Most salons offer a refer-a-friend discount—which is the problem with the promotion. You print hundreds of flyers and ask your team to give them to customers in exchange for a percentage off their next service for each friend they send into the salon. In order for clients to take advantage and actually refer a friend, we need to spice it up.
Usually the promotion is a bit dull, not very generous, hard to monitor and easy to forget. You might have a bit of initial interest but your team members likely aren’t giving the flyers to every customer. They’ll give them to the ones they are friendliest with, if any at all. Then the flyers get moved around the salon from reception to the retail area and then back again, getting a little more faded and scruffier each time. An occasional refocus in a team meeting might generate a couple of referrals but ultimately the promotion is a bit of a non-starter. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Phil Jackson, business consultant from Build Your Salon, suggests three big, but simple, changes that can add a spark to the promotion.
- Make it a campaign, not an ongoing promotion. Make every August referral month. By shortening the timescale, we can keep excitement levels higher. It also allows us to target referral months to a quieter time within the salon. When the kids break for summer, our bookings decline. Even better, we review our prices every March and September. If we have price-sensitive customers, we encourage them to recommend some friends in August to take the sting out of our increases in September.
- Make the program MUCH more generous. You can afford to. That’s because you’re wasting less money. Let me explain. Imagine you want a new customer. You decide to turn to Facebook ads and run some advertisements. Let’s say that it costs you $50 for a new customer. You’re OK with that because you know that each new customer spends $50 on their first visit. You’re not making a profit on that visit, but that’s acceptable. In marketing jargon, that's called a self-liquidating offer. The reason it’s acceptable is because in your salon, one in three new clients turn into regular customers. Even though you’re only breaking even in the short term, in the long run you are growing. Incidentally, that’s why some businesses that know their numbers are OK with making a loss on the first visit.
- Take the entire program away from your team. Run it by email. Instead of your team deciding which customer they want to speak to, your entire clientele gets to hear about the program. and it’s results can be much more impressive. Announce your promotion by email at the beginning of the month, remind clientele a week or two later in a shorter email, then a third time a few days before the end of the month with a, “Your last chance to..." message. Or, if you’re convinced you need to be running referrals year round, why not automate that email to go out after, say, a customer’s third visit? Your salon software should handle this with ease.