Creating Demand for Your Salon

As a successful salon owner, Scott Buchanan knows marketing strategies, such as appointment confirmations, online client surveys, referral programs and customized promotions,boost business. As a busy owner of three New York-based salons, he and his staff have a difficult time finding time to manage all those mundane efforts. In November 2010, Buchanan adopted Demandforce, an integrated marketing and communication platform that automated those efforts, and now, a year later, he credits the program with generating an additional $64,000 of revenue over the past 12 months.

How has Demandforce boosted your business?

“First, we love that the program offers guests an option of how they’d like to receive appointment confirmations, via text message, email or phone call. Our clients are loving the text message confirmations, and that’s freed up our front desk for other tasks. But for us, the lost customer program has had the biggest impact. The program allows you to set your own boundaries, and we set it to contact clients who hadn’t been in the salon in six months or longer and offer them 30% off their next visit. We also set it up to send friendly ‘we miss you’ messages without the discount to clients who haven’t been in for three months.”

How does the program help your website?

“Within 24 hours of a guest coming into the salon, the program emails them a survey offering a free sample shampoo for their responses which are then sent to Google—the more online reviews you have the higher your placement in search engines. You get to see every review before they are posted, and while most of them are positive, it gives you the chance to respond to any negative ones. If they leave their name, you can call them and invite them in to address the issue, or you can make your apologizes online which shows readers that you care.”

How has the program driven your referral business?

“The emails to clients give them an offer for referring us to their friends. Again, we get to set the parameters, and we offer the referring client 20% off retail and 200 loyalty points, while the person they refer receives $20 off their first service. The program then tracks the referrals and shows me how many people a guest has referred, how many have come in and what each of those referrals spent. When the referral gets the email, there’s a button that allows them to book right online. The program is responsible for generating over $11,000 of that new revenue.”