A Can’t Miss Way To Resurrect Lost Clients!!

Even the best salons lose clients. It’s just a fact of life. The average salon will lose 20% of its client base over the next 12 months. Now, most of those “lost” clients will be replaced by “new” clients, however, that doesn’t mean that you should just wave the white flag and go home.

Think of it this way, if you could just save 20% of those lost clients – that would mean a pretty substantial impact on your salon sales. For instance, if you have a base of 2000 clients (which is not a lot) – that would mean about 80 clients. How did I get there?

If you take 2000 clients and do nothing – 400 will leave the salon this year (2000 x 20%). If you can resurrect just 20% of these clients, that would be 80 clients! Now, 80 clients is probably worth about $24,000 a year (80 x $300/yr). So, think of it as the price of a full-time receptionist.

Now, what if I could also give you a really easy way to do this? Sound appealing?

Look, you and I both know that we hear good ideas all the time. The problem is that – if we don’t do them so they become habit – they get done once or twice and then we forget about them. Well, that’s the beauty of this new idea. You do it every 10 days, it’s very easy to do (takes about 10 minutes), and you do it the same way every time. This is what you do.

You get three sets of postcards. We’ll call them set 1, 2 and 3. All three sets of postcards have the same front. There will be some image that says “We haven’t seen you in a while, etc, etc”. The only difference between the three sets will be the back of the postcard.

The first set will say on the back that its been a while since we’ve seen you and we want to get you back. Then it will have a really good offer to get them to take action. The second set of postcards will say on the back that you sent them a postcard about 10 days ago and you still haven’t heard from them yet. Then it will restate the original offer. And the third set of postcards will say on the back that you’ve tried twice already to get them back so you’re going to try one last time to get them back. And you’re going to double the original offer.

So, three sets of postcards – all with slightly different messages. The messages should also be in a “Hand-written” font. This is very easy to do and any postcard company can do this for you. In other words, we want the messages to appear like someone wrote them by hand.

Now, once you do this, you’re going to let your HairMax salon software do the rest. Basically, you do a simple mailing every 10 days. Why 10 days? Because, we want to form the new habit, and we want to do the same 3 mailings every month. Let me explain.

We’re going to target clients who visited the salon four months ago but who have not been back since. We want to mail to them three times and then not mail to them again.
So, for the purposes of this example, I will pick June 2009 (because I will start this project on October 1st, 2009).

You would create a list out of your HairMax mailing system that meets the following criteria

All clients who have been in since June 1st, 2009
All clients who have not been in since June 30th, 2009
All clients who have no appointments after October 1st, 2009

Mail to these clients using the first set of postcards. Then 10 days later, do the same exact mailing (with the second set of postcards) with the only change being

All clients who have no appointments after October 10th, 2009

Then 10 days later…do the last mailing (with the 3rd set) with the only change being

All clients who have no appointments after October 20th, 2009

Now the next time you do the mailing (it’s November) you would do it for July 2009 clients. This simple mailing will target Inactive clients for a total of three times…spaced out every ten days. The chances of a client being ready to make his or her decision on coming back will be highest during this cycle.

Try it – it’s a really “low cost” way to stay on top of inactive clients and bring more of them back into the salon. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be able to afford two more receptionists!

P.S. If you need some ideas on a good postcard company – just email me back and I can pass along a few ideas. My email address is ssampson@hairmaxsoftware.com.

Best regards, Steve Sampson

HairMax Salon Software is a product designed to be the best investment your salon has ever made. It is not only the easiest and most powerful salon management software on the market. It is from a company dedicated to becoming the ultimate VALUE source to the industry.