What I Learned From A Salon Trade Show This Weekend…

Last weekend, I attended a trade show for the salon industry.  It was pretty eye-opening, I must say.  Along with the fact that attendance seemed a bit weak compared to past years, I actually learned something from the 2 days.  I learned that it wasn’t worth the “pain in the butt” effort of setting up the booth, creating the marketing materials and making sure that a HairMax rep was always present at the booth.

Ok, I know that sounds a little whiney…but I’m actually being serious. 

Marketing and advertising in the world today has experienced a major paradigm shift.  In fact, the entire way we communicate with people has gone thru such a change over the last 3-4 years…that the old methods of “marketing and advertising” are just plain inefficient and outdated.  I just wish it didn’t cost me 2 days and $4,000 in order to learn the lesson.

The good news is that the Internet (particularly emailing) allows us to get our messages across to who we want in a heartbeat.  Much like I’m doing with you right now. 

I must admit, my whole business changed when I started to “bring the news” to salon owners.  They really appreciated it.  And it allowed me to create a “relationship” with salon owners whereby they would open my emails more often because they were getting some value from the information.

Not every email had value to them.  But enough did…so I get very few unsubscribes.  Trust me, I’ve gotten a few clients who treated me rudely by sending me back “hate” mail…but that’s just the price that you pay for reaching out to a large group of people. 

Overall, “emailing my clients” has been wildly successful. 

But if I tried to do that same thing by “posting a blog” on my website…it would never work (I know I tried).  And that’s because I would be expecting them to go to my website to search for news.  It would never happen.

Unless you are People Magazine, TMZ, Entertainment Tonight or Celebrity News…no one is going to search for you.  Be serious.

I don’t care how “compelling” you think the information is.   People are way too busy today or maybe…way too distracted today.  Either way, don’t kid yourself.

The same thing would be true if I tried to use a Facebook fan page instead of emailing.  I’m a huge fan of Facebook and I use it for my business, believe me, but it’s dramatically less effective than emailing directly to the person. 

That doesn’t mean that you should abandon your Facebook fan page tomorrow.  That would be foolish.

It just means that you can’t rely on it “exclusively” to market your salon.  If you are…then you’re missing out on a much bigger opportunity…one that you surely can’t afford to miss out on.

But here is the bad news…

Emailing your clients takes some effort…way less effort if you’re using something like …no doubt.  But you still need to get client email addresses.  And for some…that seems like a big hurdle.

It shouldn’t be.

It’s almost 2014.  You will have 95% of your clients coming thru your door over the next 8 weeks. 

Put a stake in the ground.

Tell every client that you will be confirming all appointments thru email from now on (if you’re not already).   Get their email address.  And if you have their email address…verify that it is still correct.

It’s a very simply thing to do.

Now is the very best time (all year) to do this.  Don’t waste it.

In the next email…I will show exactly what to do with the emails.  There is a proven formula that works and there’s another that will fail miserably.  I will teach you both.   

As always, aim high…and dream even higher…

Steve Sampson