The Big, Costly Follow-up Mistake that Salons Make!

Here’s a question for you: when did you last get an email, letter or postcard from your favorite restaurant, or the last shop you visited, or your local supermarket?

My guess is probably never. You might get the occasional flyer, but nothing personal or even interesting. The best you can hope for is boring discount offers.

There’s a big lesson here for all of us.

As business owners, we can never be “too good” at following up with our clients. I refuse to let a salon owner moan to me about the Recession until they have a multi-step follow up sequence of 18-30 contacts (email, mail, postcard, telephone etc.) with everyone who comes in contact with their salon.  And I’m talking about both current clients and potential new clients.

Its funny, because when people do this, they tend to make so much money from increased sales, they simply shrug off the Recession and stop talking about it.

As business owners, we cannot afford to make the big, costly mistake of not following up. Because one way or another, clients will eventually disappear along with the corresponding sales associated with them.  And in this day and age, salons cannot afford to have clients walking out the door for any reason.

Take a look at these eye-opening statistics about why people stop buying from businesses:

1% die.
3% move away.
5% follow a friend or relative’s recommendation.
9% find an alternative they perceive to be of better quality or value.
14% are dissatisfied with the products or services.

And a massive 68% of people leave a business because of… indifference.

They take their business elsewhere simply because they don’t feel valued.

Since you spend a lot of time, money, and effort to get a new client to your salon, if you let them leave because of indifference, you might as well be flushing $100 bills away.

So, how often should you follow up? You should at least email your clients with new beauty tips once a month.  You should send out a client newsletter at least every other month.  That would be communicating with them – 18 times a year.  These emails and newsletters should have personality in them and be loaded with quality content.  Content can be found all over the Internet, so you don’t even have to work that hard to get it. 

You should also imbed offers for new services and retail in some of your communications.  Clients will not mind it at all, as long as the overall intent of the newsletter, email, postcard, etc also contains information that is useful to them.  Many times, the additional business you will get will more than pay for the newsletter.  

Most salon owners, I speak to, follow up maybe twice a year, if at all. This is a huge mistake.  Don’t let clients leave you because you are just being cheap, lazy or blind!