To be sure that your salon’s income offers some sense of financial security, 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 review this information is to use the reporting options in 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 datasets provide a benchmark and will help you assess the success of online and appointment pre-booking.
Analyze Away
Review your data, identify patterns and opportunities, calculate averages for the number and frequency of client visits, then set goals and develop a plan to achieve them. The goal is to increase the frequency of salon visits for each client and to increase the total ticket amount with add-ons whenever possible. A good starting point is to add 1-2 additional appointments per client per year and 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 earning points on regular purchases, redeemable 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, to increase online bookings, add reward points for each appointment booked through 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 automated emails and texts to remind people to schedule their next appointments if they don’t have anything on the books.
Up Frequency
One way to increase client visits to the salon is to use online booking. In addition to the 24/7 convenience of scheduling whenever they remember to do so, online booking also comes with some unexpected perks. It’s not just about reducing the burden on your reception team; it also encourages more visits. Here’s how that works:
The average time between client visits varies based on how appointments are booked. If clients call to schedule appointments or pre-book in person during a salon visit, the interval between appointments averages 5 weeks and 6 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.
To save time, fill every open slot, and increase client visit frequency, offer online booking. 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 part of the conversation to offer additional services to increase the ticket total for 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.
- Use suggestive selling features in your software to 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 progress and adjust your tactics and offerings as you go.
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