletters: you should be doing no less than one a month. That's 12 touches in a year. Your newsletter is your 'Trojan Horse' - it turns you from being an 'unwelcome pest' into a 'welcome guest', because it provides a means by which you can make a 'soft sell', cloaked in useful/personal/newsy information. It's not ALL pitch.

(And for those of you who moan "I don't have the time to do a newsletter every month", I quote Tracey Orr from this week's tele-seminar: "Our newsletter without doubt makes us serious money every month." So, if you're complaining about lack of time to do a monthly newsletter, what you're actually saying is that you're too busy working on the tools to actually make any money.)

Birthday cards: once a year, obviously. But you can include a Gift Voucher.

Client Appreciation Evenings: not every client will come, of course, but you invite ALL of them by mail. Another touch, say four times a year.

Monthly specials: clients want to be alerted to special offers. Another 12 touches.

Email newsletter: again, once a month - or even once a week - and most of the content is taken from your hard copy newsletter, but this one goes to more people. Another 12 touches, minimum.

Special 'Event' Driven promotions: You can count more than a dozen of them without trying, eg Mothers Day, Easter, Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc etc... plus any number of others you can simply invent, eg National Bad Hair Day. Another dozen 'touches', or more.

They add up, folks. I haven't done the sums, but just in the points above, there are probably 40 or 50 'touches'.

Here's the thing: as I told this tele-seminar attendee, if your clients feel they are getting 'too much' from you, they will tell you. And very few will actually do that, most will love it.

The crime is NOT sending enough information to your clients. Don't market timidly for fear of upsetting one or two of the masses. Market aggressively up to the point - but not beyond - where you pee everybody off. And only THEN back it off a little:-)

Salon & Spa Yellow Pages Advertising Secrets Launches with a BANG!

Scores of salon & spa owners around the world rushed to purchase Peter Butler's brilliant Salon & Spa Yellow Pages Ad Secrets guide when it launched this week.

I rarely endorse other people's products, but Peter isn't really 'other' people, he's our Senior Marketing & Sales coach for our Inner Circle members, so he knows his onions.

This guide - including some huge bonuses for early bird buyers, eg a personal critique of your Yellow Pages ad by Peter himself - is something the Yellow Pages people themselves should have produced years ago. But of course, very few Yellow Pages sales reps have much of an idea about what actually makes people pick up the phone and call you. Peter does.

Check it out here - for a piddling $US197, with over $400 worth of free bonuses, it's a steal, and if you apply just a handful of the strategies in the guide, you'll not only stop wasting your ad dollars, you'll actually turn your YP ad into a cash-generating powerhouse. I thoroughly endorse it.

Trouble Getting Staff? Here's How One Inner Circle Member Created a Rush of Interest from Job-Seekers...

Last week we launched our new Easy Staff Finder service, free for Inner Circle members....and the first Inner Circle member to use it reports stunning success.

Rachael D'Aguiar: "...brilliant way of finding new staff..."

Rachael D'Aguiar of D'Aguiar's Hair Skin Nails in Auckland, New Zealand placed a small ad on New Zealand's popular EBay-style website TradeMe.co.nz on Tuesday of this week.

View the ad

As of yesterday morning, EIGHT prospective employees had raised their hands and indicated interest in a new job. As Rachael's husband Chris says,

"This is a brilliant way of finding new staff - last time we ran an ad, we got exactly ONE response...and that was from somebody in the Philippines who looked like an attractive woman... but was in fact a man!"

I spoke with Chris yesterday...so far they've phoned two of the applicants and both are coming in for interviews.

Here's how it works:

Step #1: You book a lead generating ad in your local newspaper beauty jobs classified section, or as Rachael did, on a popular jobs website. Instead of the standard, dull-as-dishwater "Hair Stylist - great pay, fantastic team, call 000 000 000" it reads something like this:

 Attention Hair Stylists (or Beauty Therapists)! FREE Special Report - valued at $29 - reveals the crucial questions you MUST ask - and get answers for - BEFORE you sign up for any new job. Go to www.saloncentral.com/yourtown.html

Step #2: Your prospective staff member types in the web address and gets to a page that looks like this:

Step #3: When she completes the form on the page, she gets re-directed to a new page where she can download the free report...which is a thinly-disguised sales document for your salon. And YOU get an automatic email with the prospective staff member's name, email address and mobile phone number.

Try it Yourself

To test this yourself, go to www.saloncentral.com/staffsearch.html

Complete the form, and you'll be redirected to a page where you can download an actual sample of a member's special report, in this case Rachael's.  (This is a dummy page - Rachael won't get an email with your name and details, it'll come to me instead).

Why do it this way? Because advertising for staff, sifting through the applicants (if you get any!), interviewing them, short-listing them...is a pain in the butt, time-consuming, and costly.

This way, you get a list of names and contact details before you have to talk to any of them. But with their email address and phone number, you can market yourself to them, and get them excited about working for you. You just can't do that with a few lines in a standard classified ad.

It's FREE for Inner Circle members

Inner Circle members wishing to use the service should email us, and we'll send you the Free Report template you can edit appropriately and send back to us.

Or you can simply download the Free Report template here:

Non-members: $195
We'll convert your report for you, upload it, create your own special web page on Salon Central, create the name-capture form that goes with it, set up the automatic email system that sends the prospective staff member's contact details to you. All while you sleep.

It's $195 to have your name-capture page on the web for 30 days (while you run your classified ads in the job section of the local paper) and we'll give you an extra 30 days free in case you need to repeat or extend the ads.

Contact us to arrange it for you.

That's it for this week.

Greg Milner,