Mission Impossible… Not Really

6.05.07

Good morning, Mr./Mrs. Salon Owner. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, involves the marketing to whom I’ve designated "The Golden Tanner." You may select any method you like, but it is essential that your goal is to remain in business. As always, should any reader of this article become unsuccessful after implementing my expressed ideologies, I will disavow all knowledge of your actions. This message will self-destruct in five seconds.

One of the most frequent questions I hear when people find out that my family owned a tanning salon and was involved in the retail side of indoor tanning is, “What were your most successful forms of marketing?” My answer is always what used to drive me nuts as a kid when my Dad would answer my questions with another question and since we honor our Fathers this time of year I shall do the same? The question that needs to be asked first of all is, “Who is your target audience and what do you want to accomplish, or in this instance, sell them?”

The two most important factors in retailing are getting more people through your doors and once they get to your counter getting them to spend as much money as possible. Just look at all the little trinkets that clutter many of your mainstream retailers. You can’t go to a Starbucks and buy a cup of coffee without staring (at eye level) directly into the pastry portal or signing your receipt next to a square of chocolate or Michael Buble’s latest CD. What does that tell you when one of the most successful retailers of this time places such an emphasis on trying to squeeze every last penny out of you during every visit?

Now getting back to Dad’s first thought regarding who your target audience is. I’m going to assume that the vast majority of readers are going to have that answer locked up in their trusty salon software. Do you realize that the information you are collecting at the Point-of Sale should be considered gold and mainstream retailers would do just about anything to have the kind of detailed data you have on each one of your clients? The key is to work from your strength and in this case it’s your client database because they have already proven to be a user of your services and/or products.

Now depending on the sophistication of your application you should be able to segment your offers even more based on your customers’ previous buying history. So now that you know who your audience is it’s time to look at putting together an offer that will appeal to the largest pool of those customers AND get that pool to spend more money than they normally would.

I will leave you with two of my personal baseline ideas:

• Create a sense of urgency - Don’t present offers that have expiration dates of more than 7 days (I personally recommend 3 days). If you give too much time to redeem the offer you have lost a large percentage of your customers who will put off visiting your salon until it’s more convenient for them – which most likely will never happen.
• Don’t discount products/services – When you offer discounts on your products or services you are psychologically telling the consumer that what they are used to buying is really not worth what they normally purchase it for. What worked better for us was to offer some sort of premium if they purchase something at normal price. Our most successful sales campaign was the 3 day $3 offer which was buy a package or product (8+oz) and get another one of equal or lesser value for $3.

If you would like to find out other ways to more effectively market to your customers please see the ad next to this article. These seminars are not Helios exclusive so please consider attending if you are on any other software product or if you are not computerized at all.