While some hair salon owners have regular clientele, others struggle with maintaining customer loyalty as they are often seeing clients who come in once or twice and then never return. How can these small business owners promote loyalty and increase business? With customer engagement!
There are many reasons why a client may not return to your salon – they forgot about you, found a better price or a more convenient location. However, if you take the time to engage with your clientele, many are willing to drive a little further or pay a little more due to the fact that they are emotionally involved and have developed a relationship with you and your business.
How do you engage with clients? Small business owners are not like large chains and cannot designate millions of dollars to advertising and marketing budgets. However, there are ways that require little financial investment that work, such as:
Blogging
There are hundreds of blogs dedicated to hair online, and a hair stylist is the perfect person to contribute content to this topic. Blogging requires no initial investment, as there are websites such as Wix and WordPress offering free platforms for bloggers. To increase engagement, you can ask your existing clients to subscribe to your blog, which notifies them via email every time you create a new blog.
There are endless topics to write about for a hair blog, such as:
- Latest hair styles
- Hair coloring tips
- Hair treatment options
- Product recommendations
- Styling advice
Keeping in regular communication with your clients through blogging will keep you fresh in their minds, and coming back to your business time and time again.
Tutorials
Another way to engage with your customers is through tutorials – either offering in store or online classes to give hair-related advice. Just as with blogging, tutorials can cover any hair-related topic; you will just need to secure a model willing to participate in advance. Consider showcasing how to:
- Do a french braid
- Trim your bangs
- Curl your hair
- Give yourself the perfect blowout
- Use specific products for your clients’ desired styles.
If you establish weekly workshops in your salon where you provide styling tips and advertise that with a poster in your store and leaflets around your neighborhood, you will not only promote loyalty with your current customers, but will attract new clientele as well.
If you also share the tutorials on your blog, you could reach customers who were not able to attend your workshop in person. Plus, you can use that content in your online advertising campaigns and social media postings to increase your outreach even further.
Utilize Social Media
Social media is a the perfect tool to connect with current and potential clients without a big ad budget. Websites such as Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram allow you to post photos, videos, and text to market your brand and engage with users.
One caveat is that there is a lot of competition on social media, therefore, salon owners need to be creative about capturing the audience’s attention. Knowing the demographics of your clientele – gender, age group, location, and styling preferences – can help you create relevant posts to engage your target audience.
In addition to normal postings, social media sites allow business owners to pay to advertise and promote their posts on their platforms. For example, Facebook lets salon owners create a daily budget for ads, and then target them to audience based on your specifications.
With a little extra effort and a small budget, hair salons can make a big difference in their client engagement within their salons, and easily create loyal customers that will come in for more than their normal scheduled haircuts.
If you want to engage with your existing clients and attract a larger customer base, but need financial help in doing so, contact IOU Financial. We support small businesses with affordable loans of up to $150,000 in under 24 hours!